Hi folks, out of pure curiosity, I was poking some graphs.

It's been about half a year since the big API protest, so I was curious to see what Lemmy's crtitical mass looks like, what the staying power is, etc. Screenshots taken from https://the-federation.info/platform/73 on 2024-01-09. I'm posting screenshots because they're a snapshot in time, and because that stats server is very slow.

Because I'm posting on lemmy.ca, I'll post quite a few related to this instance, but it's probably more widely applicable and you can get graphs from your instance too. I'll also post some lemmy.world and lemmy.ml graphs, since they make interesting points of comparison -- biggest server, and original server.

First, lemmy-wide total users count, where this is a rolling one month window. If a user was online within the month, they count here.

First observation -- there's some jagged edges in the graph due to things popping in and out of the federation. So it's probably more useful to look at single servers. Lemmy.world came online pretty much coincidentally with the API protest and had open registration, so it makes a good data point. You can see the surge of users, then the plateau of the people who stuck around:

Lemmy.ml below has a similar curve, plus some sort of data artefact.

As does lemmy.ca, below:

I suspect the data artifact is related to the transition from 0.18 to 0.19 and something changed in the way active users was counted in between. Lemmy.world is still running 0.18.5.

Notes: The difference between the peak and the plateau is higher on lemmy.world and lemmy.ml -- I suspect this is because they were more popular places to sign up during the protest. Whereas lemmy.ca has retained more users, as a percentage. Still, the total number of active users on each server is quite low.

In the same order (total, lemmy.world, lemmy.ml, lemmy.ca), total posts. The slope of this line represents post rate. Steeper line is better. Flat line means dead instance.

And comments. I wish there was a comments to posts ratio, which would be some indication of engagement levels. But you can sort of work it out.

Anyway, looks like post rate has decreased slightly since the initial bump, but are still looking good. But the comment rate hasn't flattened as much. So the users that were retained seem to be more engaged than the users from the initial bump. I think this is a good thing for the health of lemmy. Likewise, the growth in supported apps, improvements to the software (Scaled sort in 0.19 is night-and-day better than anything prior!), and others will allow lemmy to not only survive, but be ready for whatever influx happens next.

I want to send a special shout out to all the admins, particularly on my home instance of lemmy.ca, and the coders who keep improving things. Thanks for giving us all a home!

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[–] Sterile_Technique@lemmy.world 202 points 10 months ago (9 children)

API bullshit refugee here. Y'all are stuck with me.

Sorry.

[–] scrubbles@poptalk.scrubbles.tech 29 points 10 months ago

I guess we'll make do.

/s hello fellow refugee!

[–] CobblerScholar@lemmy.world 22 points 10 months ago

Yeah I like yall here

[–] BiggestBulb@kbin.run 12 points 10 months ago

API refugee here as well! I'm on Mbin, but I'm in the Fediverse to stay!!

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[–] BedSharkPal@lemmy.ca 132 points 10 months ago (1 children)

Thanks for this. Unlike on Reddit I feel much better posting here knowing I'm not helping some company make more money.

Gives me the old internet vibes I've come to crave

[–] explodicle@local106.com 17 points 10 months ago (2 children)

I wasn't conscious of it until I had stopped, but on Reddit I was censoring myself to avoid my comments getting deleted.

[–] troyunrau@lemmy.ca 17 points 10 months ago (3 children)

Here there's a different kind of self-censorship. Anything you do (including your upvotes) gets propagated out using the ActivityPub protocol to all instances that are subscribed to that community. So in theory, admins on different instances can tell what you're upvoting. A bad acting admin could stalk you here in a way that a mod never could on reddit - because mods couldn't look at your upvote history.

The good news is that they cannot delete or modify your content on other instances (only their own), so they'll never pull a spez and edit someone else's comment globally. And, bad acting admins will simply get defederated, so we should be self-policing (in theory).

