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.

Meh, if it drops it drops. I'll never have the relationship to social media I used to, because I don't want it anymore. If Lemmy can give me a few posts a day of things I might not normally see, that's enough for me. It doesn't need to be the next Reddit or whatever. After quitting Reddit I'm getting back into things I haven't done in years. I don't need that again.

For the last time, there is no need. We are large enough. 400,000 people is a large town or small city. Remember:

1. There are no investors to please

2. No stock holders to appease

3. No CEO to bootlick

4. No ads to chase

5. No e-peen to contest

We are free at last. Free your mind from the tail chase of corporate controlled social media.

Stop advertising the site as a place to go when you get banned from reddit for being too insufferable even for them.

This is pretty normal, you get a surge of users and then it tapers off a bit as people don't like it.

Could be a lot worse, take a look at the user graph for threads.

Trying to make a place popular for the sake of popularity is putting the cart before the horse, and will always be a losing battle.

Make your Lemmy instance a place worth spending time. Don't worry about user counts or popularity.

How can we make it more popular?

By not doing the things that corporations do to make things popular. Do we even need Lemmy to be popular? I think we concentrate on trying to keep the Fediverse and Lemmy user focused and privacy friendly and people will naturally come over as they get burnt on the ever increasingly enshitified corporate data-theft sites. We need to be something different than the big sites. A breath of fresh air. I think people will be OK with putting up with a few quirks to escape those toxic environments. I think Lemmy is progressing just fine and I'm enjoying it.

How about instead of worrying about making it more popular we concentrate on making it better?

Eliminate all the shitty worthless content and spammy replies that people brought over with them from the shit hole that shall not be named and focus our efforts on creating quality content that users (particularly the ones that are already here) actually enjoy and engage with.

That's my two cents on it anyway.

One that that has made me unsubscribe from several communities here is when they are just bot-lead reposts of the equivalent subreddit. This makes these communities on lemmy objectively worse than the reddit equivalent because there is not the population to interact with the sheer volume of posts, and it just becomes spam without engagement.

More upvoting of posts.

I know that sounds a bit dumb/lame, but when I first got here and every post had like 5 upvotes, maybe 20 and then maybe once a week you'd see one with more than 100, it was jarring. Made the place feel empty and without interaction. Which it's really not, but that was my and I think perhaps a lot of peoples' first impression.

Stop with the doomerism.
"Lemmy is losing users" -> Lemmy has a stabilizing base of communities developing their own culture after a great exodus from several centralized platforms. Original, high quality content is finding its home here as users engage with one another on thousands of federated, interoperable, transparent websites.

Honestly, the main problem for popularity's sake is the un-diverse userbase.

It's a bunch of techy redditors, the same way that many other services that splinter off from reddit are. Almost all the communities are literal clones of reddit ones. So for someone who wants a similar style of place and doesn't have a hatred of reddit corporate built-in, why would they not go to reddit, which has the same kind of userbase but with 100x the users?

Honestly, other than "Open Source Master Race!!!!111!!!111", there isn't any reason, especially not one that the average person will care about.

Another one, and I fucking HATE saying this, not enough zoomers dragging their friends along. This place feels like a place for the 30-something instead of the 20-something. Which isn't bad, of course, but in terms of network effect power it is, because peer pressure is huge for social media.

But, separate from all that, do we actually want it to be that kind of popular? Maybe we should stay under the radar for the most part. Keep it from becoming stale and condescending like lots of Redditors can be. Keep the advertisers from sinking claws in. Maybe that'll be better for the site as a whole than needing ads to support a service 100x the size.

Lemmy got a HUGE influx of users from the Reddit fiasco. Of course, there was going to be a pull back.

What is going to determine if Lemmy becomes popular is if it has reached critical mass to start growing organically on its own.

as a recent refuge myself. Some random thoughts.

Things that will help, hobby groups moving here. And other interest groups. Not expecting everyone to code, be a privacy advocate, or a political extremist.

Solving some of the fundamental issues around "federation" and ease of use for the average user that just wants to post about cars, hobby, etc

Actually WANTING more users. There is a non small portion that activity is toxic to new users who came from Reddit just to escape.

