Is lemmy growth coming to a halt?

It does feel a little dead here. Right now it’s mostly memes, meta discussions, or Reddit hate. And the crowd is a very specific type of hyper aware internet dweller (myself included).

Reddit isn’t worth using without third party apps, and it’s the only social media I used before Lemmy, so I’m spending a lot more time off my phone nowadays. I only check the daily top on Lemmy once a day instead of compulsively every time I touch my phone. Guess that’s a good thing.

I think it's as you say. Lemmy's growth is going to happen in waves, until it has reached a critical mass that sustains its own "weight", in terms of growth.

You have to remember that this is no commercial platform, with little advertisement, which is made by its own users. Growth is bound to be slow, at first.

According to the Fediverse Observer, Posts and Comments are still growing day-by-day. It's definitely slower growth, but as long as it stays healthy and active it will continue to have growth spurts as the enshittification of the rest of the web continues.

The exodus from reddit has stabilized and we've made this place our experimental home. That wave is over. We won't get another wave until some of the kinks are smoothed out. If we have fewer shutdowns and better apps then I bet we'll get steady growth. Also it might take a while for people to realize that lemmy is easier to use than mastodon, which gave federation a bad name for most normies.

What’s the rush? Rome wasn’t built in a day. If people are happy (enough) with it now it will grow with time and at the pace it should.

If things get too big too quickly then the cake will always collapse.

I like the amount of content here right now and things will diversify gradually over time.

Most people seem to forget their Reddit accounts were more than 8,9,10+ years old and a lot changed over that period.

Actually I like having a "smaller" space. Reddit was already way too big, with an anonymous giant blob of users. I wouldn't even have bothered writing an answer like I do now, since it would have been buried under 100s of other posts and comments within seconds. Sometimes smaller and slower are positive features, at least to me.

Honestly, I want half of the people on reddit... to just STAY on reddit.

There is a lot of toxicity that I don't want here....

That's fine. Just do our things here, and when Reddit eventually shoot their own foot again, the next wave of refugees will have an alternative ready, unlike us a few months ago where there was confusion over where to migrate.

I'm pretty sure most of the people who will come here as a result of Reddit are already here. All the new Reddit refugees are probably getting over the hype with Lemmy/Kbin and are finally not pouring so much time into the platforms. And as a result, slowing growth numbers and tapering engagement. Its pretty natural and nothing to be worried about. There's still plenty of engagement here (just look at what happened to Threads a couple weeks after it came out).

Regardless, we should focus on making Lemmy/Kbin a fully fleshed out platform and draw in users the natural way rather than relying on Reddit falling off for new users. At this point in time, the Reddit blackout is pretty much over.

Might as well throw in my rant here, as I'm against this sentiment of not wanting Lemmy/Kbin to grow more and possibly even get mainstream. I get keeping out the undesirables of Reddit and other social media to prevent an Eternal September situation, but I also want more people of different backgrounds and interests rather than the same Reddit critic/tech enthusiast type of crowd. The great thing about federation is that if you want a smaller and more tight knit/topic centered community, there are smaller servers to join (not so much for Lemmy/Kbin at the moment since they are new, but it should get better over time). We can't seriously want Lemmy/Kbin to develop well if we voice desires to keep people out and rebuild echo chambers. Lots of smaller communities and topics have little activity because there's really only one group of people here right now.

Don’t care, there’s enough content to keep me happy and I plan to stay here until there’s not

Don’t know don’t care. There’s a community here now and it’s healthy.

This feels like a clickbait news article headline. Any headline with a leading question can usually be answered "no".

Lemmy, we, are not a corporation. In fact, exponential growth is BAD since the instance admins have to spend more money and work to keep it running. There is no financial benefit to chase the numbers. Let it grow organically.

It will always be like that. If 100 people come here for the first time on one day its great if 10 end up staying till the end of the week and lurking and out of those 10 maybe 1 would end up staying for longer. Thats just how these things work.

Anyone who would've left Reddit has already done so, they may be a small increase when Boost/sync becomes available but I doubt we'll see much growth. No one has ever heard of Lemmy.

People will go where the content is.. all it will take is one massive event where Lemmy is the source

Don’t imagine for a second that Reddit is done pissing off its users. All it takes for lemmy to win is keep improving reliability and usability.

I see two big events in the coming weeks

• release of Sync and Boost for Lemmy
• Reddit actually killing 3rd party access and old.reddit

Kinda don't want Lemmy to be mainstream.

Yes, no, kinda.

(I am basing all this on these stats: https://lemmy.fediverse.observer/dailystats)

First, the most detailed statistics show "Active Users Monthly". That means, if you have any interaction (e.g. posting a comment) you will be counted as active for a whole month.