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[–] lung@lemmy.world 87 points 10 months ago (3 children)

Personally I love Lemmy as is, and as long as it doesn't die out, I don't care if it goes mainstream. The mainstream has a lot of apathetic trolls and idiots - Lemmy feels like early reddit did, when it was just nerds, techies, pirates, and the servers were down every day - but Lemmy is better because we rallied around open source this time

[–] CombatWombatEsq@lemmy.world 29 points 10 months ago (1 children)

I feel similarly, except I wish more users were interacted with my sports communities too. Guess it's a "have your cake and eat it too" kind of problem.

[–] troyunrau@lemmy.ca 26 points 10 months ago (1 children)

Chicken and egg problem. Communities are too small to have conversation, so no one goes there for conversation. I'm a hockey fan. On reddit r/hockey is huge and busy, but so are all the team subs. Whereas on lemmy, if I post to the team sub, it's just crickets. So I suppose that if all the hockey fans all hang out in !hockey@lemmy.ca together, we might have critical mass for a conversation now and then. And we can worry about our team subs later, if the general community outgrows one place.

[–] blazeknave@lemmy.world 10 points 10 months ago

That's how it happened there. Macro to micro.

[–] Amir@lemmy.ml 9 points 10 months ago

It's enough for me to have something to waste my time on during public transport commutes

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[–] Flex@lemmy.world 70 points 10 months ago (2 children)

Lemmy has better user retention than Diablo IV confirmed

[–] DrCatface@lemmy.world 16 points 10 months ago (2 children)

and the diablo 4 community is dead lmao

[–] TheRealKuni@lemmy.world 12 points 10 months ago (1 children)

There are dozens of us! DOZENS!

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[–] Pistcow@lemm.ee 11 points 10 months ago

There's a lot less repeat cellar quests

[–] andrewrgross@slrpnk.net 57 points 10 months ago (2 children)

Thanks for sharing this, this is really interesting.

My hope is that when Reddit announces their IPO, more people will start talking about wishing for alternatives. I hope this motivates a few people who checked it out and left and lots of new people to take a first look, and when they do I hope they find an already active community that produces enough content to retain more people and generate more content.

[–] troyunrau@lemmy.ca 46 points 10 months ago (6 children)

When the reddit API protests occurred, lemmy wasn't really ready for the influx either. Historically, when a social network dies, it's some combination of a protest and there being a pre-existing landing place that is ready to receive the influx. In the case of digg dying, that was reddit ready and waiting.

But lemmy had so many rough edges and was almost entirely unknown at the time of the reddit protest -- bugs, missing features, no apps... For most reddit users, even with the 3rd party shutdown, moving to lemmy at the time was objectively worse.

You're right though -- the next time something happens, lemmy is now established, the apps exist, many of the bugs and missing features have been dealt with, etc.

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[–] Chainweasel@lemmy.world 26 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago) (3 children)

Those results might be slightly skewed by alternate accounts. When I first joined during the Reddit Exodus I created this account on lemmy.world, but the instance suffered a LOT of downtime for the first month or so, so I created a few other accounts on lemmy.ml and sh.itjust.works so I could still browse while lemmy.world was down.
After the instance stabilized I pretty much stopped using the other accounts, so I, personally, am 2 of the people who "left" by leaving the other accounts inactive.

[–] Rolando@lemmy.world 14 points 10 months ago

Same. It wasn't clear how to choose an instance, so I ended up creating accounts in three different places and posting a couple times before settling on this account. I haven't used the other accounts in months, so they're part of that surge.

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[–] dandroid@dandroid.app 52 points 10 months ago (5 children)

I can't wait for reddit's next fuck up so we can get more folks over here!

[–] negativenull@lemm.ee 24 points 10 months ago (1 children)

They are closing in on an IPO so that could come anytime now

[–] dandroid@dandroid.app 14 points 10 months ago

I feel like we have been saying that for 5+ years now.

[–] troydowling@lemmy.world 12 points 10 months ago

I noticed I was blocked today when connecting via the same VPN I've used for years, including back when I was a user. That's fuck up enough for me.