Keep calm and continue posting and commenting. Thank you for coming to my ted talk.

What Lemmy ultimately needs is original content for people to come back. Reposting memes and links can only get you so far.

This is normal, it'll stabilize. Lemmy development is certainly needed, but what we can do is just keep the content rolling despite the issues.

Maybe we just need to tighten them? Perhaps a lock washer will help 🤭

All this endless nagging of politics, ideology, capitalism, billionaries, tankies, right-wing, left-wing, Desantis and Trump are slowly making me lose interest in Lemmy. You are ruining Lemmy honestly

Going in with the aim of making Lemmy "more popular" is not the best approach. There are going to be surges of people signing up for new accounts, trying it out a bit, then leaving, especially when Reddit does something major in its poisoning of well. But the goal shouldn't be to try to keep everyone who ever creates a Lemmy account.

The best thing to do is build the communities here that you are interested in. Do what you can to make them lively and active. This, combined with client improvements from Lemmy developers, will lead to steady growth and more community participation.

The only way to make it more popular is by having more content. Unfortunately we haven't reached the critical mass number of people that keeps people interested.

I don't think the quality of content here has been as high as I would have liked. Over on lemmy.world/c/games, the moderation and post/comment quality are well below below what I would have expected from /r/Games in its glory days. For example, all the highest voted comments on the Starfield impressions thread are karma-whoring single sentence meme responses about pre-orders, "patient gamers", or piracy, all completely off-topic for an impressions thread.

Popularize the apps that exist. I couldn't figure out how to browse it in a Reddit-like way until I tried an app. That was all I needed to make the switch.

Threads did the same thing. Explosive growth followed by silence. Social media grows over time. It's not a constant gigantic upward slope.

For me the biggest issue is user engagement and missing communities.

I enjoyed /all to see news and discussion about that news, which isn't really a thing on lemmy yet.

And i enjoyed small communities for the discussions and posts which are also not really a thing on lemmy yet.

Make high quality content like answering questions and eventually people will start flocking

Also, if you want to grow Lemmy, the best thing you can do is comment and respond to everything (With thoughtfulness of course), because the value of reddit (and Lemmy) is always in the comments, so that's the best way to contribute.

By stopping asking how to make it more popular and starting making it a place that could become popular.

The charts show that Lemmy has gained a massive amount of users quickly and is experiencing a normalization period.

My first post so apologies if I break any rules. I’ve been a computer user for 50 years. I use a pc for many hours everyday. I’m averse to Facebook, Google, and TwitterX. I first heard about Lemmy today. Perhaps why it isn’t growing as fast as some think it should.

Lemmy seriously needs kindergarten-level SEO. None of the communities barely show up on Google.

Another way of looking at it: Lemmy is retaining the engagement of the vast majority of new users who have joined recently.

This happens with Mastodon too. But each wave more people stick around.

I've found great content in here and it has the good vibes of early reddit I miss so much.

I really only use reddit for search engine results now.

This is normal for any platform that gains a burst of users. You'll have significant attrition, but probably end up leveling out at somewhere higher than you started.

If you think about it, it's very hnlikely that every new lemmy user would stay

I think we're great where we're at. Exponential growth for the sake of growth is not a good thing.

We have a decent and varied user base with plenty of subject matter experts. We tend to upvote more than downvote. The app still needs to grow, find more security and discoverability, but it's pretty pleasant where we are now.

Those stats aren't particularly distressing. We lost the .ml domains. Defederation happened. We had crapload of bot accounts created then dealt with.

If DAU doesn't flatten out by november, it might be a bad sign. At the moment I'd say it's more likely that the graphs have a bunch of hidden data in them and it's not just a clean and clear indication that people are fleeing.

I'll take 40,000, nice professional pleasant people over a million random redditors any day.

I have been pretty comfortable here because I'm into nerdy things and most of us here are nerds. In fact, the only people that cared about reddit locking down the API were nerds or people jumping on the bandwagon because it was the next big thing. Others didn't care and just wanted reddit back and a lot of people that were here in the beginning went back to reddit. We will probably grow overtime but there's no point in wondering why lemmy isn't more popular, just participate in the communities you like.

