this post was submitted on 20 Oct 2023
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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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[–] dojan@lemmy.world 216 points 1 year ago (12 children)

I feel like the overall engagement has increased. I see a lot more niche communities (like people butchering their VWs in various ways πŸ˜‚) and it’s nice! There’s generally conversation to be had and such, it feels like a healthy platform.

Lemmy slotted in the gap that Reddit left really easily for me, and I’m getting what I wanted from the platform.

[–] shikogo@pawb.social 86 points 1 year ago (2 children)

One thing I love about lemmy is how easy it is to get a conversation going. On reddit it's really easy to be buried in a thread, and if you get a response it's often just a joke or a snarky remark. Here there's so much genuine engagement. It reminds me of the transition from Twitter to Mastodon. I guess people who bother to make the move are more likely to be more engaged users, too.

[–] yote_zip@pawb.social 30 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Lemmy's comment sorting does also actively prevent getting buried, unlike reddit (?). Newer comments are biased towards the top, and even heavily-upvoted older comments will fall towards the bottom. The lack of "global karma" and our community's propensity to heavily downvote anyone doing redditisms like pun threads are also doing a lot of work here.

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[–] dojan@lemmy.world 19 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Yeah! It doesn’t matter how stupid whatever point I have is, there’s usually some sort of conversation born from it, and I really enjoy that!

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[–] Kerandir@lemmy.world 16 points 1 year ago (1 children)

As a forever lurker, I agree with you, I'm unleashing up votes like never in my reddit life

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[–] heartfelthumburger@sopuli.xyz 101 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Lemmy has replaced reddit completely for me. Sure the content isn't exactly the same, but it doesn't need to to be successful IMO.

[–] Send_me_nude_girls@feddit.de 17 points 1 year ago

Same. Since the app stopped working I sometimes accidentally get on Reddit, but not on my phone.

Also Lemmy banned a lot of bot accounts, so the user number is to take with a huge grain of salt. It could in fact be up from before the bot fiasco.

[–] nucleative@lemmy.world 86 points 1 year ago (5 children)

It takes time. Lemmy is still pretty niche and reddit just has a decade+ of accumulated lurkers.

The important part is that the best people from Reddit are here now.

(β γƒ˜β ο½₯⁠_⁠ο½₯⁠)β γƒ˜β β”³β β”β β”³

[–] IndiBrony@lemmy.world 40 points 1 year ago

What did you call me? I'll have you know that, as a former Redditor, we bring a certain level of trash regardless. Nice to be here, though ❀️

[–] SupraMario@lemmy.world 22 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Yea, seems like the active posters are here and the trash is left on Reddit. The quality of posts in my subscribed subreddits is terrible now.

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[–] xtremeownage@lemmyonline.com 82 points 1 year ago (3 children)

Don't make the same mistake reddit did, by assuming active users = engagement.

Look at reddit's stats, active users didn't drop very drastically when everyone left. However, engagement/comments dropped drastically.

[–] RickyRigatoni@lemmy.ml 48 points 1 year ago (7 children)

A lot of us left entirely, but even more people just went full lurker mode. Taking "precious resources" away from Reddit servers while no longer giving them any free content in return.

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[–] glimse@lemmy.world 65 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Don't kill me for saying this but I feel like Lemmy has become slightly worse than when the mass exodus happened. I won't name names but there are so many copycat communities seemingly exclusively reposting the Greatest Hits from any given sub. It feels like we're trying to be reddit 2.0 instead of lemmy 1.0

There's also a discussion of this on hackernews, but feel free to comment here!

[–] Navarian@lemm.ee 41 points 1 year ago (1 children)

That hacker news bit got me, I won't lie.

[–] glimse@lemmy.world 32 points 1 year ago (1 children)

"An actual conversation about this post is happening elsewhere but I guess you can leave a comment here. I'm a bot so I won't read it though lol"

[–] Speculater@lemmy.world 15 points 1 year ago (5 children)

To be fair, many of those are fascinating posts in their own right.

