So since the mass-exodus from Reddit we can see that the total amount of active users has gone down rather heavily: https://i.imgur.com/MeQok2F.png
This can seem a bit sad at a first glance. Where are we heading? But one has to remember that back during the summer many of us created several accounts to settle at an instance, there were also problems with spam-bots of various kinds.
So active users in itself is actually not that interesting. At least not the comparison with the peak. Instead we can watch the total amount of posts, how is that looking?
Well it’s steadily going up actually: https://i.imgur.com/i3Vse7Y.png
Though the increase has gone down slightly. This number however is influenced by other parameters as well. There are several reposts bots and such that mass-post to different instances. But it’s definitley a good tell it’s not going down.
Another interesting factor is comments: https://imgur.com/hWT8xvF
The amount of comments per month has gone down, but not by all that much. A 10% decrease from the top or so. What’s interesting here is that the decline has plateaued, which could indicate that the userbase has settled and become somewhat consistent. This is great news.
All in all, it seems like Lemmy has settled into a rather comfortable spot, with a decent amount of users, posts and comments. That is very slightly decreasing. Ideally we’d like to see this trend reverse, and perhaps that might happen naturally with due time when things have settled even more. For Lemmy I’d reckon the growth will look a bit like this. Whenever Reddit does something horrific (and it will happen more), we’ll see a mass-exodus with more users over here. Then it’ll decrease for a bit, settle and hopefully we can rinse and repeat. Anyway - that’s some irrelevant thoughts from me on the subject.
Just wanted to post these rather good statistics!
The consequence is that, for many niche interests, there simply aren’t enough people in the Fediverse to form a viable community about it.
Just to throw a random example that crossed my mind, /r/glassblowing has 32,000 members. There is no Lemmy community as far as I can find. I actually got some useful advice from /r/terrariums, with 180,000 members, when I made a terrarium a month ago. I don’t believe there’s an equivalent Lemmy community.
Reddit’s massive strength is that it’s big enough that essentially any interest or topic, no matter how small, has enough people into it that they can form a productive community. That size also means that the default communities become absolute dogshit, but it’s easy enough to ignore them.
Yeah, I get that too. It’s a valid point. I’m hoping over time the internet at large will absorb some of those niches. I don’t even care if sometimes a web search takes me to reddit, or somewhere else really. I just want a place to browse that is less toxic than reddit. Lemmy’s userbase has gotten a little shittier lately imo, but still way better than reddit.
A lot of Lemmy’s problems can be summed up in a question: how does this benefit from not being a dedicated forum?
I want to go back to the decentralized internet where hobbyists were running their own servers and communities. Lemmy, like reddit, encourages centralization onto a single major platform, and I don’t like that.