The biggest issue I have with lemmy isn't even about anything but meme communities being tiny. It's that I don't have a way to find the tiny ones that do exist so I can't join them. I don't know how to look for anything, and when I just use the search built into sync the lemmy's that do pop up are unclear as fuck to me

The nature of a social network is to become big enough to attract most people or to stay a niche community.

But the process takes time. Right now the niche expanded significantly, but didn't reach the critical mass yet.

How the dynamic happens though is still mysterious. Accessibility is the first and most important feature though. Then, you need to keep up with the time and innovations, but it might be hard to see.

IMO the focus should be accessibility. Which will become difficult because elitist asshats are already fighting against growing the community, and accessibility is the easiest place for gatekeeping.

I can't speak for losses, but I can say I visit almost every day. I get my news from here and feel informed.

Makes sense that not everyone trying out Lemmy would stick around

The same thing happened to Mastodon

It'll be fine 🙂

Address some of the issues. Like not having multiple similar posts, on different instances with similar named communities.

Also to reach critical mass, we need to keep posting. Addition of new apps such as Boost will also increase popularity

To be expected. After any exodus and reaches a peak and dies down some. The real question will be long time retention and addition if new users over the course of a couple years, not months.

Mastodon has went through a similar bump, but more recently has had some larger figures begin usage (local government broadcasts, b-level 'thought-leaders'/'influencers', etc). In order to get to the next level, lemmy needs to show it can survive test of time and is worth the effort to establish an online profile. For example, reddit has corporate organizations creating and maintaining subreddits which act as an avenue for community engagement. Having active community engagement leads to advertisement, which can be a double edged sword, but useful if pursuing 'growth' metrics. I'm not sure what the lemmy devs (or it's users) have planned for this.

I'm a long time Mastodon user, and I've observed multiple cycles of user influxes (usually caused by some unpopular decision at Twitter) followed by slow but steady decline as these new users got frustrated, disappointed, attacked or something similar. Each wave however did leave a portion that stuck around. I can't tell you whether Mastodon or Lemmy will "succeed", but it's clear by now that both their respective user bases couldn't even agree on the definition of success.

This might sound like a negative, but if you look at corporate social media which has a pretty clear vision of what its own success looks like (is this fair?), it might also be partly positive. Also, while success might be hard to define and agree on in the Fediverse, I think that these networks are more resilient to total failure than traditional social media (though again, this statement hides some implicit assumptions).

Ultimately, I've learned to stop worrying about this. People will talk about what they want to talk about, and this will continue to change and evolve. Lemmy needs better moderation tools (as demonstrated by the recent CSAM attack), but I believe it will get them in time. If you want to talk about something different on Lemmy: do! Just post it, or create a community. It might not explode over night, but it might catch on.

Mastodon and now Lemmy are the only social media I actively use now (permanently deleted my Twitter account on the day the Tate interview was published "exclusively", but was less active there for years) , and I feel the better for it. I've observed tremendous progress in the Fediverse during the past six years and it's very encouraging in the long term.

Just wait until the next Reddit fuckup.

We need to make Lemmy a more interesting and mature place for when it, inevitably, happens.

I can understand. After the initial excitement, the content is lacuster and scarse compared to reddit (due to lack of large userbase)

How can we make it more popular?

Not by bots designed to increase content creation.

It's natural - reddit does something bad, people look for an alternative, join up then start losing interest either after a while either due to toxicity, seeing content they don't like, not having reddit features they used, or the low amount of content and start migrating back.

The user count will probably not stop dropping anytime soon, unless reddit does something again and blackout 2.0 happens.

It's also a naturally busy time for living organisms in the northern hemisphere. I've just got things going on, man.

It's normal, people come and go, same on mastodon. We will have times where people join like crazy, just wait :)

We don't have to prove ourselves to any investors though, so slight decline is totally fine!

I have a few alts that have gone inactive as instances become more reliable, I'm sure there's a bit of that

I cannot go back to Reddit! No really they gave me a site-wide ban, I can't go back!