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[–] Prethoryn@lemmy.world 54 points 1 year ago (13 children)

My activity dropped because I can't enter a single thread that isn't about, big corpo, Linux, and how I shouldn't spend money.

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[–] PM_ME_YOUR_ZOD_RUNES@sh.itjust.works 54 points 1 year ago (14 children)

I don't use any social media except for Lemmy. It used to be only Reddit but jumped ship after the API changes. I'm enjoying Lemmy for the most part. Commenting is better because it gets more traction compared to Reddit. Unlike others I actually enjoy having all the varying opinions from "problem" instances. It makes it feel less like an echo chamber, which Reddit was bad for.

My only issue is because it's so much smaller than Reddit, there isn't as much content or niche communities. I miss some of the subs I used to frequent on Reddit. Some of them were made into communities here but barely have any activity, like one post per week. I guess at the end of the day it's a good thing cause I spend less time on Lemmy than I used to on Reddit.

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[–] Nobody@lemmy.world 54 points 1 year ago (16 children)

Anecdotal, but I bounced around between 5 accounts when I first joined, then settled into 2. One regular account and one for memes/NSFW.

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[–] dgriffith@aussie.zone 53 points 1 year ago (8 children)

The arrival of Boost for Lemmy did it for me. So now it's a case of stumbling around and finding the communities I like, and beginning to post, and that always takes a little while.

[–] walden@sub.wetshaving.social 21 points 1 year ago (4 children)
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[–] bullshitter@lemmy.world 47 points 1 year ago (16 children)

Every comment in lemmy is a genuine contribution. What I hated most in reddit was chaining single letter comments to achieve what the shit. Makes me wanna barf.

[–] Toribor@corndog.social 43 points 1 year ago

This.

Edit: Thank you for the gold kind stranger!

Kidding aside, it's nice to show up to a thread and be able to join in rather than shouting into the void of thousands of other users.

[–] littlecolt@lemm.ee 21 points 1 year ago (4 children)

Same. I don't miss that, or much, but I think we can all agree on missing the genius of Shittymorph. He truly had a way of gripping you into a comment and then suddenly it's nineteen ninety-eight again, and you finally look at the username. Truly entertained every time, was sad but understandable to see him retire.

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[–] BarterClub@sh.itjust.works 44 points 1 year ago

Yes. We banned a ton of fake accounts and servers.

[–] ijeff@lemdro.id 42 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (4 children)

You're right. Reddit was the same way during the Digg migrations. The first wave took place with the HD DVD code fiasco migration when some people setup their first accounts. It was a couple years later when Digg upset users again that the final big wave occurred. This is a great place for Lemmy as growing pains get worked out and development catches up to much needed moderation functionality.

As Cole and I say in reference to lemdro.id, it's a marathon not a sprint! !android@lemdro.id has also been steadily increasing in active and subscribed users.

[–] Uranium3006@kbin.social 16 points 1 year ago (1 children)

09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0,

Big copyright die mad

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[–] foodotc@lemmy.world 35 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I would add a strong subjective signal as well. That is, I am a pure lurker. Never posted on Reddit, don't intend to post here. I browse reddit to pass the time and to feel a connection to what is happening in the world. I set up lemmy during the summer and I have been very pleasantly surprised. I now surf both lemmy and reddit about equally. I'm finding that lemmy is always more enjoyable and increasingly more informative as well. It really feels like lemmy is well on the way.

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[–] WhyAreWeHappy@lemmy.ca 33 points 1 year ago (4 children)

Go Lemmy. I'm actually okay with how it is now. Lemmy feels like an exclusive club where the members are more inviting and accepting than Reddit ever was.

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[–] Harvey656@lemmy.world 30 points 1 year ago (1 children)

This is mostly good news, good to have a proper healthy Lemmy/Fediverse.

Side note been thinking of making my own instance after I move. Maybe I can cajole a few peeps into joining the fediverse.

