FediDB says Lemmy is steady. There are some interesting stats in there. There are about 44k monthly active users, which has been true for a while, and there was a huge influx of new instances shortly after Reddit Day, but most of them dropped off and the number of users per instance has been steadily climbing and the total active instances steadily falling.
this post was submitted on 27 Jul 2024
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Asklemmy
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Looks all good to me.
I am happy here. Am not even tempted to open reddit anymore. No ads, better clients, friendlier community. Great.
It still lists feddit.de as growing. Which is not true. The dns entries expired, the instance is dead for most intents and purposesβ¦
Lang lebe feddit.org!
Peak Lemmy users happened, it was in the later part of last year as a result of the reddit API controversy. No one expected that to stay, and users slowly waned after this as expected.
I'd say we're in a maintenance phase at the moment. Active users is somewhat steady, posts and comments are somewhat steady. There are around 45k active users, but note that Lemmy counts this different than other sites. For later Lemmy versions, you need to comment, post, or vote to be considered. Lurkers that don't vote (whether logged in or not) are not counted at all (for earlier Lemmy versions, voters are also not counted).
Growing more will probably happen after some other event to dive people away from reddit.
Other than reddit going for subscription or complete outage over some time I am not sure any event will cause another influx. A lot of people didn't care about the whole API drama, since they either never knew about 3rd party apps or just went back the official app. The official app might slowly get worse and worse but if it happens slow enough, these kind of users won't care.
There probably will be something. We may not be able to predict it. But reddit will pull a Digg or a Twitter at some point and people will be looking for alternatives. Then we get another surge of users.
Alternatively, one of the federated Lemmy alternatives (Sublinks, Mbin, Piefed) might hit the right audience and push up the platform userbase.
It's definitely slowed down, but that's fine, let it grow naturally. Personally I sometimes get put off because I end up seeing the same posts repeated across different instances so it can be harder to find content, but I also love the smaller community.
I wish that the same post on different instances would just be collapsed to one in the UI
Yeah that would make a huge difference
I'm happy the way it is. Massive growth will just turn it into another shit hole like Reddit, which I came here to get away from.
I agree with the sentiment, when things get too popular every sub becomes more generic and filled with recycled or low effort content. But there's a happy medium. It would be nice if there were enough people that some more niche communities had activity.
There's a lot of smaller communities that are only kept going by one dedicated poster, or never got the critical mass to keep going, which is a shame.
It is far from getting to that point. That will happen when it becomes mainstream enough to attract normies. Lemmy could still use a lot of growth. I only get to consume content that happens to be available here, rather than being able to pick niche communities being active on the topics I would like.
yes agree but that is part of what makes it good ^I only get to consume content that happens to be available here^
I don't think growth is neccesarily the problem by itself, it's the velocity that is the problem. Reddit had a massive amount of steady growth for years and I think it mostly stayed good. Then the Obama AMA happened, and that, in my opinion is when reddit died. The number of new users outnumbered the old users and the old users could not enforce the previously established cultural norms (some bad, some good, but that is what made reddit reddit), and made the ratio of users to donations crash. large corporations and political organizations realizing reddit was a powerful way to influence people didn't help, but I think if the old guard of reddit had bullied the new users into following the unwritten rules reddit would not be nearly as bad a dumpster fire and the userbase would not be nearly so tolerant to admin BS.
Personally I think growth is a tainted metric. For a capitalist enterprise focused on shareholder value it might be worth something (although you could argue thatβs what turned the corporate Internet to shit in the first place). Steady ingress and egress of users is fine IMO. We donβt need growth, we just need stability.
Exactly, key focus should be on sustainability. As long as there are enough people to develop the platform, run instances, and post content, then Lemmy will be around indefinitely. There's absolutely no rush to grow in my opinion. A slow and steady ingress of users results in people adjusting to Lemmy norms, where a flood of users risks changing the culture entirely.
It depends, without some growth in the beginning all the niche communities where one person keeps posting for month and others just consume this person will grow tired of being the only one posting. Then those smaller communities will die and we will have shrinking instead of stagnation. The big communities will grow and the users will get centralized. But overall the whole Threadyverse will shrink.
It's like when you have a conversation with someone and you are the only one carrying the conversation.
its grow enough that reddits shitty app annoy me a week ago and I haven't looked back
I walked away from reddit after Alien Blue had to get pulled, and haven't looked back.
There are a few niche areas Lemmy hasn't had a chance to build a community yet - AskHistorians comes to mind - that I miss, but time will hopefully solve that.
It's stable and largely fun, especially more active but niche communities.
What is the current state of Lemmy?
After reddit flood, Florida. Maybe Virginia.
Wait, you didnt know? Servers shut down in 4 days.
I think there is an alarmingly high number of users with a very large amount of heavily downvoted bad takes... usually from specific homeservers but not always. I've seen a whole lot more blatantly terrible attitudes compared to reddit.
The API documentation is extremely bad, especially for non-JS devs, and the developers defend it saying there's nothing wrong and no plans to change it. People are always getting confused about how to use it to get the information they want and often never find any good help.
I am not hopeful that it will grow positively.
Lemmy has been stable on users since the Reddit Exodus, which is probably good because I don't see Lemmy in its current form able to handle growth.
Onboarding new users is a hassle unless those users know someone already on Lemmy to act as a guide. This is just going to push more people to default instances.
I think that the developers need to shift to a more distributed method of developing an open source project, including stakeholder input on what to develop next.
People complain about moderation, but I feel like a decent problem had been in distributing ownership of instances across several people and developing policy from that.
If Lemmy were to grow, it would likely grow as a fork.
A better question is... Is Lemmy better than reddit in some way so it's worth for users to switch to it?
I like that it's decentralized, but the largest instances seem to have moderation policies that are very similar to reddit.
Moderation was always mostly in the user's hands, so it makes sense that it didn't change.
In what way was it in users hands? It's always been in the hands of the creator of the sub/comm.
I have news for you xD the creator of the sub/community is a normal user. You can create your own community and run it however you want, even democratically or whatever.
Okay I did that, now what? There's nobody there.
moderation policies that are very similar to reddit.
Or worse. Censorship and childish content warnings are rife. At least it's more transparent with built in mod logs but I wish there was at least some innovation beyond being just a federated reddit clone. Still nobody knows what an upvote means, same as reddit.
I like that itβs decentralized, but the largest instances seem to have moderation policies that are very similar to reddit.
At least you can switch instances easily, so that's already a major improvement.
Slowly growing
ogranik af
Its good, we got a good sized userbase and the software is getting better and better. We will grow as the fediverse grows.