Lemmy needs proper moderation tools. Currently if someone posts an image you have to take like a dozen steps in a command line to delete it, and it doesn't delete from federated instances when removed by moderators.

So let's say you access lemmy.world through lemmy.film. Anything federated to lemmy.film through lemmy.world that's deleted due to content moderation will still appear on lemmy.film until it's deleted manually.

Couple this with an influx of malicious users and you've got a nasty situation on your hands that isn't sustainable for instance hosts while putting them at significant legal risk.

On the user experience end of things, people seem determined to flood the all feed with bot spam and it seems as though the more hostile tide of reddit users and plants sponsored by bad actors have showed up to play.

Lemmy's devs need to give some indication that they can even be bothered to glance in the direction of producing more robust moderation and federation tools if it's going to keep its momentum. User-level instance blocking would help a lot too.

On Reddit, I was mainly subscribed to a few niche subreddits. By reddit's standards, that's still like 100k subscribers. But over here, even though there might be 1000 people subscribed to those same niche communities, the 90-9-1 rule still applies. Either the community has one super-spammy power user trying to boost life into the community, or there's just no one actually posting anything.

I'm getting enough of a fix to stay on Lemmy and wade out the peace and quiet, but I do long for the engagement of 50k+ users on a truly niche topic. My willingness to stay on Lemmy has been helped by me starting to re-utilize off-site forums specifically to those niches. But I can totally understand how it just feels dead to a lot of the Reddit exodus.

I can be a data point, after initial enthusiasm I find myself spending less time on lemmy - which is not necessarily a bad thing. For me, it's just that real life is getting precedence. Also this does not mean I left lemmy, will return again when the rough edges are sorted out.

Its not easy to search for communitys ....

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.

I think it's too early to comment on the user numbers increasing/decreasing. Let's see what it looks like in 6-12 months time.

I've seen a few posts complaining about Lemmy on Lemmy and Reddit. It's generally the same complaints; so these should be addressed.

That's a difficult question, for starters people around here tend to misinterpret what you're saying accidentally or willfully, far more than my experience with reddit previously. Idk if it's because the place just filled with the worst of reddit or the dumbest of reddit, but it seems like reading comprehension is at an all time low.

Second, there needs to be clear divides between communities and their uses. When c/memes and c/linuxmemes have the same content, it's going to give new users the impression that this place is for a very specific kind of person and then they'll quit altogether.

All the people saying there is no content, should also create the content they wish to see. It's the only way to grow, even if we're talking to ourselves for a bit.

I think this is also heavily related to the CSAM issue, because

A.) Its horrible to read about in the first place B.) Its makes users more reluctant to browse content in general C.) It makes users more reluctant to browse content at work or in public places

I think that scared off many users (it also scared me off a bit). I think if Lemmy finds a solution to fight this kind of stuff and gives users some reassurance that the problem is handled will bring many users back. I think the importance of content moderation and SPAM defense should be the biggest learning points of the first Lemmy loop.

My question is how has 4chan usage looked since reddit bullshit?

Quality > Quantity

Even if it were half the size, but the same quality, I'd think that it was a success.

I haven't found the depth of experience and quality depth in most of Lemmy, yet. Lemmy.world is an exception.* It takes time.

I also feel like that's to be expected, I bet big companies see graphs just like this too. There was anger and hype for a lot of people to move to a new platform. Many did, but it didn't become the new habit for everyone. That's not a failure of Lemmy. In fact, I'd say this is an impressive metric, especially considering we do not know what defines "active". Is logging in what mark someone as active? Upvoting? Commenting? We should see this graph as a big win, especially during Lemmy's infancy.

How can we make it more popular?

Defederating tankies, nazis, fascists, bigots and other awful elements; forcing moderators and administrators to do their job when bad behaviours occur, and respectfully disagree with other people instead of calling them names or mocking them.

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

This is to be expected. The question now is where will it stabilize amd will it start growing again after?

Yep growth doesn't come all at once it goes up and it goes down, just like stocks. Social media platforms experience increases in users but also decreases in users. Though looking at the graph it just seems that people are less engaged, rather than leaving, the sharp dip is an engagement, not such a sharp dip in overall user count though.

