I joined during the first Reddit exodus, and it seemed like for ages the amount of Lemmy content was generally increasing (sometimes quickly, sometimes slowly, but overall increasing). Now it seems that when I sort by New, I get through everything since my last visit much more quickly than I used to. Is that my imagination, or is the activity declining?

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] 4Robato@lemmy.world 4 points 13 hours ago* (last edited 13 hours ago) (2 children)

I don't know how to check for the whole lemmy but seems it's growing a bit but the MAU dropped a bit probably because of august: https://fedidb.com/servers/lemmy.world

But the fediverse in general doesn't grow too much except when a scandal happens.

[–] squaresinger@lemmy.world 3 points 11 hours ago* (last edited 11 hours ago) (2 children)

Watch out, the statistics might not say what you think they do.

"Total users" is a meaningless metric. All it showes is how many users aren't using lemmy anymore.

"Monthly active users" is the only meaningful metric, and it's fluctuating and currently going down.

"Activity growth" doesn't actually show the number of new activities per month, but the total count of activities. So with constant activity you'd expect linear "activity growth" and with growing activity you'd see the line curling upward. It is currently mostly linear but slightly declining.

So these statistics show a slow decline, not an increase.

But in a way you can be happy that it doesn't grow a lot. With the base architecture of ActivityPub (every instance contains a copy of everything, all content needs to be propagated to all instances, all content needs to be duplicate-moderated by all instances' admins) it is absolutely not designed to handle large amount of users.

If only a tenth of a percent of Reddit users were to switch over to Lemmy, everything would grind to a halt and most instances would have to close down because running them would become to expensive for a non-profit project.

[–] 4Robato@lemmy.world 2 points 8 hours ago

Yeah one has to be careful with statistics and I couldn't find the whole Lemmy in one place so it's also not representative of the whole Lemmy.

I thought ActivityPub did scale well and was ATProto (Bluesky) which had a lot more issues. I mean I can comment on Peertube using my Mastodon account meaning the whole Fediverse is properly connected and we are 1M MAU so I would say it already scaled good.

[–] Skavau@piefed.social 3 points 11 hours ago

The user you are replying to has specifically sourced lemmy.world data there, which is not going to give you an overall for the wider fediverse.

[–] AFKBRBChocolate@lemmy.ca 2 points 13 hours ago

That link is just hanging for me.