I saw a discussion the other day that may have been part of it. They were pointing out that many users when first joining lemmy created accounts on multiple instances. Whether they needed to find a community they preferred or do to ddos attacks and other issues causing outages a lot of those accounts have likely become inactive more as time went by. So the numbers may not be decreasing so much as been inflated by individuals coming up as multiple active users early on. I haven’t looked into how they are verifying what users are active though, so it could be wrong. If someone knows more please respond.
As far as I have heard, “activeness” is measured by whether a user posted a comment/post the past month, so lurkers/voters are not being counted. This does likely skew the numbers quite a bit.
Yeah, my first account on Lemmy was actually on Beehive, but I was confused by their sign up process (there wasn’t a page update telling me I had to verify my email, it just happened in the background and didn’t appear to do anything when I clicked sign up). I sorted it out when I checked my email an hour later, but that killed the vibe for me. So then I made this account, but jerboa didn’t support Aussie zone at the time so I made a shitjustworks account and used that for a while until I started becoming more active in the Aussie zone communities and tried to jump ship just for the ease
But yeah, I saw quite a few people who were very confused about the whole instances thing and a few others that have jumped ship a few times because of it. And as I mainly browse local top day, then all top day once that runs out of content, and my instance federates with all the instances I want to interact with, I don’t see a reason to use either of those other accounts I created
People make it look like it’s over for Lemmy, but this is only the beginning. Don’t worry, Reddit will fuck things up again. The Fediverse will win in the long run. Maybe Lemmy doesn’t have the momentum yet that we want it to have. At the same it’s grown so much. I mean, not that long ago there were almost only communists on this thing…
Reddit just feels like hive mind jokes and reposts, but on lemmy people are genuinely interacting so it feels more engaging (which don’t get me wrong, happens on reddit too, you just have to sift through all the stupid marinara flag jokes)
Something I used to do on Reddit was find a new community, and binge the top posts from the last year. I’ve started being able to do that on Lemmy, which is a huge win in my books
anyone who wants to leave can go. Hell, I’m responsible for two of the lost users because when i first came over here I misunderstood how this works and made a new account on each instance. what’s up @reverendsteveii and @reverendsteveii?
I’ve been thoroughly enjoying Lemmy much more than I did Reddit. I find it’s overall less toxic and I’m therefore engaging more instead of just lurking.
One criticism, though: I really do not like the communities that use bots to copy over posts and comments from Reddit. I see no value in commenting or engaging on those posts as the original poster is not present for discussion. It’s also kind of weird that the original posters are most likely not aware their post and its comments have been copied elsewhere and may be having further engagement.
On Reddit it got so bad I stopped responding to replies entirely. I’m still not very regular about that, but whenever I check now, I’m shocked to find I’m not just getting blindly downvoted for potentially contraversial statements. It feels like a really good sign to me - progress in an era of downward spirals as low effort people all over the world spew their nonsense on everything.
I treat Reddit like I treat twitter. When something happens, I look at it to get a read on the situation, or what people are saying or whatever. But I otherwise totally ignore it now.
A year ago, I couldn’t go an hour without looking at Reddit.
Yeah, I saw that again the other day and could not care less. I love the Lemmy mobile apps, and there’s nothing good left for Reddit in that area.
I actually was kind of annoyed the first week of Lemmy. It felt like a lot of keyboard warriors came over. It doesn’t feel as much like that any longer. I think if anyone didn’t stick around, it was the loud people pretending they were stronger than their addictions.
Good riddance, this is a much more chill crowd now. Maybe it’s just a bunch of old people… But eh, I’m old. We can all be old together now. Just stay the fuck off my lawn, and by that I mean the grass outside my apartment complex.
If anything, I feel a lot more calmer and more at peace when reading Lemmy threads. I find the people here are the reasonable ones, and all the other maggots seemed to stay on Reddit. Which I’m super ok with.
Now and then you’ll see someone who just goes thermonuclear on the first response to one of their comments, but they are far and few between. They all seem to eventually go back to Reddit, thankfully. Maybe because they can’t get the endorphin rush that they crave here.
This period of peace won’t probably last long, but I’m enjoying it while I can.
Every time I’ve gone back to Reddit, I’ve just seen the local communities I used to like getting incredibly right wing with the increasing number of wolf whistles in the comments. Or pro weed nonsense
And honestly, it just felt like doom scrolling and a waste of time. It has grown now to the point it’s just basically the Facebook crowd.
Lemmy is sufficiently busy, and much better quality. And there is more to think about when reading comments
Reddit allowed their communities to get shifted to the poles. My local community is the exact opposite, it’s so far to the left that it’s painful. The extreme poles of either side of the political spectrum are just as painful as the other.
Here we just chat. Left right square circle triangle, doesn’t seem to matter. The threads and interactions on here seem to be with people that are most like me, and not so much with the Ultra Hardcore MAGA bros, or the basement dweller 40 year old virgin social assistance crowd. Can’t say the same for Reddit. Glad they have a place too, hopefully they stay there.
I still love Lemmy. It’s nice to be able to post or comment without getting an automated response telling you you’re doing 15 things wrongs for trying to participate like happens on schmeddit.
Was there some stat released somewhere showing lemmy “losing users”? I’m pretty new and plan on sticking around, the quality here is infinitely better than reddit.
Honestly, good. The Internet was better when people were spread out across many small message board and chat rooms. The golden age of the Internet was when you’d do a search for something and 500 different forms and little websites would pop up.
Now’s it’s all reddit, “X,” and shitty corporate owned nonsense. We turned 2020 Internet into 90’s cable TV.
Gonna add a comment to my upvote: I agree with this so fucking much. I look back at the joyous days when I had… fuck if I know how many websites, each dedicated to its own thing, most with its own userbase, so unique and so defined. The only good thing about Reddit for me was gaming communities that, unfortunately, replaced actual forums that once allowed me to engage with passionate people and look for relevant info, even if it’s been years since its creation.
It’s probably just me being unaware, but gaming communities these days feel dead outside their respective subreddits and some Discord servers - and the latter is an even worse experience because the form factor of an endless IRC-clone that actually seems to save chat history is pretty fucking dumb more than it is convenient. If anyone has any suggestions there, shoot.
And blocking is great! I’ve blocked many spam bots, people with hateful comments, entire communities because I don’t speak their language or just don’t have interest in their content (no OFFENSE to THE PACK you guys ARE SO COOL AND BADASS but that kind of humor doesn’t appeal to me 90% of the time, no offense to sports fans but if I’m not actively playing it, I don’t want to watch it)
But if it’s a power user, it’s really hard to get away from, and you can block them and all 15 of their alts but people still talk about some of them.
So you can prevent them from contacting you, and you can prevent either of you from seeing each other’s posts and comments, but you can’t completely get away from everyone.
IMO the constant posts about users dropping aren’t from people who want Lemmy to succeed. Anecdotally I haven’t noticed a major change, still seems as active if not more than when I joined. Reddit has gotten worse and worse in that time period. I have faith.
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