There's still a lot of low hanging development fruit. All that downtime the bigger instances have are largely the result of poorly optimized database interactions (with the exception of the DDoSing) and that works out to higher costs overall. It should not cost instance admins nearly as much as it does to host a sum total of 50k users. Not to mention, moderation tools are still basically nonexistent. There is progress on tweaking the algorithm to not completely bury anything but the largest communities, so that will probably significantly improve folks feeds.

Also there's no point recruiting from Reddit anymore. I think we are better off establishing a wholly new slow growth phase pulling primarily from Mastodon. The userbase is huge by our standards and already understands federation. Not to mention Mastodon users tend to be far more active posters than Reddit users.

If we look at how things went for Mastodon during the various twitter exodus waves, it's a very similar pattern - huge increase followed by tail off, then another wave of increase followed by another tail off etc. I suspect the same thing will happen with Lemmy/Reddit. We all know reddit are going to continue to do stupid things prior to their IPO so it's likely there'll be more waves of influx followed by tail offs.

This is actually good as it's organic growth/loss. I can't think of an example where a big push by a company to get more users has resulted in a 'better' community, just a larger one. Organic growth/loss is much more likely to result in a better community as oppose to just a 'popular' one. Or, to put it another way, lets aim for quality not quantity.

Now that my instance has defeded from Hexbear I don't see much outright tankie stuff anymore and on the very rare occasions I do come across it, I just block the user. That said, I have noticed a growing trend of people calling anything slightly to the political left of Joe Biden either socialist, communist or tankie as though those terms were interchangeable, which they're not. Either way, if it bothers you, either ignore it, block the user, block the community or move your account to an instance that is defeded from the instances you are upset by.

Let's also not forget Lemmy is not mature software and has only become as heavily used as it is now about 3 months ago. There's a lot of features missing, particularly for admin and mod users, so we can either be patient and do what we can right now, fork Lemmy, create unofficial patches or not use it.

I do feel like we've become so used to highly polished, corporate solutions that do everything that we've lost our ability to be patient. For me, its vastly preferable to be somewhere where I'm not tracked, fingerprinted, advertised to and have my data sold but at the same time put up with a few idiosyncrasy's of the software than the alternative.

How?

Be the change you want ro see. Activity participate on Lemmy.

It's time for Lemmy devs to really think about the pain points and how to address them.

It's clear that federation isn't working as intended. Because of that, moderation is too difficult. Defederation has been a major drama for Lemmy, which is only being made more likely given these complaints have not been addressed.

Then there's the curse of choice that makes gaining non-tech users a lost cause. It is leading to extreme fragmentation which makes people drift back to their busier platforms.

These issues need to be addressed or Lemmy will be MySpaced within a year.

Isn't this ok? I'm not saying it's better... just OK?

I don't know if this is just me but why is there always a race to be the "most popular/larger platform"?

Isn't this kind of race to be the most popular the reason why a lot of platforms/companies/jobs/games/etc are suffering today? Growth for the sake of growth and forcing something to be more popular just because it needs to be more popular is just kind of sad.

It's not like "corporate fediverse/lemmy" needs more users... At least this is my opinion.

Imo. Lemmy is doing great. I feel like this was expected after such a huge expansion. Never could expect everyone to stay. I stood up my own instance in early June and it's technically still up but I'll probably be bringing it down soon as I feel comfortable here on startrek.website and support the cause.

more plateauing than losing I think

I'd worry more about content.

If the amount of non-bot posts/comments per user is falling, then there may be a health issue.

But I'd wait a bit longer before freaking out.

Lurkers are not counted I think. I prefer browsing. Let me comment so I can be "active."

Its because of the diffusion of content and users. Its been pointed out elsewhere that the current structure of lemmy thins out both content and engagement.

Its a harder to grow social network and it suffers from some design issues.

It's fine, it doesn't need to be popular

SELL!!

I'm on today but was unable to get on many times. It says to change instances, but with no clue how to easily do that. I could not figure it out - so I just left it do its downtime thing until I could return.

