It is official; Netcraft now confirms: Lemmy is dying

One more crippling bombshell hit the already beleaguered Lemmy community when IDC confirmed that Lemmy market share has dropped yet again, now down to less than a fraction of 1 percent of all servers. Coming close on the heels of a recent Netcraft survey which plainly states that Lemmy has lost more market share, this news serves to reinforce what we've known all along. Lemmy is collapsing in complete disarray, as fittingly exemplified by failing dead last in the recent Sys Admin comprehensive networking test.

You don't need to be a Kreskin to predict Lemmy's future. The hand writing is on the wall: Lemmy faces a bleak future. In fact there won't be any future at all for Lemmy because Lemmy is dying. Things are looking very bad for Lemmy. As many of us are already aware, Lemmy continues to lose market share. Red ink flows like a river of blood.

FreeLemmy is the most endangered of them all, having lost 93% of its core developers. The sudden and unpleasant departures of long time FreeLemmy developers Hurka Durr and Tum Tatee only serve to underscore the point more clearly. There can no longer be any doubt: FreeLemmy is dying.

Let's keep to the facts and look at the numbers.

OpenLemmy leader Herp states that there are 7000 users of OpenLemmy. How many users of NetLemmy are there? Let's see. The number of OpenLemmy versus NetLemmy shitposts on Usenet is roughly in ratio of 5 to 1. Therefore there are about 7000/5 = 1400 NetLemmy users. Lemmy/OS shitposts on Usenet are about half of the volume of NetLemmy shitposts. Therefore there are about 700 users of Lemmy/OS. A recent article put FreeLemmy at about 80 percent of the Lemmy market. Therefore there are (7000+1400+700)4 = 36400 FreeLemmy users. This is consistent with the number of FreeLemmy shitposts.

Due to the troubles of Walnut Creek, abysmal sales and so on, FreeLemmy went out of business and was taken over by LemmyI who sell another troubled OS. Now LemmyI is also dead, its corpse turned over to yet another charnel house.

All major surveys show that Lemmy has steadily declined in market share. Lemmy is very sick and its long term survival prospects are very dim. If Lemmy is to survive at all it will be among OS dilettante dabblers. Lemmy continues to decay. Nothing short of a cockeyed miracle could save Lemmy from its fate at this point in time. For all practical purposes, Lemmy is dead.

Fact: Lemmy is dying

My experience so far has been:

• "default" reddit, like /r/popular etc. has been worse, because reddit started using some form of "the algorithm" which pretty aggressively pushes controversial subreddits with high engagement, and those tend to be dumb and toxic. Amitheasshole, twohottakes etc. are the most obvious ones.

• customized, highly selective reddit with as much crap from the frontpage as possible unsubscribed from is not significantly worse than a year ago, but then again, it was already pretty bad a year ago. Since the API changes I've had 3 people block me to get the last word in an argument, for simply disagreeing with them, without me being an asshole. This is quite annoying in a small subreddit where such a person posts regularly, but it may have just been bad luck.

• Lemmy... Well, 3 things that I probably dislike about reddit the most, not because they're the worst things that happen there, but because they're so damn prevalent, are overmoderation (heavy handed deletions of posts and comment trees, unnecessarily locking threads that are even mildly controversial, things like banning people for ever posting in a controversial community etc.), strong american partisanship where if people realize you don't agree with them on everything with regards to society/politics/culture wars, they immediately assume you're from the opposite american camp and that you must have bad intentions, and finally simply people not being very smart on average.

Well, all three of those problems seem to be just as prevalent on large Lemmy instances, the first two even more in some places. And whereas on reddit many people understood that you're probably not realistically going to be able to create an alternative subreddit to some huge default with hundreds of thousands of users, so the "go make your own subreddit" copout is not very practical, here "go make your own instance" seems to be one of the default reactions to any criticisms.

That said, Tildes seems to be doing okay. It's even smaller and it doesn't really try to be a reddit alternative, but it's considerably smarter and more sane on average than both Reddit and Lemmy.

If you liked working at startups this whole scene is awesome. I contribute a modest amount to the person doing the heavy-lifting from where I use The Federation.

If one is looking for a place to create communitas that only happens before The Enshittification.

Everything else after that is marketing and sales.

Lemmy doesn't have videos and this is funny if you think about it

IDK Reddit part but Lemmy is so far so good.