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[–] Number1SummerJam@lemmy.world 30 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

It's kind of crazy how much Reddit doesn't want people to migrate here. 5 months ago, they banned the mod of a subreddit for Lemmy migration and reinstated the community after backlash. When you search Lemmy in Reddit search, you see a few top pinned posts about how to migrate but everything else is low effort trash talk from people who have never used Lemmy. The entire Lemmy subreddit is dedicated to complaining about it- I'm sure Reddit is doing this intentionally. Keep spreading the word- Lemmy's growth starts with you! We have a brand new platform owned by all and the power to shape it into something great for everyone.

[–] TrickDacy@lemmy.world 30 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Imo almost a million active users is about the right place to be. Fuck being as big as reddit.

[–] BraveSirZaphod@kbin.social 30 points 1 year ago (4 children)

The consequence is that, for many niche interests, there simply aren't enough people in the Fediverse to form a viable community about it.

Just to throw a random example that crossed my mind, /r/glassblowing has 32,000 members. There is no Lemmy community as far as I can find. I actually got some useful advice from /r/terrariums, with 180,000 members, when I made a terrarium a month ago. I don't believe there's an equivalent Lemmy community.

Reddit's massive strength is that it's big enough that essentially any interest or topic, no matter how small, has enough people into it that they can form a productive community. That size also means that the default communities become absolute dogshit, but it's easy enough to ignore them.

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[–] Kolanaki@yiffit.net 27 points 1 year ago (3 children)

The amount of comments per month has gone down, but not by all that much. A 10% decrease from the top or so.

I've been a bit depressed. My bad.

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[–] BilboBargains@lemmy.world 26 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Lemmy doing an excellent job overall. I'm here every day and enjoying the banter in the comments. Not been back to Reddit since Judgement Day.

The smaller scale is feature, not a bug. I don't want millions of cretins diluting the stock.

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[–] simple@lemm.ee 25 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I've said it before but active users isn't indicative of anything really, the early numbers were inflated due to:

  • Bot instances before getting defederated

  • People instance hopping before staying on one instance (I made 3 accounts before deciding on lemm.ee, that means 2 that used to be active are now stale)

  • Early on there were a lot of small-ish instances that died off over time as people moved to more stable ones

Comments and posts are a much better indicator but it's still not entirely accurate since it's hard to tell how much of that is spam. I think it'd be nice if people stopped obsessing over graphs and just chilled out. I dumped Reddit a few months ago and it's been pretty nice here.

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[–] TheSaneWriter@lemmy.thesanewriter.com 25 points 1 year ago (4 children)

Unfortunately, the software for both running and displaying Lemmy is still in beta. While it's still in active development, it's probably for the best that we stay niche because bugs and stability issues turn off a lot of people permanently from the platform. That's why I'm waiting until the Lemmy 1.0 release to really advertise, I don't think we're ready for that kind of growth yet.

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[–] yoz@aussie.zone 24 points 1 year ago (1 children)

After twitter implements subscription for all users, prepare for twitter users moving to Lemmy.

Twitter new subscription tiers

[–] Venomnik0@lemm.ee 44 points 1 year ago (7 children)

or mastodon/threads mainly

[–] Jakeroxs@sh.itjust.works 21 points 1 year ago

This is much more likely, the way twitter works is very different from reddit/Lemmy style

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[–] TWeaK@lemm.ee 23 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (6 children)

With proper image code:

Well it's steadily going up actually:

Another interesting factor is comments:

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[–] masquenox@lemmy.ml 19 points 1 year ago (5 children)

I recently came back to Lemmy from reddit to escape the batshit pro-Israel censorship happening on there right now and I have to say that the quality of the content and discussion has just gone up.

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[–] kayrae_42@lemmy.world 18 points 1 year ago (9 children)

I just joined after taking a break from reddit because of its toxicity spread into some of the smaller subreddits was active in, or they just shut down entirely. Now I’m kinda lurking around to get a feel for the communities here and the culture of lemmy in general. I like it here.

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[–] FrostyTrichs@lemmy.world 16 points 1 year ago

Reddit will continue to do things that push the users away. As apps and accessibility to Lemmy improve, hopefully quality posts and comments will continue to grow.

[–] mrcleanup@lemmy.world 16 points 1 year ago (1 children)
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