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Is Lemmy growing or shrinking? (sh.itjust.works)

submitted 8 months ago by threelonmusketeers@sh.itjust.works to c/fediverse@lemmy.world

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How is the size of Lemmy's userbase changing? Is it growing or shrinking? How diverse is it? What do the current trendlines look like as we approach a year since Rexxit?

I feel like I used to see graphs on this sub fairly regularly, but haven't seen one recently. There was also some ambiguity in the numbers as commenting and voting were added to the active user totals. Now that most (all?) instances have switched to 0.19, do we have a better idea of where things stand?

Aside from sticking around and posting, commenting, and voting, is there anything users should be doing to help grow the platform? (!lemmygrow would be a good name for a sublemmy, if anyone wanted to organize something)

In any case, thanks to everyone who has helped grow Lemmy to its current size!

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[-] wiki_me@lemmy.ml 24 points 8 months ago

Yeah it's probably not doing great, compare lemmy active user count to that of writefreely , it does a lot better, even the number of servers is increasing, the number of other projects starting that compete with lemmy (piefed, sublinks) is also not a great sign .

Not trying to belittle anyone, i just believe in the importance of negative feedback and defensive pessimism.

On a more positive note, the amount of donations lemmy receive (which i think should correlate with high quality usage of the platform) has increased moderately (see november 2 numbers when they started posting the numbers with current numbers) .

[-] Liz@midwest.social 35 points 8 months ago

I find your take on that data to be super weird, given that Lemmy has 10x the number of monthly active users than writefreely. We're not going to be beating Reddit anytime soon, but we've got a decent little community going.

[-] wiki_me@lemmy.ml 2 points 8 months ago

As you can see from the graph support for measuring monthly active users was added fairly recently, so some servers might not be reporting it and in general 6m active users is a better metric, in that case that's somewhere around 2.5 times bigger , pixelfed is around 63K 6M MAU and is also growing , two of these projects are comparable in size of use and manage to generate growth.

Sometimes it is better to look at trends and not the current market share, because that might be the result of historical circumstances that are not related to how a project or business is managed, for example writefreely already had a strong open source competitor (wordpress) and lemmy basically got a free marketing campaign due to reddit API fiasco.

[-] Liz@midwest.social 2 points 8 months ago

I don't have anything to add but I wanted to say those are all good points.

[-] ProdigalFrog@slrpnk.net 24 points 8 months ago

Sublinks and piefed don't compete with lemmy, or at least, they don't weaken the ecosystem since they are all inter compatible.

[-] nutomic@lemmy.ml 11 points 8 months ago

Having other projects which are similar to Lemmy is a great sign. It means users have more choices available and developers can experiment with different solutions. It's really not a competition, because the existence of more compatible Fediverse projects will also benefit Lemmy, as there will be more users and more content.

[-] wiki_me@lemmy.ml 1 points 8 months ago

Look at the decline of lutris in term of revenue (around 2020), it seems to be inversely correlated with the growth of competitor like heroic game launcher and playnite.

What you mentioned is one possible scenario, but the negative one is that lemmy userbase will continue to decline and there will be less feedback/income/contributions to keep the project going, the resources spent on basic development on sublinks and piefed could be used to make lemmy even better and developing experimental addons and gathering feedback on this kind of experimentation (e.g. in the form of surveys).

I am also not sure we are at a point where starting to experiment is the best option as features that seem to have more of a consensus are not yet implemented (e.g. multireddits, the issue with the most "thumbs up" on github).

With that said lemmy did manage to overcome previous open source competitors, If i would have to estimate probabilities like in the good judgement project i would say there is a 40 percent chance lemmy would decline and a 60% chance it will maintain its resources or grow.

[-] nutomic@lemmy.ml 4 points 8 months ago

Mastodon seems like a better comparison. It has more than a dozen forks and clones, and plenty of donation income.

Sure it would be good to have more contributions in Lemmy, but as these projects are made by volunteers they will do what they are most interested in. Nothing we can do to change that. And if they add new features which prove useful, they can also be added to Lemmy.

New users for Piefed and Sublinks are most likely to come out of the millions of Reddit users, not out of a few thousand Lemmy users. So this will increase the size of the Lemmy network and lead to more activity.

[-] wiki_me@lemmy.ml 1 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago)

Mastodon seems like a better comparison. It has more than a dozen forks and clones, and plenty of donation income.

Is mastodon a good case study?, his 6M active user count , server count, and income from patreon seems on the decline , and this isn't a project that made a large dent in existing market share like wikipedia/firefox/blender, compared to twitter and facebook market share it is still less then 0.1 percent. and when compared to it lemmy is not as established with a income that is about enough for just one developer.

Sure it would be good to have more contributions in Lemmy, but as these projects are made by volunteers they will do what they are most interested in. Nothing we can do to change that. And if they add new features which prove useful, they can also be added to Lemmy.

Maybe, but i think the problem with lemmy is that feedback does not effect prioritization enough (that is the common criticism it seems, iirc one of the justifications for creating the new projects), peertube probably created ideas.peertube to prevent this problem, when i compare sublinks and piefed development statistics to lemmy (in term of contributions this month) it indicates they are already equivalent in term of development resources despite being much newer and not really usable. Better prioratization processes might encourage more people to contribute rather then go there own way.

I know planning and prioritizing is not a particularly appealing or enjoyable activity ,but 65% of businesses fail during the first 10 years , I imagine running a non profit competing with industry giants like meta and twitter and seasoned business men is going to be harder then managing the average business .