Also, a lot of the posts are weird. Political. I don't want to see that stuff and have blocked what I can but I'm still seeing the stuff!

When I go to specific forum topics I do want to read, there just aren't many posts.

When I end up on the front page, some days it's the same stuff I read hours before.

Some things need to change to make it more attractive to hang out here. Even us nerdy types are finding other places.

Not complaints. Just my observations that perhaps someone can look at as a point to make some changes

I love Lemmy but I find the extreme pro-FOSS bias and hatred of everything else to be pretty abrasive and not conducive to useful or interesting discussion. And that's coming from someone who both loves to use and contribute to FOSS. But my preferred desktop OS isn't Linux which apparently according to the Lemmy hivemind is a big no-no.

I think more Lemmy users need to learn that the upvote and downvote buttons aren't meant to be used to indicate agreement and disagreement respectively, it's to indicate if a comment is valuable contribution to the discussion regardless of whether or not you agree.

In a post discussing Chrome, a few comments about alternative browsers make sense. But if there are 100s and 100s of comments all just saying some variation of "switch to Firefox otherwise you suck" and those are the only ones that are upvoted, then the whole comment section becomes pointless.

In that time we've had new people come and experience a lack of apps, many that we do have today were still in the works a month or two ago. We've had performance issues, shitty Active sorting that still shows week old posts no matter how many times you refresh, we've had instances simply disappearing over night, we've had ddos attacks, we've had horrible content spam like CSAM and issues with extremism.

All of that with the cherry on top that signing up for Lemmy, understanding how it works and using it day to day is not as easy as a place like reddit. Who knows what the future holds for Lemmy.

Two instances I signed up to went down. My accounts are down 50%!

New platforms take time, patience & nurturing.

Doesn't help when you have a moderator for a community as big as KDE that tells users looking for help to learn to code. Looking at you, @Bro666@lemmy.kde.social. Suppose to be a support community, and if anyone reports an issue or concern, he calls them rude and dismisses them with a repost of his article to go code it yourself. That's helpful to no one. If I were new to Lemmy and KDE, that would have made me leave both. Toxic mods are a problem.

Blame lurkers posting nothing but upvoting.

There’s hundreds of posts on “all” every day without a single comment

When I first joined, I hopped around instances and tried out a bunch. But eventually I settled on this one and I haven’t logged in to any other account in a while. I probably count as like 5 inactive users. I wouldn’t be surprised if there’s a lot of that.

Posts are going up pretty steady, that matters more.

Less is more

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.

Somewhat expected, probably will be multiple waves of people joining with small declines in the months immediately after. Some of those less engaged individuals will come back too, and some of each wave will stay. I stayed from this last wave of reddit users. I've been using three lemmy accounts and my Mastodon since the incident. I intend to keep doing it, it's been a lot fun.

Why on Earth would we want to make it more popular?

I want more people to leave. Things have noticeably gotten better over the last few weeks, but there's still a ways to go.

The people who are leaving are presumably mostly people who are frustrated by the relative complexity of decentralized forums and people who can't find enough "content" to scroll through here, and good riddance to the lot of them.

IDK Lemmy.world is at 132k users now, it was way below 100k when I started 3 months ago, and has been steadily climbing since.

There are servers that allow new users, but have no real users, just massive amounts of bots.

You can look here: (warning very slow server)

https://the-federation.info/platform/73

Try to sort the servers by Total users, Lemmy.world is on top, but the next 7 try to look at the row of numbers, you will see servers with many "total users" have almost zero activity posts and comments, compared to the number of claimed Total users.

I'm guessing those users are all fake. Why people generate fake users IDK, but there is clearly attempts to sabotage the Lemmy network.

Trying to penetrate the noise, and figure out more real numbers, I'm sure Lemmy remains quite healthy and is growing in real numbers, if you filter servers that are actively and properly maintained.

Imagine being in a room with 50k people and tell me you wont have someone to have a conversation with.

I made accounts on like 10 Lemmy & Mastodon instances because I was confused about federation. I would comment using native accounts but now I mostly just use my main.

