Almost broke 2.5 million daily total users on Lemmy in the last 24 hours.
3 years ago by Victor Gnarly to c/fediverse
Yeah, I created an account on a difference instance just because I didn't know how to post in a community from a different (but federated) instance in this instance.
Active users isn't perfect either, for two reasons:
Bot accounts can be actively doing things -- in fact, it's likely that they will do so at some point to build legitimacy. We had someone farming regularly-created bot accounts back on /r/europe around the time I left, reposting slightly-mangled old comments and slightly cropped and rotated old highly-upvoted old images. Dozens of accounts a day.
Some (human) users are just going to lurk, and won't become active users.
It may be an input into a better estimate, and may be better than total users at this point, but it isn't the "right" number either, and I would wager that it will start to increasingly deviate from the legitimate number if people start activating bots.
Good to see, but as with all posts like this, it’s important to note that the really important number is “Active Users” That number has gone up significantly as well, just not as fast as number of accounts.
Yeah this is a good point.
It took me months to actually start using Lemmy and Mastodon. I would consider myself a tech savvy person and it still took a while getting used too. I think there need to be better tutorials linked on the sign-up pages that help people understand the basic concepts. That would help drive true user acquisition.
I just started with mastodon. Lemmy I'm pretty understanding at but do you have any people/ hashtags you reccomend following on mastodon to not make the whole place feel so small and repetitive? I'm interested in pretty much anything.
I use the advanced UI and have various columns pinned with hashtags I'm interested in. Just jumping in and joining convos, commenting on interesting projects I see etc has worked fine for me, got two accounts on two fairly small servers and they both have very active feeds and lots of engagement.
Pick something you want to talk to people about, and just go for it tbh.
Honestly, with Mastodon, I'm at the same place. I signed up with a very specific and small instance and it's a ghost-town. I don't have the time to search around for content. I'll probably start looking for a larger default instance and go from there.
I'm also a "tech savvy" and still trying to understand how all this works...
Do you need to for some reason? You can subscribe, comment, and post to any community that's federated with your home instance.
If you're on Lemmy.ml and the comm you want to sub to us on Lemmy.world, you should be able to find and subscribe in the "communities" section. As long as it's filtered for all communities and not just your "local" instance.
You join one, you can see, post on, comment on, and subscribe to communities on any server it is federated with. Beehaw.org defederated itself from sh.itjustworksl and lemmy.world a couple weeks ago which is making it confusing for some people. If you are on beehaw.org you can still see old posts on those two from when they were federated, but nothing new and you're comments on those old posts won't be posted for other servers to see, and vica versa for sh.itjustworks and lemmy.world users.
You can make an account on beehaw as well if you want, but it gets a bit confusing as to which one you are logged into sometimes.
As a lemmy.world user I type "lemmy.world" into my address bar and do all my browsing from there. You can change your page to look at "all" instead of "local" and see content from all instances it is federated with. Or you can go to "communities" and filter by "all" and see all communities from any instance it is federated with. (As long as one of the lemmy.world users has visited that instance at one point)
No reason to make multiple accounts unless you really want some content from a defederated instance, like beehaw.
What's considered an "Active User"?
A person who posted/commented in the last 30 days
From the docs: "Lemmy also shows counts of active users for your site, and its communities. These are counted within the last day, week, month, and half year, and are cached on starting up lemmy, and every hour.
An active user is someone who has posted or commented on our instance or community within the last given time frame. For site counts, only local users are counted. For community counts, federated users are included."
I've posted more in the week I joined here than I ever did in Reddit.
You sir are a legend
i've only been on the platform for a few days but i've noticed a decent uptick in content and unique posts. probably still a lot of bots but with a decent surge of users and people getting a handle on the platform there's been a good bit of activity.
yea track the monthly active users number. It continues to go up. And on lemmy, to be "active", a user actually has to post, not just sign in and lurk.
Conversely, kbin doesn't really track active users, so it's more or less the same as total users.
Can they be in my volume instead?
Daily active users is a much more reliable statistic due to bots
Source: https://lemmy.fediverse.observer/dailystats
Yup, came here to say that as well. it's al bots. The active users graph is much more realistic.
And I've been seeing some...odd looking.... comments recently from users at instances known for being mostly bots. Some of these comments really look AI generated, and have a suspicious number of upvotes.
beep beep boop
Just wait until Apollo/RIF/etc actually go dark!
I'm waiting for when I open sync for reddit and see a link to sync for lemmy
The web app wefwef.app is actually a really great alternative to apollo for lemmy! I'm using it right now on android, and while it does feel weird with the ui differences it has gestures and the same interface and generally feels really good.
Here's the link wefwef.app for anyone curious
Holy shit, this is great! Thanks!!!
Yeah once the first hits we're gonna see a huge spike in users. The growth right now is just from people who deleted their accounts in protest on the 12th.