[–] fidodo@lemmy.world 12 points 10 months ago (5 children)

Lemmy is big enough that we don't need to wait for that. We can grow organically, but there are still some issues that need to get worked out. One issue is that lemmy is too anonymous and that leads to it not attracting content creators that don't actually want to be anonymous and want to create a presence. I rarely see high effort OC on lemmy and I think that's a big reason for it. People that create content that takes tens of hours to create aren't going to bother with a platform with no kind of verification option where they can show that they're actually the real creator and not a copycat account since you can have the same username on any instance. I think that could be fixed if there were a special instance for verified accounts only that content creators or notable individuals could use to post from.

[–] 9point6@lemmy.world 26 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago)

Personally speaking, and I don't think it's too controversial of a view, but I kinda like that about lemmy.

I have come to hate "personal" focused social media and prefer "content" focused social media. I don't care about random people or someone hoping to become an internet personality, I'm here for varied content and a selection of opinions in the comments. I don't want those comments to be from the same people, and if they are, I'd prefer to be oblivious to that. I kinda like how lemmy goes further than Reddit in that it gets rid of cumulative karma counts too, hopefully means we avoid seeing a Lemmy equivalent of karmawhoring.

There was loads of high effort OC on Reddit, people typically weren't doing it to create a presence (and if they were, they couldn't have picked a harder platform to accomplish that, other than maybe 4chan)

[–] ZeroCool@slrpnk.net 19 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago) (1 children)

One issue is that lemmy is too anonymous and that leads to it not attracting content creators that don’t actually want to be anonymous and want to create a presence.

So what? I find it strange how many people on link aggregators like reddit and lemmy/kbin don't seem to understand the point of a link aggregator. There are plenty of places to go on the internet if you want to create "a presence." But link aggregators aren't it. The closest it gets are novelty accounts and power users.

A lot of reddit's issues trace back to the fact that they stopped being satisfied with being a link aggregator because there isn't much money in it. It's been all downhill ever since they started morphing into a more traditional social media website and trying to attract more content creators by doing things like making userpages their own subreddits and adding half-assed knockoff "features" from more popular social media sites/apps. Lemmy isn't profit driven and therefore doesn't need to parrot reddit's mistakes. There's nothing wrong with link aggregators being link aggregators.

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[–] antonim@lemmy.dbzer0.com 9 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago) (1 children)

One issue is that lemmy is too anonymous and that leads to it not attracting content creators that don’t actually want to be anonymous and want to create a presence

That's not an issue. Reddit was equally anonymous yet it did just fine (relatively speaking). The different users' usernames that can theoretically appear the same can be fixed by making it mandatory to show your instance next to your username, rather than hiding it if you change your default username. But even without that anyone can hover over your profile name and see which instance you're from, so really you can't actually deceive people regarding the nature of your account.

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[–] TimewornTraveler@lemm.ee 47 points 10 months ago (2 children)

I didn't really look at all the little letters but I like how line go up

[–] troyunrau@lemmy.ca 51 points 10 months ago (2 children)

Would you like to invest in my cryptocurrency? Here's a graph

[–] TimewornTraveler@lemm.ee 24 points 10 months ago

shut up and take my money!

[–] antonim@lemmy.dbzer0.com 13 points 10 months ago

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[–] grue@lemmy.world 45 points 10 months ago (5 children)

Looking at the rest of the data (especially the sustained linear increase in posts across the whole network), I'm increasingly skeptical that the drop in "active users" is really all that meaningful. Speaking for myself, when the big migration happened I created three accounts on different instances, but I've found myself only consistently using one of them. If a significant percentage of the rest of you did similar, that means there could've been what looks like a huge drop in the number of "active users" even though the number of actual people using the platform remained the same!

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[–] magnetosphere@kbin.social 39 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago) (6 children)

My sympathies to anyone who has to use reddit because their niche community either doesn’t have enough activity or doesn’t exist at all.

I’m more of a casual user who’s just here for the news and memes, so fortunately I don’t have that problem.