No surprise. After a surge of reactionary, or curiosity, based signups, some will inevitably loose interest. In particular, the 'bottom 10%' of users, who weren't/wouldn't contribute anything of substance anyway, or possibly were annoyed by some feature or another that was different than Reddit. I similarly don't care that more people haven't moved from Reddit to Lemmy, as the majority who haven't would likely make the place worse. When everyone can interact with something with even the most meager barriers to entry removed, the quality always declines.

Needs more content. Personally I'd like video hosting (i know thats a big ask). And some way to make instances less confusing for newcomers.

May the next iteration of the internet include more people journeying to smaller communities that fit them, and less scooping everyone up and exposing them to as much outrage as possible to addict them.

Ideally all social media use goes to near zero

i mean aside from the obvious fact that things don't have to have infinite growth -- what stops me from using more is the bugginess and weirdness of the interface. you still can't hide individual posts, which was huge for me on reddit, and would be on here especially since things are slower. [there are apps that can hide posts, but only on those apps, they don't carry over to desktop]

I can't even register for lemmy.world.

I'm liking how fast things load though.

Less abrasive tankies telling people they deserve to die/be killed.

That's about it, actually.

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.

People come to platforms like these for content. Post content you'd like to see yourself, and people will come

I mean is it really a bad thing? Not to be elitest but I think we are pretty good with niches.

Maybe fix some structural issues? Apparently Beehaw is looking to shut down and or completely defederate. There are complaints that serious issues are being ignored by devs.

If fixes were on a roadmap, I think that would help.

I don't know much of anything about the backend, but if a whole community is considering leaving, it may be time to reassess priorities and goals.

A couple of accounts I made have been made redundant. Chances are if you went with LemmyWorld as your starting point and got sick of all the downtime you probably did too, leaving behind a handful of obsolete accounts.

Doesn't account for all, just some.

The fediverse has defederated with some instances. That's probably the cause

Corporate has seen those graphs and asked me to turn up the enshittification dial.

Content ofc, but also I'm on Kbin, and the software here is atrocious. 100% of the time after like a minute goes by while I read a post and read the comments and then want to upvote/boost or write a comment, it asks me to re-login on a mobile Firefox. Also, if I comment on something and someone responds, but then a moderator removes the entire post on another instance, it breaks my entire Notifications - not just that singular one, but the entire process of receiving notifications for anything I say (the good news is that it only breaks the one page that it occurs on, so if I make enough other comments it will eventually fall behind the curve, but that's still a whole page of notifications that I will never be able to see, ever). Also there is no API at all. Also... well, you get the idea.

At this point, I would move to Lemmy except... account migration is a lie. I already asked people to follow me from Reddit to Kbin, and I'm not doing that again.

You will be baked, and then there will be cake.

Because it's just a circlejerk for the most part and it's not particularly useful

Lots of good content here but I'm never going to use it to the same extent I used reddit

I feel like I've been seeing more posts and comments though, and looking at those, they seem to still be rising (although probably influenced by bots).

I wonder if the spike of active user may be caused by people first trying it out (then giving up), followed up by people making several accounts on different instances before settling for one or two.

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.

I have like 4 accounts and use one of them.

It's normal to see a big initial spike and see things taper off. Also I think there were a lot of spam accounts in the past that got deleted (or something) so that may be part of it as well.

I'm still here

steal memes from other platforms

I got it, Celebrity Endorsement. Like John Oliver.

There is plenty of content on here for me

mo users, mo problems.

Start with spelling correctly. It's "losing" smh.

woah lemmy instances also going down

It is to be expected. most people who migrated early on did it as an act of boycott, and not because they needed an alternative to reddit. so when the boycott failed, the natural thing for them was to go back to the plateform with the bigger userbase.

Why? there is lots of good communities and a lot of content

I'm on my 3rd account....

In reality, things don't always go "Up and to the right" and nor do they always need to. My thoughts anyway.

I wonder if they're moving to KBin or even Mastodon instead, and that explains the dip in Lemmy specifically.

That's the Neat Part, You Don't.

