2y ago

Lemmy is popular nowadays, yet is losing its active users

Similar to Mastodon's spikes last year, it seems. Anyways, there is data to think about. Source

471 comments

I feel like that is more or less to be expected. A ton of people found Lemmy during the reddit protests. Now that the protests are gone and Lemmy has had its growing pains some users are leaving, going back to reddit or other places. If we keep using it and making content users will grow organically.
Lemmy is having an identity crisis of sorts. It was built to be decentralized yet we (users) seem to want to centralize everything and we all go to a few of the largest instances.
- I wish there was a way to migrate all my subscriptions, cause then I would probably change instances to ease the burden on my current instance.
  
  I appreciate World's transparency but it's been a lot nicer on lemm.ee for me. Not having a way to kill time when I need to isn't the end of the world but definitely annoying.
  
  I have also recently moved and it makes me wonder, will users moving to other instances affect the graph?
- I don’t think it’s about a craving for centralisation but for newcomers and people still learning the core ideas about decentralisation it’s about a promise of more active engagement and more varied content.
  
  And FOMO. New users gravitate towards the large instances because they think they will miss content, not knowing they can easily access said content on any instance as long as it hasn't defederated from them.
  
  Of course it's not about centralisation per se, but the problems that a centralised platform does not have to deal with.
- Lemmy is having an identity crisis of sorts. It was built to be decentralized yet we (users) seem to want to centralize everything and we all go to a few of the largest instances.
  Because decentralization, at least as it is now, runs counter to what people are looking for in a social media platform; mainly discoverability.
  
  Does it though? My instance has very little locally, but if I browse 'All' it really isn't any different than being on any other instance, even a big one.
- It's not that users want to centralize everything. It's Lemmy's design that promotes it, because despite federation, there are still advantages to choosing big instances and communities.
  Joining the largest instance makes searching, joining, or opening communities much more seamless.This can be addressed by:
  Improving the search so that it can find communities, or even content, that no one on the instance has subscribed yet.
  Making it easier to open a community in your home instance.
  In addition to Sub/Local/All feed, you can have a "moderated" feed (with communities selected by admins). The "local" feed is most useful for instances on a specific topic. But for very small instances, it'll be too empty at least at first. So a moderated feed can create an on-topic feed that's more lively.
  For most topics, only the largest communities are large enough to have good content, so everyone wants to join them. To address this, you need some easy mechanism to subscribe to all communities on a topic. For example, we can let communities follow other communities. Then people can create topical meta-communities that aggregate content without centralizing it.
  
  This is the big one to me. It's much more difficult to search for specific content if it's isolated amongst communities on different servers, all trying to fill the same niche and splitting the potential userbase for said niche up between them.
  If there was like a tag system in place that communities could use to tag themselves as being for a specific thing, like cooking, for example, and then you could aggregate/search posts from all communities under the cooking tag across all servers federated with yours, it would greatly simplify finding content for less tech literate users while also increasing the resilience of the entire network by allowing more communities for a specific niche to exist, which would prevent content loss if one server goes down without discoverability being an issue.
- You also don't have the content of Reddit. It doesn't take too long to scroll through all top six hours and get to the single digits of upvotes.
  
  Kinda cozy though, if you pay attention you kinda see who's active.
  Like you, only user on my instance who has more comments than me.
- It's hard to find instances that offer what world offers, so I get it.
  OTOH, I ended up moving or handing over most of my communities that I had created on world because this instance is TOO popular and bogged down all the time. Plus, they make arbitrary and drastic decisions without discussion on matters like defederation and often banning. It's smart to go to a smaller instance but it's also risky because any instance could go down at any moment. That's why many of my communities are duplicated (across world and infosec) because it would be devastating to lose all of those quality links and engagement.
- It's that everyone wants to create the same community on different instances.
- I think more people need to make communities they are interested in that might already exist on beehaw/lemmy.world/lemmy.ml/etc but on other instances. We really need to not keep everything on a few instances… I agree it contradicts itself. I tried by creating fallout but hard to get activity. Even its main community is quiet so that makes sense. I might try something a bit less niche.
- I think there is a gap in understanding how Lemmy works and how it differs from reddit, in particular with the less technical crowd. We definitely don't want people sharing giant instances, but that matches more with the sign up for reddit, use reddit logic many people are used to.
  I think it's also why we have seen such drama over Sync for Lemmy and its ads and pricing. To the techy crowd that was the majority of Lemmy users, that all seems antithetical to what Lemmy is and how it works. To the people who came to Lemmy from reddit, and especially those who may have tried out Lemmy because of Sync, the criticism sounds maddening because that's the way it always worked on reddit.
  So in some sense all of this is expected. Lemmy will lose some users, but maybe it will find an equilibrium. The key focus these days imho should be outreach about smaller instances, and outreach about donating to your instance (if you can) to keep it running.
- I like the idea of federated social media platforms conceptually, but ai absolutely want to make my home on the largest instances. That's just an artifact of how I use social media, though, I always gravitate towards the busiest platforms because interacting with so many people is the real joy of it.
- Lemmy is having an identity crisis of sorts. It was built to be decentralized yet we (users) seem to want to centralize everything and we all go to a few of the largest instances.
  Is that any different on Mastodon and other Fediverse projects?
- Same shit happened with the 'temporary' mass migration to Signal.
  
