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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!

andrewrgross ,

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 OP ,
@troyunrau@lemmy.ca avatar

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.

lvxferre ,
@lvxferre@lemmy.ml avatar

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).

troyunrau OP ,
@troyunrau@lemmy.ca avatar

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

emly_sh_ ,
@emly_sh_@sh.itjust.works avatar

Could you explain what this was? I couldn’t find anything about it while searching.

troyunrau OP ,
@troyunrau@lemmy.ca avatar

en.wikipedia.org/…/AACS_encryption_key_controvers…

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.

emly_sh_ ,
@emly_sh_@sh.itjust.works avatar

Thank you! That was fun to read :)

Hamartiogonic ,
@Hamartiogonic@sopuli.xyz avatar

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.

Chainweasel , (edited )

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 ,

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.

sjmarf ,

Same. I’ve made six accounts since I joined during the exodus, only two of which I actively use now.

someacnt_ ,

Same, it might have been this

key ,

Details on active users count change:

github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/pull/4235

BedSharkPal ,

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 ,

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

troyunrau OP ,
@troyunrau@lemmy.ca avatar

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).

explodicle ,

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.

troyunrau OP ,
@troyunrau@lemmy.ca avatar

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.

gears ,

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.

Empricorn ,

You were probably being racist. There’s only 2 things I can’t stand: intolerance and the Dutch.

doylio ,

Awesome work! Thanks for sharing!

Sterile_Technique ,
@Sterile_Technique@lemmy.world avatar

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

Sorry.

scrubbles ,
@scrubbles@poptalk.scrubbles.tech avatar

I guess we’ll make do.

/s hello fellow refugee!

CobblerScholar ,

Yeah I like yall here

Valmond ,

-“Sorry.”

Found the canadian 😋

Cheers and lets make this a place that rocks!

drasticpotatoes ,

Cheers, friend.

BiggestBulb ,
@BiggestBulb@kbin.run avatar

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

glarf ,

Howdy! There’s some engagement for yah

kinther ,
@kinther@lemmy.world avatar

Same. I post and comment on lemmy but only casually browse specific subreddits now. Some days I’m only on lemmy.

Wav_function ,

Hello

Jimbo ,
@Jimbo@yiffit.net avatar

Seconded

iarigby ,

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

Aurelius ,
@Aurelius@lemmy.world avatar

I’ve also been building a lemmy web client (Quiblr) and I can tell ya that these types bugs often come up due to API issues. Honestly, it can be difficult at times to know if it is actually an API issue or if it is an app bug. So app bugs go unresolved because they get written off as API issues lol The alternative is that you invest a lot of time trying to fix something, only to realize that it is out of your control

I think Lemmy’s API issues will be fixed, but the growing pains are definitely there!

deweydecibel ,

Bug reporting in general is kind of confusing for Lemmy users who aren’t intimately familiar with it’s development.

For example, filtering comments by date on user profiles just doesn’t seem to work. You can sort properly, but try filtering them by day, week, month, etc, and it never filters them. It always shows all comments from All Time. But this sort of filtering works fine everywhere else. Happens on the three Lemmy apps I’ve used, and the web UI last I checked.

But I’m not sure where that bug is actually coming from, and I haven’t seen any other bug reports about it. Is that an issue for Lemmy’s dev, Lemmy’s UI devs, the app devs, the instance admins, etc. I don’t know who to submit it to.

I don’t want to waste anyone’s time making them bug hunt something that isn’t under their umbrella.

Valmond , (edited )

Seems the latest version, 0.19.1, has some kind of federation bug or something. My communitys posts has gone from a steady 10-20 upvotes to just one or a very few since I upgraded my server.

That makes it somehow unwelcomed to post, thinking it doesn’t really matter.

I hope they’ll find a fix soon :-) good luck to them!

DrCake ,

Out of curiosity, what app are you using now?

iarigby ,

It’s called “Bean for Lemmy”. I really enjoy how it looks.

DrCake ,

Thanks, I’ll give it a try

sunaurus ,

lemm.ee started having a weird bug for logging in

Hey, can you share some more about this login bug? I’m not aware of any login issues currently. Could it be related to an app you were using not supporting 0.19 yet?

iarigby ,

I wish I had written down the bug, but it’s possible that was the reason, because the client started saying “invalid login” while I was already logged in. The thing is, I then visited the website and had trouble logging in there too, it kept getting stuck on loading. I clicked “rest password” and it finally logged in 😅. Then I tried changing my password and at that point apple keychain’s autofill might’ve messed up and remembered a wrong one. I now reset it again and the client works.

sunaurus ,

Based on the description, I am thinking this was related to some general issues we were having after the 0.19 upgrade (which have been solved now). Thanks for the info!

iarigby ,

Yes :) Thanks for your work!

LUHG_HANI ,
@LUHG_HANI@lemmy.world avatar

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.

BiggestBulb ,
@BiggestBulb@kbin.run avatar

Let's hope for an API debacle 2.0 then. Fuck Spez!

magnetosphere , (edited )
@magnetosphere@kbin.social avatar

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 OP ,
@troyunrau@lemmy.ca avatar

In that case, I recommend !tenforward ;)

magnetosphere ,
@magnetosphere@kbin.social avatar

Subbed! Thanks!

troyunrau OP ,
@troyunrau@lemmy.ca avatar

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.

magnetosphere ,
@magnetosphere@kbin.social avatar

Hey, cool! I didn’t know about Scaled sorting. Thanks again!

Aurelius ,
@Aurelius@lemmy.world avatar

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

deweydecibel ,

That’s cool and all, but sorting is only part of the issue.