[–] troyunrau@lemmy.ca 19 points 10 months ago (9 children)

Okay, more serious answer. You look like you're on kbin, so I don't know if this applies -- nevertheless.

On Lemmy 0.19, the Scaled sort algorithm is such a good improvement over (Hot/All/Top/...) that existed prior to 0.19. It's basically a Hot sort, but it's weighted by community size. So if you're subscribed to a small community, that gets one post a week, it's still likely to end up in your feed. I've noticed a huge improvement when switching to it as my default sort -- suddenly that weird music community I subbed to, but never noticed any of the posts -- is in my feed. Etc.

Lemmy.world is still on 0.18, but when they upgrade (I have no information on that process) I suspect that people should be switching to it as their default sort for a better experience if they're into niche topics.

[–] Aurelius@lemmy.world 9 points 10 months ago

I chatted with the lemmy.world folks about a month or so ago and they mentioned that 0.19 wasn't fully stable yet. The Lemmy instances being split is a real pain for app developers lol can't wait till this gets resolved tbh

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[–] FireTower@lemmy.world 11 points 10 months ago (11 children)

My niche community didn't exist, so I just made it myself and started posting. Be that change you want to see.

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[–] nicetriangle@kbin.social 35 points 10 months ago (1 children)

Sweet post. To me this looks like the makings of a sustainable community and I remain pretty optimistic. Curious what the numbers for Kbin would look like.

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[–] Wav_function@lemmy.world 32 points 10 months ago (3 children)

I'm here because of the API stuff, I was a reddit sync user so when sync made their Lemmy app I joined.

Honestly Lemmy feels much more confusing than Reddit used to, I don't fully understand the federation stuff and different worlds or whatever, I imagine there's a lot of people confused about it like me.

I'm happy to stay and contribute but I think I need to figure out how to use this on my desktop because I only check Lemmy because of the sync android app.

Any tips on how to get started migrating my experience to desktop? Like I literally don't know what URL I would go to.

[–] reattach@lemmy.world 21 points 10 months ago

The most intuitive analogy to federation to me is email. You may have an account with one provider (gmail.com in the example of email, or lemmy.world in the example of Lemmy) but you can send emails to other providers (email example) or post messages to other instances (Lemmy).

Just like with email providers, a Lemmy instance may decide not to allow communication with another instance - this is "defederation." Instances that allow communication are "federated."

Just like email, you don't normally need to worry much about whether you are on the same instance as a particular community or user - it just works.

This is a simplification, but for me is a good working model.

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[–] Sekrayray@lemmy.world 31 points 10 months ago (3 children)

I’ve tried to go back to Reddit here or there, and I literally can’t do it. I only visit it for very select communities that don’t exist here.

The post frequency isn’t the same here, but the quality of the posts and the comments is so much higher. I’ve said this before, but current Lemmy reminds me of Reddit in the early 2010’s before it got shitty. One of the great things about early Reddit was that it was more mature, people tended to assume good intentions more often, and it promoted logical dialogue. That has VERY MUCH been lost in Reddit’s current incarnation.

[–] andrew@radiation.party 10 points 10 months ago (1 children)

I used Apollo and Relay extensively and not having those makes it so hard to even try for me.

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[–] LUHG_HANI@lemmy.world 19 points 10 months ago (1 children)

Witnessing Lemmy grow in real time is the best way to say it's natural growth. We had no clients, laggy servers, downtime and bare as bones communities.

It'll take years to get a decent chunk of Reddit users.

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[–] iarigby@lemmy.world 19 points 10 months ago (10 children)

I think these numbers are really good. I was using Memmy client before and for some reason it always displayed lower than actual count of comments on posts, so I had the impression that activities were really dying down. I wouldn’t click a post to go to comments because I thought there were barely any, so I would scroll through everything so fast that for a while I stopped browsing altogether. Feels nice to be back - with a different account because lemm.ee started having a weird bug for logging in

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[–] Aurix@lemmy.world 9 points 10 months ago

The good news is it is stable and healthy with that amount.

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