cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ca/post/12971023
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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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
I wasn’t conscious of it until I had stopped, but on Reddit I was censoring myself to avoid my comments getting deleted.
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).
Do we have an expectation of privacy for our upvotes, or is that generally supposed to be public information? I like to think my comments and upvotes match up pretty well.
I’m not sure how that expectation lines up. On reddit they were private (except to yourself and the admins). Because there’s no warning anywhere on lemmy that they are public (or at least semi-public), I’m going to presume that most reddit refugees believe it works like reddit.
Fair. I’ve heard kbin allows viewing, so there are federated sites which can see them without needing to be an admin or run an instance.
You were probably being racist. There’s only 2 things I can’t stand: intolerance and the Dutch.
I can’t wait for reddit’s next fuck up so we can get more folks over here!
They are closing in on an IPO so that could come anytime now
I feel like we have been saying that for 5+ years now.
But please after the federation bug fix!
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.
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.
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)
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Excellent work. Based on this, I think the communities on kbin and beehaw are in trouble. But only if you consider posts to their communities to be the key metric. If their users are still participating in the larger fediverse, then maybe it is fine.
Kbin has had a lot of stability issues. And beehaw defederated from some major parts of the network specifically because they wanted to avoid the influx of users from lemmy.world and others. So why would I, as a lemmy.ca user, post to a kbin or beehaw community and limit the potential discussion.
I sort of wish the-federation.info would produce derivatives as you did – far easier to interpret than slope changes visually. Probably could use a 28 day moving window average or something to smooth it so it isn’t as noisy, but that would disguise interesting events.
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.
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.
Another important detail is that Digg v4 pissed off most of the userbase, so the impact was pretty much immediate. Reddit APIcalypse pissed off only power users instead; the impact will only come off later (sadly likely past IPO).
Well, there was also the DeCSS key censorship debacle…
09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0
Could you explain what this was? I couldn’t find anything about it while searching.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AACS_encryption_key_controversy
Good overview. But it was a huge on-site protest, where a large percentage of all comments and posts contained the above string in some form.
Thank you! That was fun to read :)
Totally remember the lack of apps. Initially, I just had to use Lemmy through a mobile browser. Lots of devs were working hard to publish their apps, and after a few months we had lots of options. That was just amazing how quickly it happened.
BTW shout out to Bean, my favorite Lemmy client. It’s not perfect, so in some cases I still use Voyager to fill in the gaps, so bonus points for Voyager too.
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.Same, it might have been this
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.
That’s nice. Reddit just needs to fuck up once again and we’ll maybe double again in users, then lose half of those that joined and be at 50% from now.
Once Forgejo and Gitlab have ActivityPub, more services like Wordpress and Flipboard activate it, and kbin/mbin/lemmy/mastodon becomes able to interact with them, then we might see some organic growth. If we get to a point where people don’t even know they’re part of the fediverse yet interact with it naturally, then maybe we’ll see explosive growth. All in time though. There’s no rush.
didnt read no bump 👆🤣🇺🇸🌀🦈🔨🤮
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.
Here’s the kbin graphs directly on the site that generates the charts. I’m unfamiliar with kbin as a backend, so I don’t know how to interpret any of their numbers. But you can play: https://the-federation.info/platform/184
I didn’t really look at all the little letters but I like how line go up
Would you like to invest in my cryptocurrency? Here’s a graph
shut up and take my money!
:o
Spoken like a true oil and gas stakeholder. Or any other stakeholder, for that matter.
I’m curious, what led to the December user spike?
Difference in the way active users is counted on v0.19 versus earlier versions. On earlier versions, you’re only counted as an active user if you made a post or a comment, but as of v0.19, it also counts people who upvote as active. lemmy.world hasn’t updated to v0.19 yet, so you don’t see the bump on their graph (yet).
Maybe the shitty UI update on Reddit.
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.
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.
API bullshit refugee here. Y’all are stuck with me.
Sorry.
Yeah I like yall here
I guess we’ll make do.
/s hello fellow refugee!
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.
My understanding is they started counting votes as activity.
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.
Makes sense that people who care enough to look into smaller instances would be more committed.
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
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.
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.
That’s how it happened there. Macro to micro.
I find the plateau quite puzzling (lemmy.world, but the total looks very similar):
There was quite a steep increase, and then it suddenly stopped.
I would rather expect it to slow down, than to stop that abruptly.
We’re looking at a fairly large group of people making a decision to create an account on Lemmy. There are plenty of reasons to expect it to be fuzzy. Even if they all responded to one particular event in time, some would have done so immediately, others the next day, few more even later.
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!
Yes, i made four, because when i joined Lemmy, everyone seemed to urge new users to spread across the fediverse. So, i did. But over time, i did away with two accounts and am contemplating ditching another one.
This is true in my case too.
I think posts is being inflated with bots copying reddit, my subscribed feed has noticeably slowed and even trying to find more communities to get more posts hasn’t been a huge help.
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It’s interesting none the less. One explanation for the plateau is that many people signed up for difference instances, either because they didn’t know how federation worked or they disagreed with the instance and wanted to be somewhere else. Not as many people necessarily went back to reddit as the numbers might suggest.
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