If you have a look when the decline first started, you'll see that it's right around one month after the Reddit blackout.

So what happened is that tons of people came to Lemmy during the blackout, tried it out for a few minutes, maybe posted a comment, and then dropped it again. They were still counted in the statistics until the 12th of July, which is when the drop starts in the statistics, because all these "single-day-users" are dropping out.

But: the drop from the highest point to now is only ~10% of the users. Other than that the user count seems to be kinda stable.

For more up-to-date numbers look at the post/comment counts, since they are daily. Here you see a linear, maybe slightly more than that, increase, which indicates a steady amount of interaction.

Btw, the number of total users is steadily decreasing, and that's a good thing. The reason for that is that there are lots of obscure instances with a handful of active users but 10k-90k of users who have never posted anything. These instances usually have open registration without captcha, so all these users are probably bots.

Since these instances don't actually have real users or content, they probably were just created by someone to try something out, so they keep getting closed, and with them, the bot accounts disappear.

I think the growth is going fine. Just invite friends to Lemmy and share an app with them.

I think there are 2 groups coming from reddit. 1- Users wanting a more niche community (think early reddit) 2- Users trying to turn Lemmy into present day Reddit. Theres a good amount of communities that are carbon copies of reddit subs. Personally I think that reddit has morphed into something toxic (Ive had a reddit account for 15 years). While its good to have growth, nobody wants to use a site that is so popular that Aunt Betty is chiming in with her love jesus memes.

I think that ease of use is the biggest hurdle at the moment. While yeah Mastodon has grown it's also improved quite a bit. The onboarding is much more streamlined versus six months ago.

Those barriers are getting better but are still there for Lemmy. Apps are starting to come which is fantastic but the users need to want to engage with the platform. Streamlined sign up, improved features and UI improvements will need to continue to evolve in order to grow the user base.

I wouldn't call it a matter of need. While I want to see Lemmy grow, I don't think that we should rely on outrage on another platform to drive our own activity in the long term. While the number of users joining has slowed down, it certainly hasn't halted.

All we can do is make Lemmy as solid and enticing of a platform as possible, and leave those on Reddit to choose between supporting a platform they don't like and leaving. We shouldn't be responsible for forcing their hand, but we should be responsible for maintaining a healthy community here.

I think even something like a indie video game developer hosting a forum on Lemmy instead of Reddit would do wonders for making Lemmy "mainstream". Or even a youtuber, streamer, or some other content creator at that. But of course, it's not something I'd go out of my way to do; just something that I think will happen in due time.

I believe it will continue but at a slower pace

I'm not naturally a poster I got tired of posting. I keep thinking of stuff to post while I'm at work then forget when I get home.

One thing Lemmy is missing is a way to join that doesn't require you to understand the fediverse - currently the barrier of entry is quite high. Also, there aren't any great user interfaces yet, which makes the platform difficult to use.

If it doesn't, I'm okay with that. The level of engagement I have here is very satisfactory to me. Reddit could be way too overwhelming. That Lemmy is small is kind of refreshing.

If you build it they will come

I think we might follow mastodon's path, with a users spike with each reddit fuckup and then a plateau. But only time will tell.

Many communities are getting larger though, I wonder why despite this ?

It will come in waves as Reddit would become worse and worse over monetization.

I think that growth is not going to happen passively. These comercial platforms are deliberately pushed and advertised and there is always some new content whenever you open the app.

Fediverse, lemmy whatever may have the better model in theory but that is not enough to create buzz or to reach a critical mass of users.

"Hello here is the better model now come here, why aren't you here? " is not guaranteed to work.

Things take time, progress ebbs and flows. I think there's a critical mass of good content and interesting people here and over time people will use it more. Just keep participating and ignoring the corporate sites.

For example, the friends that started using Reddit because of me are still on Reddit, but I'm pretty sure they'll find their way here. Change isn't something that everyone jumps on.

I think the triggers are likely to die down as the CEOs gradually stop sawing at their own genitalia.

What you have here is a start, but the barriers like having to find all the niches through searching mechanics that send you to a website and back to a client are always going to be a sticking point. There's not much support on any client to just get a list of communities on the instance, much less a different one.

If they come down or the instances centralize enough that it doesn't matter we'll see some growth by enticing other users because it'll be functionally the same thing to them. But there are some definite hurdles in getting here, and there's no incentive to advertise (read $) other than grassroots.

Seeing as how the servers keep on doing down or there are other similar problems, I'm not sure Lemmy could handle the traffic even if it did stay. And there are far too many subs with next to zero traffic which only makes the whole site look kind of sad. You are better off having 1/2 as many subs with 2x the engagement that they currently have.

It seems like a comfortable size to me. I'm starting to think the ideal is something in the range of 20,000-1000,000 users per instance.