Most never stopped using reddit, but rather used reddit in unsavory ways. Goating all the new rules from blasphemy to nsfw to indefinitely private has had a lot of effect. I mean InterestingAsFuck still has no mods after the admins axed the whole sub. They're not ready for modless chaos. We won't see them double back until possible August, then it'll be too late and the folks will not want to come back. That's my prediction.
First post, post-Reddit 🥴
It shows 50,000 active users per day compared to 2,500,000 total users per day. Most of the difference, presumably, is dormant bot accounts. If they were all activated and started posting one day, they could probably bring the network down.
I'm confused though by the active comments per day being about 100 times the active users per day. Surely users are not commenting 100 times per day on average. Is there something wrong with how the comments are being counted?
The posts count also looks a bit odd, since it means active users are making more than 10 posts a day on average. That seems implausibly high.
“average user posts 100 times per day" actualy just statistical error. average user posts 0 times per day. Feddi Georg, who lives in cave & posts over 10,000 each day, is an outlier adn should not have been counted
That and some of the active users are also bots. Lemmit.online is a good example; that community is set up to harvest content from Reddit via RSS and then Bots post it into the community. Other users (including bots) can then cross post it to other parts of the Threadiverse. "Lemmit.Online Bot" has made 20.1k posts in 7 days.
I wouldn't be surprised if there are also hyperactive comment bots out there too.
It’s still an average. The mean average precisely. The modal average is most likely zero but the median average is probably greater than zero.
Lemmy.world doesn't synchronized with other instances. Every comments and posts lemmy.world users do are not seen by the other instances. Why? Lemmy.world is still on 0.17, and the other instances are on 0.18 for the majority
I'm a new person that joined within the last few days, so they're not all bots, that's for sure.
That’s what a bot would say!!
Teehee hee that tickles!
I think you can somewhat assure that most of them aren't bots, since bots get banned fairly quickly by mods of instances and most instances have systems to make sure the bot will not pass through so easily
Daily total = almost all are bots, daily active = almost all are people
Man, so much has changed. Glad I made the switch to Lemmy.
I’m enjoying it so much more with the app development. Devs trying to accomplish the goal of instilling the feeling of Apollo for us refugees coming. I just needed useful communities, with posts that people reply to with more and more information. Reddit still defeats lemmy there but I’m hoping it changes a bit.
This aspect is the most fun part to me. I came over on June 12th and it became clear really early that the devs and admins involved were pretty skilled and genuinely cared about the project.
Watching changes in real time and seeing people begin devoting their time to building the next big thing is very exciting to see.
For the people that have been in the Fediverse for years, sorry for flooding your cool hangout with new users but I'm confident the new attention will be a very good thing for ActivityPub.
Mom's spaghetti
Here comes the spag
Yeah I just found out about this project/the fediverse, been looking for several weeks for the best replacement to Reddit and this is by far the most promising. Also, as a self-hosting enthusiast, I'm liking this place more and more by the minute. With any luck increased visibility will continue to push activity & content. Power to the people.
Are any of these accounts bots?
Or maybe how many of these accounts are bots?
Are they all bots?
Around 95% accounts are bots. Around 90% if we are positive and assume that a lot of redditors joined since the bot farming started.
So what are the Bots doing? Who created them and why? I don't understand the purpose of bots.
Currently nothing but once activated they may start spamming stuff everywhere. Owners can decide what gets upvotes and what gets downvotes which gives you a lot of power on a platform where downvotes/upvotes mean everything.
Still don't get it - someone makes a comment, bots upvote it so it gets seen by more people. Not really going to change the world.
So what are the Bots doing?
Many of them are doing nothing so far.
No doubt they are available for sale to some company or individual that wants to buy them wholesale and start spamming or astroturfing.
Who created them and why?
People wanting to sell them for $$ mostly. In some cases, people biding their time to use them for mass spam, social misdirection, opinion forming, etc.
I don’t understand the purpose of bots.
In social media, a common and concerning use of them is to use them wholesale (comments, posts, and votes) to try and sway mass opinion on some issue to something the person responsible for the bots wants.
Thats seems bad. I know some bots are hepful. But 1 million bots seems like they for something nefariously.
Like trying to keep people on reddit?
Or just too generally troll the fediverse.
I'd go to Facebook first
Yeah, I hope that people farming them are just trolling the fediverse and don't plan on using them.
Lol trolling is bad. A bot army could make things miserable here.
I'm just afraid that these bots are bascially here to sabotage lemmy.
The fediverse is so awesome, there is no way big social media corps can play nice in the long term.
The platform has 3 years so I was thinking more in terms of real human made accounts.
Welcome friend.
Are any of these accounts bots?
About 2.45 million of the 2.5 are, yes.
As i suspected.
Yes unfortunately but lemmy is still growing
I'm going to link my comment because I don't want to rewrite it for everyone I reply to where it is relevant
Thanks for the reply!
