Oh I hadn’t even thought of that. I have two accounts because when I started using Boost for Lemmy, my home instance wasn’t supported, so I signed up for startrek.website.
My old account would appear to be an inactive user in the numbers, which is not really accurate. But also it means that bump in users that happened during the reddit exodus was partially driven by duplicate sign ups.
So true, lemmy provides me with just enough stuff to feel like I saw enough memes, got some news, etc. but then I can just put it down and do other stuff. My interneting / doomscrolling is waaay lower than it was before.
this is an excellent point. perhaps the slowness of the content here is helping those of us who’ve been on reddit forever and are used to just doom scrolling through endless content.
i spend less time here but I feel I get more direct ‘value’ when I do. it’s more small business feel than condy nast breathing margins down the user community’s throats(pre and post gold eras)
I quit the R word cold turkey re: API and now toggle between this and kbin but lemmy with eternity app has been the best baconreader withdrawal breaker for me.
Another big point is that it’s a rejection of the profit motive, ie there’s not even a “small business” feeling like you say for me, but a far more genuine feeling. Nobody has tried to sell me anything here yet.
Coulda fooled me, the content quality has continued to climb, and that’s all that matters. Look at this post, it’s an original meme only relevant to this community, and it’s blowing up.
I get a bit annoyed with a hit meme being reposted 5+ times across instances, it clogs the main feed with repetition and only artificially increases the post numbers while making the whole experience less good. I did enjoy the comment-stacking meme yesterday where everyone added their own take. There are a few news-posting bots that post the exact same articles and cause the clogging repetitive main feed that makes the app far less interesting as well. It gets a bit depressing seeing the same inflammatory headlines 3-4 times, ie “35 blind fingerless coal-mining orphans bombed in Gaza strip hospital, why isn’t Joe Biden doing anything?” While reporting is important, the repetition of some themes seems astroturf-y. I also get really annoyed with the bots posting NSFW/ extremely explicit sex content/ads on main feeds. I have been here less because of these things.
Let’s look at some numbers and do some napkin math:
Currently, the top post of Lemmy can usually get a little more than 2K upvotes, which puts Lemmy at about late 2010 to early 2011 reddit level of activity, which is right before reddit hits its explosive growth phase in 2012 with SOPA, Kony, and the Obama AMA. While active user count has been going down, the amount of post and comments have both been steadily going up.
You also have to realize that in more than a decade, there was never a reddit alternative that has EVER hit this level of activity. (unless you count 9gag or the_donald for some reason.)
i am hopeful still. and i prefer this to be quieter and hence, safer, honestly. personally, i am not an active user because i’m the type of person that feels shame just for existing, but internet is helping me socialize. still not to the point of having something useful to say without wanting to delete it immediatly, but when i see these posts, i automatically get strenght to give my support. i am not able to maintain a community, be a mod, i don’t know how to code, i just can post supportive messages or be a helpful user adding resources and so. but i should be doing more, yep. i am ashamed of posting, but not contributing probably would be more shameful haha sorry people… hehe
My hypothesis is user account consolidation. I made several accounts across multiple instances (to deal with outages) but now only use a couple of them. So maybe people are not using their alts as much
You also have to realize that in more than a decade, there was never a reddit alternative that has EVER hit this level of activity.
That is a very important point that doesn’t get mentioned enough. Lemmy is the largest and most active reddit alternative around. All the other sites that tried to capitalize on the API disaster have laughable numbers of users and most posts rarely have more than 10 votes or interactions.
Kbin is doing pretty well, they are still holding on to about 6,000 MAUs. Lemmy still has around 32,000, for comparison. Lemmy peaked around 66,000 MAUs at the end of July, but a big chunk of that was probably alt accounts that have since gone dormant.
Kbin’s main developer had some major IRL events that coincided with the reddit exodus so he wasn’t really able to do much work on the code for a while. But now he is back, and another team has also made a fork of kbin called mbin.