  Signal
  Interesting what do you mean? I use signal but I can't get anyone other than my ex wife to use it with me. It is so much nicer than google voice or the texting app, regardless of the end to end encryption.

That doesn't seem weird to me. Honestly it seems weird that it's that active. I would've expected a sharper, quicker decline. Retaining active users is hard.
- Exactly. Users who are involved in extremely niche communities will probably not find a place on Lemmy/Kbin yet. In 2008, reddit was the same. The politics subreddit only had 50,000 subscribers.
  It's all about momentum. The more users we have, the more engagement in niche communities, the more it'll attract and retain users.
  
  And loads of people hear the buzz, try it out and leave when they grow bored. I think the reason for the downward spike not being worse is that the threshold to take part in Lemmy communities is higher than many social media sites, and invested time registering makes people more likely to stay.
  
  Why I'm encouraging anyone who will listen to participate in their fledgling niche communities here. Even if it's just a little bit.
  One can simply lurk on the niche subreddits. Growing fediverse communities need active participation.
- Lemmy is a much closer analog to Reddit than Mastodon is for Twitter. While Mastodon has similar basic functionality to Twitter, it lacks a lot of the features that make it easy to find new content and new people to follow.
  Pair that with some very polished third-party mobile reddit apps with large, loyal followings transitioning to Lemmy and it became way easier to abandon reddit for Lemmy than it was to leave Twitter for Mastodon. I'm a huge open source supporter, but the average user doesn't care about FOSS or open source software. They want something that looks nice and just works.
  
  the average user doesn't care about FOSS or open source software. They want something that looks nice and just works.
  Truer words were never said.
  
  I got super frustrated with Mastodon because of this. I've tried a couple of instances with no luck. And hilariously, I have to think that the furry folks are either having the same problem finding a home, or they are stalking me, because everywhere I move, shortly after, a ton of furries appear and do introductions. Furry stuff is not my thing, but I can appreciate how they might have a hard time finding a good place to settle.
- Am I being retained?!??
  
  Sigh... You're free to go sir. Have a nice evening Mr sovereign user.

until personal interest groups are populated people will not use this site. its basically 1 big meme sub right now with some tech and politics sprinkled on top.
- This is honestly it.
  I like the site, I want to use it, I want to encourage others to use it, but I'm getting tired of only talking about the same things here.
  Maybe we need to start encouraging people to post rather than just expecting them to.
  
  we don't need more memes, we need people to start going to the games, movies, shows, and hobbies they like and making posts.
  
  I'm in the process of making some stuff, I just worry that the community I post it to on lemmy isn't big enough to get the word out community-wide.
  For context, I've been working on a very long dogelore thing. But in the same way, I feel like this hurts any bhj or mtcj stuff I might do. The community on lemmy isn't big enough to get traction, so what's the point?
  I'm not going back to reddit, and discord is annoying, so it's just a little discouraging.
- It feels like it's mainly talking one way or another about Reddit, or describing how one of the 3P apps is now available for Lemmy. The content is super stale, but it will grow. Fuck, Reddit back in the day was not exactly the thriving metropolis it was maybe six or so years ago. And reddit peaked and came down to how it exists today. So it'll take time.
  That being said, I don't check Lemmy anywhere near as frequently as I did Reddit, and mainly because the subs I frequented most have smaller footprints here for now. Which is what you said, but in fewer words.
- For what it’s worth, memes have helped me stay. I doubt I’m the only one.
  They’re quick and easy to browse and some get a bunch of topical comments and links to other relevant communities.
  It’ll take a while to reach a level that’s known in the public eye like Twitter and Reddit, but the low-hanging fruit helps keep people interested while more niche communities are forming.
  
  We don't want to be in the public eye. Let's enjoy what we have while it lasts
- Also, liftoff kinda sucked, but I just figured out some features of Sync, and it's fucking beautiful.
  
  Lol what? Liftoff is fantastic, and FOSS. Are we blaming liftoff for the downward trend/lack of growth? Cause the oh-so-amazing Sync does not seem to have reversed it, to spite all the claims I keep seeing.
  
