this post was submitted on 20 Oct 2023
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A community to talk about the Fediverse and all it's related services using ActivityPub (Mastodon, Lemmy, KBin, etc).

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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!

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[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago (2 children)

This happens with every migration from a large platform. One thing that insulates the fediverse, I think, is that it's non-commercial nature makes it enshittification-proof. There are a lot of significant problems, but it's super attractive that some tech-bro dickhead won't blow up the platform to satisfy shareholders' insatiable profit-lust.

Reddit is now firmly on the enshittification path, so it's only a matter of time before another exodus wave.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago (1 children)

It doesn't need to enshittify because it's already kind of shit in a lot of ways.

A lot of basic features for moderation are not worked on, not prioritized by the dev team, and left to the wayside while large instances deal with CSAM attacks. There are massive, expensive SQL queries that can lock instances into downtime. If something is federated across the network it gets replicated, regardless of if it's genuine/legal/proper content or not. That's a huge flaw in the CSAM attack vector because it complicates the situation for everybody federated with the server being attacked.

I don't have to worry about the platform getting shittier because it still needs to achieve a lot of basic functionality.

The only real place to go is up.

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[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago (7 children)

Because the site goes down too often. I get it, not the developers fault. But it will take off only if there is more reliable.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago

Which site? Choose another instance if yours is unreliable. That's the advantage of a federated system. Or just have a second account at another instance.

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[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago

Total number of posts isn't really a helpful data point I think. Like yeah of course it will go up, but is the rate increasing or decreasing? That's the more interesting number.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago

Woot! I'm more of a lurker but I comment occasionally (not necessarily smart or informed as they should be ones) and I would love to post in recreations of some of my favorite niche places, but running them is quite an investment...

I'm pumped I can still see star trek memes though.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago

Or a more logical inference is that bots are posting reddit posts here, leading to higher posts. While users are leaving, leading to fewer comments and active users.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

It's been a while since I've taken calculus, but if those charts are for total posts/comments, then I'd say that the derivative is more important and it sure looks like the rate of posts have gone down.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I'd like some clarity too but I'm fairly certain it's posts per day. The comments certainly aren't cumulative since they go down.

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[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago

Do posts include bot posts? If so it'd be really interesting to see what that number looks like if you stripped out bots.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago

I wonder if anyone has ever attempted to model the min/max/ideal number of users (and ...ugh... "engagement") for a healthy online community? It'd be especially tricky for a federated service, but I'd bet there's some overall population size that puts the average user in contact with the right number of other people (lower than the Dunbar limit, I'd expect) to make it seem worthwhile to keep interacting.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago (1 children)
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[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago (3 children)

Is there a way to stay logged in? I have to log in like every time I use it.

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