Federation is still pretty janky with kbin, so I think that activity should pick up on both sides once we get some software updates and more intermingling of the kbin and Lemmy userbases.
OP is also spot on about this being the largest that a reddit alternative has ever gotten. I’m pretty sure alternatives such as discuit, squabble, tildes, etc have never even approached 10k MAUs, so we are already well past that. If not for the fact that this platform is federated, there would probably already be much more activity. However, the federated structure should become more and more useful as we grow larger, so it’s a worthy sacrifice even if it’s stunting activity for the time being.
Internet in general is becoming boring and tedious. Don’t know if it’s because of my age (Started to use internet when I was 13yo now I’m 31) but the internet isn’t that exciting and curiosity inducing place to me.
Have you continued exploring, or found yourself settling in more?
For me any place stagnates when I start settling into it, so I try to find a new angle, a new question to ask of it, and eventually something gives way to something exciting and fascinating that was right around the corner the whole time.
I continued exploring it. But, aside of one or other interesting sites that catch my attention for long periods of time (e.g. TvTropes), I can’t find internet amusing as I used to do in my childhood/teens. Sometimes I pick a good site that keep me entertained while browsing CloudHiker, but isn’t the same thing anymore.
I literally bought a Lightphone II because I was spending too much time on reddit. Like, I’d stay in bed for an hour just scrolling.
I’ve recently slacked off and started keeping my iPhone (on wifi) next to me when I sleep. I loose interest in like 20 minutes.
I’ve made a point of not posting or commenting on reddit since the recent debacle, but it’s really frustrating when I have some OC that would be great for a niche community that just doesn’t exist in any real numbers on lemmy.
There’s nothing wrong with browsing your social media whereever that be Facebook or Instagram or messageboards like lemmy reddit or 4chan just as long as it’s not impacting your life. Could be a good way to catch up on friends and pass the time. Although “social media detoxing” can be really good for your mental health
So do the new posts and everything. But Reddit is a shithole and Omegle got sued to death, online gaming is either a full time job or a money sink, streaming services start to cancel out each other and most of the regular games and their performance suck ass.
Indie games are the only thing keeping gaming alive for me, for the most part. All the AAA games I play are older titles. Doing the GTAV story with a trainer has been a pretty fun time lately for me.
Wait, I just want to make sure I’m getting this. You’re going through five converters before plugging into the tv? Counting the computer->USBc as a converter…
Technically yes. In reality it’s just 2 “real” converters who both need their own power supply. Once from digital to HD analogue, and then from that to SD. For input lag, it’s a lot less than the 20 ms of input lag the HDMI 2 input of my Sony Bravia TV.
Same here. I like the idea of Lemmy but the decentralization makes it really difficult to find the content I want. Reddits centralization, while causing some problems, definitely made it easy to find communities. That lack of ease is what makes Lemmy not as easy to use for new people.
Have you checked out !lemmy411? For some reason I don’t see it mentioned or linked to much, but it’s basically that, which I think would feel much more approachable to new people than pointing them to tools like Lemmyverse (as much as I do really appreciate it).
Another good one for sharing communities you’ve stumbled across would be !wowthislemmyexists.
There’s also the problem where I totally want to start a community (for example: Marble Racing), but I don’t know where a good home would be for it and I don’t think my home instance would be a good home.
I think it does a bit. The obvious one would be for porn on general purpose instances. Alternatively, my primary instance for example is a bit of a niche one related to reading, so a sports or politics community could feel disjointed especially for the admins/mods who manage the community.
Same here. I lurk more on Lemmy but if I want to discuss some niche topic then Reddit is so easy to I don’t use that fucking app though, website or 3rd party.
Try Deep Rock Galactic! It is neither a full time job or a money sink. Any purchases are purely cosmetic, seasons are entirely free and there are regular updates.
