Mastodon saw a drop from over 2 million MAUs to 1.8m, but the Lemmy hit seems more substantial.
I’ve been on Reddit alternatives for the last 5 years. Lemmy is long past the phase the others all failed at, and next time Reddit screws up it’ll grow even more.
The largest existential threat for Lemmy at the moment is perpetual funding. The two full-time devs are almost in the poverty line.
If you can donate even a few dollars/month, it’s a huge help: https://join-lemmy.org/support
What’s wild to me is this is the first time I have ever heard anything about the financial part of lemmy, I will happily donate
There are two types of people you can donate to. Many instances have a way to donate to them to upkeep and upgrade costs. Then you can donate also for development of the project here https://join-lemmy.org/donate
The project devs currently have like 300 bucks a week comitted to them… kind of sad
$300 on liberapay, 1500€ on Patreon and $10 on OpenCollective
Looking at the Patreon and LiberaPay linked on the join-lemmy page it’s >$600 a week. Still not a lot.
That’s because the financial accounts are also distributed. lemmy.world is separate to lemmy.ml and every other instance, which is also separate to the core development project. Granted, the lemmy.ml admin are the core devs, and there are other users who span across borders, but it’s possible for the instance people are faced with (eg lemmy.world) getting all the donations while the core back end development project does not.
The two full-time devs are almost in the poverty line.
How do you know this?
You can open their donation links and sum the pledged amounts you see there. For full time devs, they are indeed extremely underpaid.
Don’t they get funding from NL.net as well?
They were but not anymore iirc
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A big part of having more substantial discussions is just having more people. 40k is a good number for active shit posting and stupid jokes, it’s way to small to have a community about hobbies or even most major metro areas. You need at least 2-3x more people active to at least start to get moderately specialized communities like pro sports. For something really niche, you probably need at least a million MaU.
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I think it’s part of the game and growing pains. You want high quality comments? Well you need more users, 75% of which will rarely post anything, 15% will spam low quality comments, and 10% might submit good posts and we’ll thought out comments. Those numbers are probably a little inflated, but you just need to frow the base and what we are looking for will eventually be there. There will just be a ton of other nonsense, but that’s the good part about upvote/downvotes and different ranking sorting systems.
It will take time, and a lot of people, for a long time will complain that Lemmy is becoming worse, while it slowly gets better.
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Specifically, what have I done that you take such issue with? Or if there is another admin you’d like to criticize, go ahead and speak your piece.
I’d hate people to get the wrong idea about Lemmy admins, whom I have found to be largely selfless and altruistic in their actions and motivations.
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Can you provide a link?
As a moderator, one of my duties is to remove comments that are unnecessarily hostile, personal, and/or non-productive. The vast majority of accusations of fascism that I have seen here are unwarranted and needlessly inflammatory.
I don’t like the hexbear community at all, but jumping straight to accusations of fascism is counterproductive in the extreme. Hexbear users are guilty of brigading, arguing in bad faith, trolling, racism, advocating for violence, and supporting authoritarian regimes, but its quite simply incorrect to describe them as a far right ultranationalist group.
I removed many comments throughout that fiasco, and the vast majority were from hexbears.
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That’s not a counterpoint, it’s a non-sequitor that’s both factually inaccurate and inflammatory. They verifiably did call out “racism” (Winnie the pooh memes) and “bigotry” (crazy is an ableist slur) when they were federated.
A counter point would be to clarify that their criticism of bigotry is not genuine, but instead is merely a tactic to shame ideological opponents. They allow rampant bigotry within their own community, but adopt a zero tolerance policy when it comes to other communities.
Their definition of bigotry is entirely arbitrary and political and has no moral or philosophical underpinning, and is therefore meaningless.
The difference being that my response actually acknowledges the point and proceeds to explain why the comment is incorrect, while yours simply ignores the point and declares them to be fascists.
Your comment is exactly the same type of response that hexbears often give, which is why I removed it.
No hard feelings, I totally understand why you would respond like that when being trolled and brigaded by those clowns. But I was just trying to be objective and hold everyone to the same standard.
That is a fantastic explanation of a mod decision. Thanks for the explanation and for the work you’re doing!
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When I joined Lemmy, I was afraid the politics of the creators would be an issue. It turns out, they are amazing at separating that and their development and stewards of Lemmy.
I’ve found exactly the opposite. I essentially dismissed concerns about Lemmygrad and political extremism, now I’ve come to see it as the biggest threat to the fediverse.
I use it less and would be embarrassed for others to find out I use it in case they saw Lemmygrad/Hexbear content.
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Propaganda isn’t obvious or
orit wouldn’t work. It’s also generally based on the truth.deleted by creator
I don’t understand what you’re asking.
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There should be plenty of instances to choose from which are defederated from both. Would that be a solution for you or others?
Plus instance blocking is coming soon, and some apps already have their own implementation of said feature.
I’m hoping that instance defederation and blocking gets to that point, but as it is it doesn’t really work. I have Lemmygrad and Hexbear blocked and I still see them regularly.
There’s also a lot of softer propaganda from lemmy.ml, although it doesn’t bother me much since I lean “left” anyway.
