Lemmy world was growing at a decent pace leading up to July 1st, then had a big influx following the API deadline. However the last week in particular has seen a decline.

Engagement still appears to be the same, although a little lower than the start of the month. A few of the other instances i have been checking follow a similar pattern.

Do you think we will continue growing at a steady pace, or do we need another big trigger to get users to migrate? For Mastodon, it seems there's a big trigger every other week to drive users away from Twitter, but with Reddit, the revolt seems to have quietened down considerably.

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[–] Dave@lemmy.nz 61 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Not only that, we want it to be slow. Being a server admin at the moment is racing from fire to fire. The Lemmy software needs to mature a bit before it will be ready for the less-technical users.

[–] itadakimasu@lemmy.world 0 points 1 year ago (2 children)

As a user I disagree. But I do understand your side

[–] CaptainAniki@lemmy.flight-crew.org 6 points 1 year ago

As someone running their own instance - its still VERY rough.

[–] Dave@lemmy.nz 2 points 1 year ago

I'm sorry you're getting downvoted, it's perfectly reasonable to want more content and it seems reasonable that more users would bring that content.

However, a massive number of new users (rather than slower organic growth) probably won't bring what you want. Because there are massive issues that many people will not put up with.

As an example, Lemmy.world recently had an administrator account broken into because of a problem in the code that meant accounts could be compromised (any account) by viewing a page. Lemmy has never had a professional security review (they are super expensive).

Another example, if a user tries to delete their account (or if an admin tries to ban and remove all the content of a spam bot), the site will freeze for all users, it will start showing them an error page until the operation has completed or (more likely) the operation is killed by server admin or automated stabilty software. The bug report has a lot of commentary on the cause but doesn't seem to have clear direction on how to fix it.

And yet another, Hot and Active sorting are still messed up for old posts recently federated, which means you get months or years old posts showing near the top even if they have no comments. This is luckily fixed in the upcoming release, but is an example of things that may turn away new users.

There are still massive performance issues. Currently the large sites are throwing money at the problem, using powerful hardware to attempt to mitigate this. But Lemmy has something like 100,000 active users across the whole network. If this was 1,000,000 you'd hope there was more content, but what you'd probably get is a site that won't load.

We have to remember that 2 months ago, there were about 1000 monthly active users. This is already a massive growth in a short time, and many volunteers are working hard to try to improve Lemmy and increase performance to be able to scale to more users. But 2 months is a short timeframe for new contributors to learn how the code works, work out ways to improve it, write that code, test it, and release it with confidence that it's stable. In reality not all these steps happen and new bugs are introduced (such as the account takeover one) so we really don't want to rush into more users.

With that said, we also want to be seen as an alternative to reddit. So when new rushes happen, we want to be ready for the influx and be able to handle the new users, we shouldn't turn people away.