  I’m still using wefwef. What am I missing?
- Yeah, I really want r/sysadmin on here.
  They have a Discord but Discord is so incredibly annoying to use for this.
  P.S. change the sort mode to hot or top (x hours) to get more content. The default of active sucks.
  
  hot is completely useless because its filled with content that's less than an hour old with virtually no comments. its very poor quality content.
- I will say I was looking for some opinions on new Internet browsers.
  Posted on Reddit and here.
  Already got responses on lemmy, but my Reddit post is just being ignored.
  
  Also, Lemmy posts tend to get real conversations going rather than reused meme templates.
  
  If you're interested in the right (tech) topics I can see Lemmy being better yeah
- The two biggest ones I know of are startrek.website for trekkies and blahaj for all things trans/lgbtq. But even those don't see to have much activity. We need better advertisement to smaller communities somehow.
  
  its not about the instances, those are actually hindering growth by dividing communities across instances and defederating them. lemmy is basically several copies of reddit in a trench coat pretending to be a social network.
- I've been posting on the HP and Tolkien communities and begun modding them too. I'd encourage people to post, and if necessary take up a little responsibility too.
- Which site?
  Lemmy.world? Lemmy.ml? Lemm.ee? Programming.dev? Lemmy.ca? Lemmy.nz? ...
- I think I've blocked the biggest meme sub or two. Helps a lot with that.

Some dropoff after initial hype is normal. Now we just continue as usual until reddit pisses people off again.
- We have to wait until tomorrow?
- There are also conscious efforts to weed out bots and other measures that try to remove potential cancer from spreading.
  There was a post recently that outlined bot weeding efforts on a couple dozen instances that tanked user number by something like 1/5 - clearly visible on graphs.
  Lemmy’s doing great. Even if plenty small communities are still not big enough here.
- exactly this right here. we saw the same phenomenon with threads and mastodon before it inre twitter annoying its userbase. depending on how engaged each wave of incoming users ends up, i'd guess you could expect it to look something like:
  spike
  drop off
  plateau
  spike
  drop off
  plateau above the last plateau
  etc etc
  sometimes the drop off is really bad. sometimes its just people getting bored with the initial hype while others stay. rinse and repeat until the platform succeeds or dies.
  
  I'm not sure what else will be able to cause a spike again. Reddits behavior over the past month is pretty much as terrible as it can get. If people aren't moving to Lemmy anymore, it's going to take something apocalyptic to cause Lemmys usercount to grow again.

I'm to tired to make quality posts. Props to the people that can do that every day. Best I got is a few mildly opinionated comments.
- Even lurkers are still part of the community.
  I started out looking for an exact replacement for Reddit (where I mostly lurk). Initially I thought the lack of content and traffic on Lemmy was a bad thing, but I now see it as early days of a community and lack of content means I have a chance to make a post or comment that is valued and gets engagement from other users. Reddit was so mature that anything I wanted to post was either already there, not welcome or buried under an ocean of other content/comments. If you use both you could even find good content on Reddit to crosspost on Lemmy.
  It's quite nice being part of a small community now. Even just an up/down vote from you will be worth more here. It's great.
  
  I used to be a reddit lurker. I would go into a thread for a post and look for the thing I would have posted, and upvote it.
  I can't do this on Lemmy, I actually have to write stuff now I guess, otherwise it doesn't show up. I don't like it.
  Feels weird man.
- I try to comment when I can. Even if it's not insightful. A small compliment keeps a community going.
  
  Hell small compliments keep people going let alone an abstract sense of community
  
  I try to browse and upvote in new also
- I’m to tired to make quality posts.
  There's room for shitty posts too. 🫂
- Get out of my head!
- How mildly opinionated of you.
- Thanks for pointing that out! High quality content takes time to craft. It's being skilled and/or knowledgable, being able to convey that across on a digital platform (where basically everyone's anonymous and of unknown backgrounds), and being engaging while you're at it. It definitely can be demanding for some.
- Beans on toast are better than vegemite on toast!
  
  Noodles on toast is better than both

I'm actively lurking, I just have nothing of value to share 🌝
- I feel like people just want to hang out and talk about stuff. We don't always need to be wowed by some crazy high quality content or new OC. We just want to hang out with friends and shoot the shit. Most of us are on here to distract us from whatever bullshit we should probably be doing instead.
  
  At least it's less likely for your boss to find you here on the Fediverse.
  
  Just emphasizing my upvote on your comment through my comment.
- To be honest, I do the same thing. A couple of simple rules to keep the web entertaining:
  Filter everything that triggers you
  Ban porn
  Never, never look at comments on politics, religion and family. You're like to want to erase humanity afterwards
  
  Yeah it took a long time for me to finally curate Reddit to something I enjoyed using, I've started increasingly working on my filters and it just gets better and better here.
  Like Reddit, I find trying to find communities I'm interested in a little difficult so I'm just defaulting to all and continuing to filter for now. At some point soon I'll be able to just default to subscribed.
- Yup. Exactly.
- there's always something of value to share at least on c/lemmyshitpost

471 comments