Ask Lemmy

Lemmy will never really grow beyond what it is now. Even if there was another influx of users, the retention rate is going to be low and the amount of active users is going to be even lower. It will forever remain a niche platform for 3 reasons:

1. It's made by and for people on the far left, tech/privacy nerds, and people who have been kicked out of Reddit. Because of this, the actual active users on here tend to fall into of these 3 groups, and they define Lemmy's culture, and this includes the developers. Because of this, much of content on here revolve around niche topics and so there isn't much here to appeal to the mainstream.

2. It is fundamentally flawed by design. There are bunch of different communities on different instances about the same topic, and there is no way to consolidate them. Because of this, you have a bunch of dead communities that operate as independent nodes, instead of having centralized communities that are big and active. This issue would've been solved if Lemmy was designed to have each instance be a community in of itself (AskLemmy has its own instance and so does tech, gaming, and so on), but instead we have the current implementation.

3. Lemmy has many of the problems that drive people away from Reddit. Sure, Lemmy isn't a greedy corporation, which is nice, but it still has terminally online powermods with little to no accountability, a hostile and negative community, weird/extreme echo chambers that make most people cringe, and so on. If you sign up for Lemmy, you're going to get the same problems but with a worse experience because it's way smaller and has less content, so why would you come to Lemmy instead of making another Reddit account?

I just don't see Lemmy every becoming mainstream or overtaking Reddit. It's already been 6 years since the start of Lemmy's development, and 2 years since the big influx of users from Reddit's API fiasco, and it STILL has to rely on the same dozen or so people spamming the platform to keep it barely active. Lemmy won't collapse, but it also won't be more than what it is now, at least not any time soon.

Its the perfect size right now. Big enough to have a good variety of content and discussions while still small enough and niche to not be plagued by bots or targeted by corpos

I do feel it’s increasing, and not to mention, I love scrolling through Lemmy more than Reddit these past few days, I noticed.

Nah. The same ten people that post content have just upped their game. Never stop you beautiful people!

I would agree. And I'm spreading the word. We need to break our dependency on huge corporations. It's just laziness.

not really, since the great purges in the spring thats where we had a huge boost, the shadowbans and sitewide ban seemed to have died down for now, although the SB are increasing in the background, we might see another increase if reddit does another major purge. although instances dying ive seen less content overall(especially with ee gone)

According to Voyager, I have upvoted your content 34 times.

Hope this helps.

Been here since November. Seeing a lot more upvotes and comments on posts than when I got here.

https://lemmy.fediverse.observer/stats

Currently trending down. And it's all your fault for taking a break. 😔

Its been at a pretty consistent 50k which means we retained 25% of the users from our peak. Its 37.5k at the moment with 1.8k on piefed. There is another 18k users once NodeBB federations integrates.

Its a decent little community, enough to be self sufficient and enough for new users to feel like they arent joining a ghost town.

No, the MAU (which is what I assume you meant) seems to be going down very slowly. Though it probably will start going up once again someday. Possibly when the new digg is released to the public or when Reddit pulls another shit that not even the current Redditors will be able to tolerate.

I personally don't have a problem with the current state. I like it here. I recognize lots of people every day comment and post. It feels cozy.

I salute you. And please take care of yourself first.

It appears that Twitter users are migrating to Bluesky, while simultaneously engaging with Reddit and Discord. Meanwhile, Reddit users are making their way to Lemmy or maybe not I exacly don't how but LEMMY IS GOING UPP.

Thank you for your service.

Also, thank you for asking. Yes, I'm increasing, and I'm eating more salads now to help prevent it, OK?