It’s essentially a brand new platform. A tiny dip a month after the initial boom is far from “losing users” and is not indicative of trends. I don’t understand why everyone is so obsessed with growing Lemmy as fast as possible.
You also lose users when you’re basically asking your userbase to be alpha testers as you build from scratch. It’s fine, it’s an open source project.
People that are thinking this is some finished, capable competitor already are a little out of touch though. Which is unsurprising, given we’re all in a weird, dark corner of the internet atm.
The app ecosystem has been getting so much better, and people are starting to grok federation, and frankly this app would be dead if some of the recent drama happened if it had way more users.
We are definitely on the early adopter curve for this tech.
And even if it stays small, the quality and community here is thriving. Sure, we have our trolls and junk but they don’t have nearly the influence or visibility as…ahem…other familiar platforms.
I have mixed experience with community quality here. For many topics you should better ask your question on Reddit - you will get better answers there (and faster).
Depends on the communities… quite often they consist of one or two users (or bits) reposting old or current Reddit posts.
And certainly for more niche topics the communities tend to be dead.
Quite often there is little commenting or conversation.
The communities with the most conversation seem to be about Lemmy and the Fediverse…
But yes there are a couple of decent communities in my Home feed, but the whole needs to grow to get it to a tipping point where it provides an active and diverse (in topics and conversation) community.
Also, a lot of younger users started back to school. But I’m with ya. Let Lemmy grow organically. There are no advertisers or shareholders to appease here. There’s no need for explosive growth.
Engagement and creation of worthwhile content. Memes are fine, but it’s junk food. The more meaty content that creates engagement and discussion, the better.
Controversy also creates discussion, but drives out quality.
Post news from quality sources, educational content, breaking stories, and ESPECIALLY good, fun, discussion and content around hobbies.
I really wish they’d have some type of tagging system. I’ve blocked so many anime communities. I wish Lemmy would let me just ban that tag instead of playing wack-a-mole.
It might be a good idea to see where it stabilizes before worrying about making it more popular. You can see how big the surge was. There was probably always going to be a dip.
What qualifies as an active user might also effect those numbers. Lots of people created an account on every instance because they didn’t understand federation.
Something I realized on Mastodon years ago (well before the Twitter/X thing) is it quickly doesn’t matter so much to me how many active users a platform has. A platform is good enough if there’s some activity, and I like being there. Lemmy was already something I checked when I saw only a handful of new posts a day.
Anyway, that’s just my perspective. I’m not too concerned about downtrends of active users.
Originally I signed up with vlemmy.net, but after like only a week, their server shut down. So I had to sign back up in lemmy.world
I can only imagine that as this service is fairly new, many users are experiencing similar things. Also, I can only imagine that a number of new users testing out the fediverse created throwaway accounts.
I think it basically all adds up to Lemmy and the fediverse in general gradually balancing itself out.
yes, there’s a github instance list, which is one of the top google result and it says “It doesn’t matter which instance you use” in bold, but that’s not true:
2 instances i joined ceased to exist after < 1 month
1 had the hardest captcha on earth and it just stopped showing after the 3rd try and the register form would no longer work without it
some need you to fill out an application message and don’t say what you’re supposed to put in. then a person needs to manually approve you based on that. that mechanism is not pleasant for everyone
We had this question before, so let’s get right back at it!
There was a rather controversial happening at Reddit a few months ago, which caused a lot (in Lemmy terms) of users to check out Lemmy.
Some of those users left rather soon, and some more keep dropping off regularly, as they can’t seem to adapt to Lemmy, or rather live without one or another feature or content from Reddit.
Now to your question, what can we do better?
Advertisement is of course one, but a large part of the users who left Lemmy we’re likely because of Lemmies unfinished state, so maturing Lemmy should be a top priority. “But properly maturing a social site requires an already existing user base” - and that’s exactly what we have right now, even if it’s dwindling.
Other solutions might also spring from creating the better user experience, such as features to moderate properly, both on a moderator and user basis, and of course to provide sufficient high-quality content.
We can of course try and forcefully promote Lemmy while promising rich lands and green fields, but I think that this is not the optimum path for Lemmy at this time, as we just might acquire the same bad reputation that vegetarians or Linux or a lot of other good initiatives suffered from.
Some of it is also the nature of the fediverse. For example, you'll sometimes see people complaining about having to see the same story multiple times.
The exact same article will be posted on [email protected], [email protected], [email protected], etc. etc. Or you won't get to see stories depending on which instance you're using, because server A has chosen not to (no longer) federate with server B, which means you need an account with multiple networks to see the whole fediverse, despite the fediverse supposedly being interconnected.
That's off-putting to many users, but I don't know if there's a way to change that easily, because these kinds of things are arguably part and parcel of the fediverse.
That, and the reddit repost bots who sometimes mass post content from Reddit with no interaction on Lemmy.
Now, having the same post being replicated on multiple subs was no rarity on Reddit, but they tended to use crossposting.
I’ve found the current moderation tools to be enough to deal with the latter problem, but crossposting or linking posts would be a nice feature on Lemmy, even if I’m not sure how one would properly implement that on the fediverse. So yea…
Not only that, but following the influx of new users was an assumption that just setting up niche communities exactly the way they were set up on Reddit was the best way forward (despite there only being a fraction of the userbase).
Some of these niches are going to need to merge. In some cases it’s going to happen naturally as redundant communities die off, but I’d like to see some effort to preempt that.
I want to remind everyone that Lemmy has had a bot crisis, a while ago I did some research into botted instances and I estimated something like 40% of user accounts are bots. Although this was a while ago so I’m not sure if that is remotely accurate anymore
Many instances will have taken steps to start purging user accounts, at the scale of Lemmy, that downturn could be entirely explained by these bots being removed
Obviously some users will leave but i do feel it’s worth noting this fact
A number of those bots are meant to share posts from other sites on Lemmy. There’s actually a lot of background interconnectivity like that going on right now.
As long as the bots aren’t doing nefarious things, is that a bad thing?
There’s nothing wrong with those kind of bots But when you take an instance for example granitestate.social, I think that’s what it’s called, which when I was looking into it had 100,000 inactive accounts sat there doing nothing.
These bots that have been created over the course of maybe a week could be used to spam or brigade instances. Emphasis on COULD, maybe they just sit there. Who knows?
But many instances took to purging idle bot accounts that had been created on their instances and defedrating from instances that had excessive numbers of bots
These idle accounts are hard to detect, so only when they appear in large quantities are they removable.
Just to clear up really I guess, I’m not talking about a Reddit repost bot or twitter scraper, more large amounts of bot spam.
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