I’m one of the people who has stopped coming here. I’ll keep visiting occasionally but the lack of content and pro-east/anti-west rhetoric is just as irritating as the maga/conspiracy crowds on reddit.
Large portions of Lemmy feel similar to places like /r/sino on Reddit. Personally I like to look at that stuff from time to time just to keep tabs on that flavor of propaganda, but it’s pretty detached from reality.
Do you visit here/Reddit for some news alongside other stuff, or more other stuff than news?
If the latter, you can somewhat avoid the rhetoric back & forth by blocking out a lot of the news communities, but then you do run into the general content problem more (especially if you’re also blocking memes).
Yeah, “monthly active users” does not necessarily mean “unique monthly active users”.
I would much rather see activity statistics like posts+comments or something like that. As long as those are looking good, then new unique users will continue to join gradually.
the average lemmy user has 3 alts factoid is just statistical error. the average lemmy user has 0 alts. alts georg, who lives on linux.community apparently and has 20,000 alts, is a statistical outlier adn should not be counted
The quality here is far better with the exception of maybe some user generated text stories. Posts don’t just get lost in a sea of posts. The users here may not be as many, but it appears to have more consistent engagement and far less people PM’ing me offering me Amazon gift cards for feet pics.
This really is a nice place. Even most engaged posts hardly get over 50 comments usually, but 48 of those comments are on topic, sane and unique even on a fandom community. Arguments are heated but mostly contribute at least some point of view rather than being rabid spoutings that either get upvoted (or awarded) to skies above or downvoted to hell unanimously.
We have way fewer posts, even fewer do in niche communities. However, the posts on the bigger communities are quite enough to pass the time. What we actually need is more people interacting with the seemingly dead niche communities of their fandoms and interests.
Big communities keep crossposting a lot of daily news or magazine-worth happenings, which kinda gets tiring after seeing the same post for the 5th time. Hiding crossposts per user settings would be nice to prevent the feeling of only same posts being posted for interested non-fediverse users.
It’s worth noting that Lemmy only had around 1000 active users for the first half of 2023. (Kbin had fewer than 40 active users until May 2023!) Currently Lemmy + Kbin have about 38,000 active users.
Exactly. There’s nothing out of the ordinary in that chart, just a quick growth, that led to an overshoot, and now it’s stabilizing In the next months, we will probably see a more stable pattern of linear-looking growth, with occasional peaks here and there.
for what it’s worth, it’s a small active community. Those that stay participate, like a pre-Eternal September internet. I’ve seen memes here before they made it to reddit, that’s a shift in “power” that can’t be understated in the landscape of the internets.
I think “the good ending” looks something like that.
We aren’t beholden to stockholders, so we don’t need perpetual growth. We aren’t driven by an egomaniacal CEO so we don’t need to be the biggest social network around. We just need to find our equilibrium.
I never even new lemmy existed until the reddixit and I never went back because I think lemmy is a lot less toxic. Also worth pointing out that this post alone has more than 800 likes When I firsf came around top posts had 100 likes tops
All the people constantly complaining about “tankies” and “commies”: You are the problem. Normal people are repulsed by that shit. The only reason you don’t see more pushback against it is because nobody wants to get inundated with pedo-nazis trying to draw them into a debate where they’re either forced to side with literal nazis or the worst strawmen of socialism that they can think up, where if they back down or stand up for their values at any point, they get targeted for harassment. I deal with that shit regularly because I’m built for it. Most people aren’t.
Honestly it feels good to read the “end” of Lemmy occasionally. It reminds me that I spend a lot of time on this app (and used to spend more time in reddit) and forces me to close it and do something else, even if it’s just to open a non-social media app.
I get that, it’s just it’s only good for certain topics and anything more niche or casual isn’t well represented. This place did get me into Linux again though haha.
Don’t use the official Reddit app. Instead, grab the last release apk of Sync for Reddit from apkmirror, then use revanced manager to patch it with your own api key (and probably patched out the ads while you’re at it).
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