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Six months after the initial reddit surge (graphs)

cross-posted from: 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 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.

https://lemmy.ca/pictrs/image/5f423f53-4c8b-4a60-a1c3-0155e0e74dd7.png

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:

https://lemmy.ca/pictrs/image/c9ae8c42-9556-42e1-a732-6c42140c038a.png

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

https://lemmy.ca/pictrs/image/ae73bb5a-2026-4c67-8e96-2242587ab3e6.png

As does lemmy.ca, below:

https://lemmy.ca/pictrs/image/dfdf0f57-bc94-4505-8a90-0d4b062957ba.png

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.

https://lemmy.ca/pictrs/image/32eec43f-31d5-4029-aecd-601f9f764aa7.png

https://lemmy.ca/pictrs/image/d25437fd-dbce-4dbc-bce4-b6a3dfa2f6af.png

https://lemmy.ca/pictrs/image/44361ef4-c570-4762-833f-83473bb5d10b.png

https://lemmy.ca/pictrs/image/44c15b77-e07b-4606-9695-f1d0635cd660.png

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.

https://lemmy.ca/pictrs/image/f1a6d1dd-df33-4892-bb32-c63ca2d53569.png

https://lemmy.ca/pictrs/image/ad187ceb-5fc7-44b8-9d20-93c6bad0883c.png

https://lemmy.ca/pictrs/image/032ab253-704d-415e-9d0b-fa3d0796d04c.png

https://lemmy.ca/pictrs/image/057ade85-90d5-4fd6-b26c-960be77608d9.png

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!

Clbull ,

I’m curious, what led to the December user spike?

Sightline ,

Maybe the shitty UI update on Reddit.

troyunrau OP ,
@troyunrau@lemmy.ca avatar

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).

onlinepersona ,

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.

CC BY-NC-SA 4.0

MaxVoltage ,
@MaxVoltage@lemmy.world avatar

didnt read no bump 👆🤣🇺🇸🌀🦈🔨🤮

Sekrayray ,

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 ,
@andrew@radiation.party avatar

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

Anti_Iridium ,

I miss Relay.

Clbull ,

This is why I don’t want Lemmy to become mainstream and would rather see another Reddit clone pick up the slack.

Lemmy is like circa 2010 Reddit, minus the jailbait, creepshots, incest-posting, racism and all the other degenerate shit.

rar ,

I do wish there was an instance that becomes perhaps half as popular as Reddit did at its peak. Just barely enough so we can expose to opinions outside the typical young tech-enthusiast crowd.

Spzi ,

I find the plateau quite puzzling (lemmy.world, but the total looks very similar):

https://lemmy.ca/pictrs/image/c9ae8c42-9556-42e1-a732-6c42140c038a.png

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.

troyunrau OP ,
@troyunrau@lemmy.ca avatar

It’s because it is a one month rolling window.

hamid ,

I want to see the hexbear numbers to compare. It is funny to me how people can’t let go of the language of a product that needs to be sold for a community run website provided for free. Engagement, growth, click thrus, daily average users all don’t really matter as long as the people running it enjoy what they are doing and the people who show up do too.

If it is not fun for you that is a real issue, but you’re not going to make it fun by chasing the tactics to grow a able-to-be-monetized product like attracting a large amount of teenager activity for example.

Duamerthrax ,

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.

hamid ,

I don’t really believe its one or the other with regards to reddit. I still sometimes use it, I also use twitter, tumblr, instagram, even pinterest. They are just websites and apps and I can use multiple.

Wav_function ,

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.

shrugal , (edited )

The url for you would simply be lemmy.world. Just login with your account from the app and start scrolling, no need to migrate anything.

Federation in principle is actually really simple. Basically there are multiple servers (aka instances) run by different people and with their own urls, and they just send each other messages to stay in sync. E g. if you post something on LW, that server also sends it to all the others (all it is federated with), so they can show it to their users too. If someone upvotes the post then their server sends that info to all the other servers as well, so everyone can update their vote counter for that post. That’s it, that’s the magic.

The result is that all instances have the same content, and users can message each other no matter what instance they are on. That means it doesn’t really matter which one you sign up on, and no content is lost if one of them goes down.

Wav_function ,

Thanks

Hjalamanger ,
@Hjalamanger@feddit.nu avatar

You could just go to lemmy.world. That’s your home instance, it works kinda like an email provider. And if you (for example) use gmail you can access your mail at the Gmail website and the same is true for Lemmy.

But just like you could download an email client you can get yourself an Lemy client and use that*. That client will make API requests to your home instance to get the posts it presents to you. Your home instance in turn will communicate with other instances in order to show their posts to you.**

clients/websites you could try

Here is one list and here is another. Also note that some clients are actually webapps.

** you probably know this considering you use the Lemmy client sync*

** Disclaimer: the last part about how Lemmy works is just how I think it works based on what I have read. I could be completely wrong.

reattach ,

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.

Wav_function ,

Thanks

skullgiver , (edited )
@skullgiver@popplesburger.hilciferous.nl avatar

deleted_by_author

    •
    troyunrau OP ,
    @troyunrau@lemmy.ca avatar

    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.

    TimewornTraveler ,

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

    troyunrau OP ,
    @troyunrau@lemmy.ca avatar

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

    https://lemmy.ca/pictrs/image/82ff1c22-5d07-4c63-bfd8-fe31dda4935c.png

    antonim ,

    :o

    TimewornTraveler ,

    shut up and take my money!

    noobdoomguy8658 ,

    Spoken like a true oil and gas stakeholder. Or any other stakeholder, for that matter.

    JustZ ,
    @JustZ@lemmy.world avatar

    I’m fairly sure that explosions, tsunamis, and cardiac arrest all begin with a similar waveform. Those things all tend to be exponential in scale.

    Flex ,

    Lemmy has better user retention than Diablo IV confirmed

    DrCatface ,

    and the diablo 4 community is dead lmao

    TheRealKuni ,

    There are dozens of us! DOZENS!

    DrCatface ,

    x doubt

    Valmond ,

    Diablo II FTW!

    Pistcow ,

    There’s a lot less repeat cellar quests

    grue ,

    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!

    ryathal ,

    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.

    machinin , (edited )

    This is true in my case too.

    notasandwich1948 ,

    I only really ever made 1 account, this one

    Papanca ,

    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.

    Spzi ,

    Yes, that’s true, but the number probably actually declined for a similar reason.

    Some created multiple accounts, others tried multiple platforms. Some were happy with lemmy and stayed, others did not.

    kbal ,
    @kbal@fedia.io avatar

    Meanwhile if you're curious how reddit has been doing, just look at this chart

    kbal ,
    @kbal@fedia.io avatar

    chart doesn't seem to show up on lemmy. Not sure what I did wrong there, but it's the first time I tried an image in a comment. I guess this way works better.

    blazeknave ,

    Worth two comments and a page load 😁

    JustZ ,
    @JustZ@lemmy.world avatar

    You the real MVP of this meme.

    lung ,
    @lung@lemmy.world avatar

    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

    Chee_Koala ,

    Same! Feels like it’s large enough to keep some balls rolling, and that’s all I ever wanted. It would be great for some of my more niche interests to have more representation (and I try and contribute to that) but if it would stay like it is now, I’m down to clown.

    CombatWombatEsq ,

    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 OP ,
    @troyunrau@lemmy.ca avatar

    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 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 ,

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

    Amir ,

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

    gedaliyah ,
    @gedaliyah@lemmy.world avatar

    Excellent work. Thank you!

    Aurix ,

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

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