The other part is that they’re simply aren’t enough people here yet. That will change with time, of course, I’m not too concerned about that. Hopefully the sorting will help draw attention to vacant communities in need of filling.

blueson ,

Decenteralized systems in all it’s glory, but I think at some point we will need to address or come up with a solution on how we market niche communities.

In reddit it was so simple to find your communities. Let’s say you grew interest in Balisongs, then you just type r/balisong and there you are. This helps discovery immensly.

Doing this on a lemmy instance will only get you to that instance community. Which means you might have like 10 of these already niche communities spread out around different instances.

Personally I’d think a system where an instance can promote or assign another instance community as the “main” one, with some type of backup feature, would help Lemmy grow.

But I also think that opinion is controversial considering the nature of a decentralized system.

nutomic ,
@nutomic@lemmy.ml avatar

You can find communities on lemmyverse.net/communities

blueson ,

I know I can.

But my point is that a lot of users will not stay here if they need to jump through different identical-communities across several instances or other websites to build their content-flow.

flames5123 ,

I still need to put in the work to sub to all the alternatives. I had hundreds of subs and my front page was so curated. But now on Lemmy, I tried Hot for new/fresh content, but I have to browse Active most of the time due to the amount of just single up vote posts on Hot.

I just wish we had more people. I’m doing my part of being active though!

troyunrau OP ,
@troyunrau@lemmy.ca avatar

Even if you find alternatives to all your reddit communities, they might be empty placeholder communities. Someone needs to get the content kicked off in them.

Admittedly it’s not just a lemmy problem. Small reddit subs sometimes have the same issue. My specific field of science is called geophysics. I stopped posting to r/geophysics during the API protest – it was already pretty quiet, and I previously accounted for a significant amount of the content/chatter. But after I stopped posting, what remains is conspiracy theory nonsense mostly. Well, normally I’d report that, but now I’m just watching reddit burn. Started !geophysics and it’s just as quiet in there, with mostly me posting… but hey, if I’m going to scream into an empty void, it might as well be here :)

Vex_Detrause ,

So you’re saying I should try Hot sort now? Hmm. Let’s see.

FireTower ,
@FireTower@lemmy.world avatar

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

magnetosphere ,
@magnetosphere@kbin.social avatar

THIS is the way to do it, folks! Nice work!

FireTower ,
@FireTower@lemmy.world avatar

Thanks! !forgottenweapons has been around for about a month and we’re almost at 1k members!

magnetosphere ,
@magnetosphere@kbin.social avatar

lol that’s YOU?!? https://lemmy.world/c/forgottenweapons showed up randomly in my feed one day, and I subscribed because it’s unique and interesting! Awesome!

FireTower ,
@FireTower@lemmy.world avatar

Glad to hear it! And yes that is me. You’re making me feel like Lemmy’s second biggest celebrity, behind the android community moderator Margot Robbie. If you enjoy the posts don’t forget to check out the Forgotten Weapons YouTube channel & website.

The community is sort of a place for fans of the show to post stuff that other fans would enjoy, but it’s got a whole bunch of members who actually have found out about Forgotten Weapons through the Lemmy community first. I’m really glad to see people who find out about Forgotten Weapons from the community. It makes me feel like I’m giving back to Ian McCollum for everything I’ve learned from his show.

magnetosphere ,
@magnetosphere@kbin.social avatar

I’ve watched several videos! I know next to nothing about guns, so hearing about the oddities is a fun way to learn.

It’s also fascinating that Robbie finds a way to balance her celebrity career with moderating a community on Lemmy lol

sbv ,

You’ve got a pretty cool community. I enjoy every one of your posts.

FireTower ,
@FireTower@lemmy.world avatar

Thanks! User engagement is what keeps me going. Otherwise it feels like I’m just talking into a void.

Poem_for_your_sprog ,

That takes a small amount of effort. Can you just create my niche communities for me?

FireTower ,
@FireTower@lemmy.world avatar

Sure. But only if your niche community is centered around a YouTube channel run by a man with a three musketeers looking mustache and ponytail who travels the globe to disassemble military prototypes.

Poem_for_your_sprog ,

That sounds pretty fun. Does he do UFOs too?

FireTower ,
@FireTower@lemmy.world avatar

No but I think we have one for UFOs

SacrificedBeans ,

I miss my niche communities, but I don’t have my app anymore soooo. Tough for me, tougher for spez.

notasandwich1948 ,

sadly even things like memes were better on Reddit, maybe I could do something to change that

Blaze ,
@Blaze@lemm.ee avatar

Great post, thanks!

NegativeLookBehind ,
@NegativeLookBehind@kbin.social avatar

Look at it

troyunrau OP ,
@troyunrau@lemmy.ca avatar

https://lemmy.ca/pictrs/image/b3cea09e-244a-4174-aa21-f648a87ccac1.png

NegativeLookBehind ,
@NegativeLookBehind@kbin.social avatar

The line is going up. My sources tell me this is good.

DarkThoughts ,

That graph gets worse the longer I look at it.

JustZ ,

.pizza now? How can anyone know if a domain is legit. I guess it was never certain.

nicetriangle ,

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.

troyunrau OP ,
@troyunrau@lemmy.ca avatar

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: the-federation.info/platform/184

pruwybn ,
@pruwybn@discuss.tchncs.de avatar

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.

be_excellent_to_each_other ,
@be_excellent_to_each_other@kbin.social avatar

I don't even use lemmy and that was interesting to read.

Aurix ,

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

gedaliyah ,
@gedaliyah@lemmy.world avatar

Excellent work. Thank you!

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