And I totally agree.
+1, just joined the party.
Look at the graph and the uptick in activity. Note that on June 8, Reddit's u/iamthatis posted Apollo's intent to shut down.
Huzzah!
And now that I’m in the beta for Limbo / Liftoff, I’m loving it. The web experience was not great for me on mobile.
Servers still seem slow though. Posting a comment is slow. Loading images is slow. But I’m not going to complain about that when this kind of explosive growth is happening. Keeping things up at all is impressive.
If you’re on iPhone, install TestFlight in the AppStore and after that join through this link: https://testflight.apple.com/join/e6ZEbxuR
Speak for yourself. I enjoy analyzing the posts and discussing the growth. It brings up discussions of what stats are better to look at to analyze user growth, how to handle the growth, and what if any moderation/sign up workflows should be implemented. Go be a hater somewhere else.
Apollo user coming over from Reddit
alright, it's happening
Switch instances
Hopefully Lemmy continues to grow
//\
can't wait to see how all of this evolves.
Bwhahahaha love it. Is this AI or is it from a movie or something?
No shade thrown, very fun! Thanks!
Yes We Can!
-this post brought to you by the Yes We Can! bot
Yet it feels like an echo chamber. My local community I created had 3-4 posts per day until 2 days ago. Now zero people are posting lol
That’s generally not what people mean when they use the term “echo chamber”.
Meaningless metric (mostly bots, we all know that) but active user numbers are also up.
Image Transcription: Line Graph
[A line graph is shown depicting the number of users on Lemmy over one month's time. The horizontal axis lists the date of each reading, with an interval shown for every day. The earliest date begins at '2023-05-27' and the most recent date is given as '2023-06-25'. The vertical axis measures the number of users, with intervals marked at every 500,000 users, with an upper limit of 2,500,000 users. A blue line labelled 'users' shows the increase over time. The line remains flat at approximately 50,000 users from the '05-27' date mark to the '06-06' mark, then begins to gradually increase to approximately 125,000 users. At the '06-18' date mark, the line begins increasing exponentially, with the last marked date coming just shy of 2.5 million users.]
^I'm a human volunteer transcribing posts in a format compatible with screen readers, for blind and visually impaired users!^
Good to see. Lemmy seems to be growing pretty quickly. July 1st is gonna be fun on here.
It's ironic that this post about addressing potential bot problem is mostly likely written by ChatGPT.
Notice how repetitive the use of "This can help" is?
And that it's properly formatted lol. But serious, the biggest spam I see here are users complaining about bots without evidence that they're a real problem. I believe a lot of them are simply scrapping reddit and posting that content here or are otherwise folks who don't want to see redditors migrating. My take is: Welcome aboard everyone! Make an account and say hey wherever you like to become an active user.
Oh absolutely. Always find it ironic that on reddit people are so quick to accuse each other of being bots and shills when in reality the real bots are easy to spot, and the real shills are busy doing AMAs.
I'm not dismissive, just acknowledging one reason why that not everyone is happy about the new folks (there's always a weird in crowd nbd.) The comments I read are using this bot suspicion to lash out at redditors because the topic of bots keeps coming up in feeds. This post is simply reflecting a general positivity about growth even if it isn't in the most ideal way.
It seems that those of us who look beyond the hype are a minority. Lemmy has potential but also serious problems. Bots are an obvious one, meta and co invading sooner or later is another. Tankies are something that we need to keep talking about and keep an eye on any politically influenced moderating, esp. on lemmy.ml
@lemmy.world
A community to talk about the Fediverse and all it's related services using ActivityPub (Mastodon, Lemmy, Mbin, etc).
If you wanted to get help with moderating your own community then head over to !moderators@lemmy.world!
Rules
- Posts must be on topic.
- Be respectful of others.
- Cite the sources used for graphs and other statistics.
- Follow the general Lemmy.world rules.
Learn more at these websites: Join The Fediverse Wiki, Fediverse.info, Wikipedia Page, The Federation Info (Stats), FediDB (Stats), Sub Rehab (Reddit Migration)
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@lemmy.world
A community to talk about the Fediverse and all it's related services using ActivityPub (Mastodon, Lemmy, Mbin, etc).
If you wanted to get help with moderating your own community then head over to !moderators@lemmy.world!
Rules
- Posts must be on topic.
- Be respectful of others.
- Cite the sources used for graphs and other statistics.
- Follow the general Lemmy.world rules.
Learn more at these websites: Join The Fediverse Wiki, Fediverse.info, Wikipedia Page, The Federation Info (Stats), FediDB (Stats), Sub Rehab (Reddit Migration)
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You gotta stop counting total users. Only active users should be counted. We know there's utterly massive numbers of bots being created. Plus people have multiple accounts from trying out different instances even if they'll only use one.
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