It doesn't really matter lol. We all know that there was going to be a drop of users, because many of them came because of the 3rd Party Apps trend on Reddit, and they didn't get used to it or they didn't like the platform.

I don't want it to be more popular with idiots.

make a decentralized system that scales quickly and efficiently with usage and has a higher uptime than any server based site like reddit

It is like the holy grail of a decentral web, and it is (currently) very hard to achieve without making a tradeoff.

Lemmy trades off scalability and availability for federation. It's not very effective because instances have to be selected manually, and if any large instance goes down, chaos ensues.

It's not even truly decentral. More like a somewhat redundant media system.

The best I think we have right now is IPFS. It has scalability and accessibility. But it lacks speed due to DHT searches being hella slow compared to a simple DNS lookup.

I like it here. Not here here, but in my instance :3

I was put off of one instance by community feud with a self-appointed HOA-type representative, and on another by downvotes on any opinion comment that I made on otherwise empty posts. Switching platform sadly can't fix the problem of awful people. 😔

But then you also have a large instance like beehaw trying to break away from lemmy

Now that the 3rd app ban has been implemented, people I know are already moving away from reddit.

As many others have said, it's only natural for the trends to plateau. After a sudden surge of users, due to the Reddit controversy, some of the less "devoted" (can't think of the best word) are bound to leave in search of a more user-friendly experience or a community with more active users. I too, also wish that some of the more niche communities had more active users, however I also understand that these things take time and A LOT more users. For that reason and for the sake of a freer internet, I reckon I'm in for the long haul. I'm also trying to contribute as much as I can with the limited time I have. I think people need to understand that because we aren't the product/customer anymore, we need to help to contribute content and help the build new communities.

Biggest issue right now seems to be moderation being difficult due to federation.

I think, once that issue is tackled, we'll see Lemmy grow more naturally.

How does Lemmy user count actually go down ? People delete their account?

Who cares? I'm here, you're all here, and for now the content I see is pretty good quality compared to alternatives. I'm of the mindset that too many users can be just as bad for a site like lemmy as too few.

With School back I session, can see Lemmy really starting to take off. Students chating Between classes and seeing friends using Lemmy and getting word out.

And Winter in the northern hemisphere means more people insidenand doing stuff on screens. User base should go up because of this too.

I don't think we need to worry about Lemmy dying. It might take a while, but the user base will likely keep going up over many years. Just remember how new Lemmy really is.

Maybe it'll drop down to just few thousand users.

And that's just fine.

New signups have been blocked I think. Had that not existed Lemmy would grow more. Lemmy communities seem to be gaining people despite that though.

Delete politics

This is one of the biggest opportunities in recent years for a new social media platform to come up and establish itself and Lemmy seems to be totally squandering the opportunity. The fact that the active user count is dropping so fast, should be very worrying.

I think a lot of it has been mentioned by @rr7@lemmy.world, but it isn't just what is here, but also what isn't there. Namely the lack of posts in communities outside a handful of political ones. Social media should be some form of conversation and yet if you go to lots of the slightly more esoteric communities and there are few posts and even fewer replies to those posts. You'll basically be talking to yourself if you want to talk about cars or the latest gadget or asking for help on some DIY project.

so is your mom

Should we?

Of course it's losing users, it's jam packed full of extremist propaganda. Hexbear, Lemmygrad, etc.

I'm considering joining them.

Make it run more efficiently. When users spike everything crashes for a like week

We shouldn't. Stop trying to fuck this up.

There are two many communties. The powermods from Reddit came over and replicated every single sub they were running, then populated them full of bot accounts which vote down to oblivion anyone who inadvertently leaves a comment they object to.

RIP Lemmy (2019-2023). Bye-bye.

goes back to Facebook, X formerly known as Twitter, and Reddit

Hopefully OP is one of them.

Anyone got any spare money to buy ads on reddit? I know it's giving them money but maybe it'll help bring more over

Devs need to do better.

Well of course it is, it's a commie shithole, and the internet already has enough of those.

Stop users saying socialism is good for a change, every other meme I see here is about that

Maybe stop being such diehard Linux nerds. Kind of cringe