That’s okay, I’m sure the lemmygrad and hexbear users are embarrassed to find out you use it too.
I totally agree, I’ve found Lemmy to also be quite boring, my feed consistents of 90% memes and politics. With nearly nothing about my more niche hobbies.
Honestly the biggest long term threat to Lemmy is its technology not being able to keep up with its own success. Issues like bad moderation tools, spam, and fractured communities need to be addressed within the software platform itself.
The model also inherits the biggest potential flaw from reddit, shitty moderators with no means to escalate complaints against their power tripping.
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I don’t care about optics as an end user. I care about my experience. And majority of reddit agrees that the admins and mods suck unless it’s a very niche community.
I feel the opposite. If a community is owned by shitty mods, there is usually an alternative with better moderation
I don’t think there really were 54k MAUs in the first place. It took me a few goes to find the right instance for me. Through some fedi drama I’ve had to move “home instance” last month. So last month I probably got counted as 2 MAUs.
But this month I’ve only been using this account.
When lemmy.world was having DDoS issues (are they still?) a lot of people made alts or moved completely and those would all be double counted.
Yeah, I have an account on 4 or 5 other servers but I mainly use this one… So there’s ~4 more “inactive” users.
There’s going to be ups and downs. I wouldn’t be too concerned right now.
I see the bigger problems being community discoverability, not being able to group communities together, and moderation tools.
This. All of this. It’s fine if the goal is to let the active communities bubble to the top organically, but that doesn’t mean much if people can’t easily find them.
It would be nice if there was a way to load-share communities among the instances or something, kind of like a mesh network.
Have them all in like a tag system. So I can see all subs related to technology, etc.
community discoverability, […], and moderation tools
Those are big. But so is the lack of smooth interoperability with Mastodon. There’s a large population using Mastodon right now that could be participating in threaded discussions here, who are just totally blind to the space, and those that do engage have a super jankey experience.
And on top of that, it’s also a super jankey experience on the Lemmy end when Mastodon users engage.
Hopefully things get better on that front once Mastodon has implemented groups.
not being able to group communities together
I honestly see this being a continued expectation to be a bigger issue. Two communities with the same name on different servers could be very different spaces. Giving users the ability to group them together homogenizes them in a way that is likely bad for the ecosystem overall.
Like, it’s fine to have federated or merged communities, but I think that power needs to be in mods and/or admins hands, not end users.
I honestly see this being a continued expectation to be a bigger issue. Two communities with the same name on different servers could be very different spaces. Giving users the ability to group them together homogenizes them in a way that is likely bad for the ecosystem overall.
I see the issue, but I still see the tradeoff as being worth it. Right now, if I want to browse technology commies I have to click into each one I’m subbed to. This means I’m going to go the to biggest one first, then second biggest, and so forth. This pretty much favors the big commies over the small ones because this is just annoying to the end user. Grouping gives those smaller ones a better chance of appearing in someone’s feed thus spreading out activity over a larger part of the lemmy fediverse.
I guess, but it also puts a lot of pressure on those small ones to be indistinguishable from the big ones, by having people treating them like they’re the same place.
I don’t think Lemmy scales the same way that Mastodon does. I don’t think this topic-based community forum model translates to federation the same way the individual-based microblogging space does. It’s a more complex space, with more layers to manage. It’s often mod or admin driven, whereas microblogs are entirely about average user behaviour.
I don’t think it replicates Reddit the same way that it replicates Twitter. I think the mental model just doesn’t fit the tech.
Like, yeah, letting users make personalized community lists is one thing, and I get the appeal, but it ends up functioning very differently in a space where multiple communities can have the same handle, you know? I can lump 5 different gaming subreddits together into a single stream, and be totally and intuitively aware that they’re different. They have different names, and they present differently, with different stylings, when you actually click through to a post. Without those signals, though, empowering users to lump communities together only has benefits to smaller communities if those communities are looking to grow for growth’s sake.
Mastodon has done a great disservice to its admins and users by trying to mask the federated nature of the fediverse. By trying to sell ‘Mastodon’ as a space in and of itself. By trying to make the actual website you’re using invisible. I don’t think we benefit from that in any way. Indeed, I think it’s only the platform developers who benefit, by making their product the only thing people really see. But the individual websites that make up these networks of social networks are entities in and of themselves. They’re like neighbourhoods, or towns. They have their own infrastructure, their own residents, their own characters, and their own needs. Treating them as interchangeable or invisible, ultimately, I feel, stymies the actual potential of the space.
Because this isn’t Reddit. It doesn’t work like Reddit. It can’t try to be “Reddit, but ____”, because it fails at the first word. The way forward is in recognizing that, and trying to figure out what this new space really is.
And one of the things it is is not one space.
There’s a large population using Mastodon right now that could be participating in threaded discussions here, who are just totally blind to the space, and those that do engage have a super jankey experience.
I sometimes post to Lemmy communities from Firefish, and have Mastodon users replying. The interaction seems okay, there are a few improvements points but not so bad overall.
I like Lemmy for the communities it has. But the problem is that it doesn’t have the communities that I like most. I liked Reddit most for the hobby communities that aren’t all necessarily programming or gaming related. Lemmy is fantastic for memes and news and programming and gaming. But those are a small portion of what I used Reddit for. And they aren’t even my favorite part. Look at true guitar communities. Or astronomy, or any other hobby. It’s extremely inactive here.
So I found myself using Lemmy a lot. And then I realized that I was only using Lemmy for the things I don’t actually care about and the things I do care about aren’t here.
That also something I thought about lately. As a moderator of some hobby/interests communities this sticks out even more. But then why isn’t anyone posting? I mean in /c/minimalism we have over 1k subscribers but barely any posts or comments on the few posts made. Is it really the platform or is it us?
I like helping people and talking about things other people are interested in more than I like raising topics or asking questions. I feel weird about showing off a new thing, but am happy to talk about someone else’s new thing.
Exactly thats also how I feel oftentimes. I only post things I really find intriguing or really worth to share. And many others probably feel the same. Soaybe it’s just the nature of the people here than a problem of the service itself.
I’m definitely not saying there’s something wrong with the Lemmy software. But the reality is that most hobbies don’t have active communities here.
Doesn’t it depend on us which communities are active and which are not? I have noticed that a lot of people are ready to comment on topics they find interesting but far less actually want to contribute content to work with. Which is also OK. I much prefer communities with few but meaningful posts to content dumps where a lot of rather uninteresting news articles are shared on a daily basis and no one wants to respond to.
On that one, it’s been under my radar for a bit. I’ll try to post/comment more, but I also feel like I’m mature with my minimalism approach, so I don’t need to question it so much anymore
Which is also totally OK. I think we have false expectations about what a community has to be. In the end we are the community and the people are still there.
Yeah or just niche subjects… like I did some hvac changes to my house recently and being able to research the subject and see questions and answers from others doing the same is super helpful. Lemmy doesn’t have that yet. We need to grow that.
Thats’s true, and it’s true for programming related subs too. But I think it’s just just a question of time, nothing strictly necessary is missing on this platform and its usability is on pair with commercial competitors. They could try monetize with silly stuff like avatars, money tips to most active users integrating patron and similar payment methods, etc…
Do we really need more people here? There are no investors to appease or advertisers to swindle.
Unlimited growth should be a metric we should chase over other stuff like engagement on posts, quality of submissions, etc.
Yes. There are innumerable topics and interests that don’t have a robust presence on Lemmy yet because the platform is just too small and niche. Lemmy is great for tech and tech-adjacent stuff but I still wander back to Reddit from time to time for sports, for instance.
There is an argument to be made that a diversity of perspectives increases overall quality, and a diversity of perspectives is only achievable when growth is beyond a certain point.
That said, Lemmy (the software) just isn’t ready for anything approaching Reddit-sized audiences yet, so I think you’re absolutely right that growth should only be a goal right now inasmuch as it enables existing communities to flourish.
You won’t have diversity of perspectives here… Entire instances are defederating rather than dealing with all the different opinions and the massive burden of moderating it.
But sure, you can still choose to be on some instance that allows all discussions, that’s a plus of the technology. But I don’t think people want that. They dont want to see what they don’t agree with. This is why they downvote things.
Diversity of perspectives? This place is about left wing politics.
It’d be nice to have some good hobby communities, but lemmy doesn’t want a diversity of perspectives.
If you think the only topics of conversation we need are Politics, World News, & Technology, then we don’t need more people here.
Personally, I don’t like having to keep going back to Reddit for everything else. For other communities to be successful on Lemmy, we need about 2 orders of magnitude more users.
Are you content to have meaningful activity in just a small handful of generic topics? I’m not.
So, yes, we really do need more people here. A LOT more.
You might not need exponential growth, but you do want a certain critical mass of activity for each of a variety of topics
Too many fascists harassing, bullying and arguing in bad faith have this effect too.
Thats why my blocklist runneth over. I think of it like playing duck-hunt on ye olde nintendo. Hence I dont see alot of fash on here and when I do its for like 7/10s of a second.
I really wish we could share blocklists or something.
I’ve had a way bigger problem here with extremist communists, but I hate both equally.
Lemmy is already past the failure possibility line, we are already to many to not grow over time. Please remember that this numbers don’t represent accurately as we have many spam bots that get banned and instances take measures against bots in general.
Also some short term loss is normal, as long as the actually active people don’t leave entirely (like from reddit)
I see mostly memes, maybe that’s why its losing interest. I’m on here less now too.
I just blocked all memes communities. Better content now
I blocked all memes except Risa…
Hey, nice to see you here!
The pattern I see in MAU is periodic surges of new users, followed by a leveling-off decay that eventually amounts to about half of the new users.
How does that compare to other platforms?
I think the big question here is still where we land. It could easily be somewhere in the 20-30k range.
Probably better stats across the entire Fediverse can be found here:
I read that as it jumped by 25%, 500,000 users.
Nobody seriously expects Lemmy to last that much longer than Voat and similar “alternatives”.
Really? You think it’s going to fail?
