What this shows us is that more people are joining lemmy, but even more people are either leaving or going into lurker mode, as Lemmy only counts people who have commented or posted in that time period as active users, whereas most social media counts any activity while logged in as active. You have to realize that people who use reddit as Google search results don't usually interact with the content there and most won't even make an account.

On the upside, with fewer people, it's easy to get noticed here just by contributing good content since you don't really get drowned out here because of the democratic upvote based sorting instead of black box personalized recommendation algorithms. So with relatively low amount of effort, you can make sure your content is being seen instead of relying on analytics and metrics.

The last thing to in mind that Lemmy is only one aspect of ActivityPub, and Mastodon's growth is currently the highest right now because of the ecosystem created by the whale fall of Twitter, which indirectly grows Lemmy as Mastodon users can post directly to federated Lemmy communities.

[–] LostCat005@lemmy.world 73 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) (3 children)

I just got recommended this site after posting on reddit re: predatory algos and the necessary regulations needed to protect people and how algos have manipulated the UX so much its disrupted the originally intended purposes; ie insta has effectively become a marketing and advertising platform.

So in response someone suggested finding alternatives to the popular social media sites and used Lemmy as an example.

I have been loving it thus far - its old school reddit.

this is my first comment on lemmy!

[–] Enfors@lemm.ee 12 points 11 months ago (1 children)

Welcome! So far, in my experience, this is a much friendlier community that... many of the alternatives.

[–] CosmicCleric@lemmy.world 0 points 11 months ago (1 children)

Welcome! So far, in my experience, this is a much friendlier community that… many of the alternatives.

Usually. There's definitely some who want to take their pound of flesh out of you when you disagree with them on something, but overall not so bad.

[–] SuckMyWang@lemmy.world 3 points 11 months ago (1 children)

I disagree strongly with that opinion but respect you as a lemming

[–] CosmicCleric@lemmy.world 1 points 11 months ago (1 children)

Fair enough. My perspective in the last day or two tells me otherwise, but I'm glad you're having a great experience.

[–] irreticent@lemmy.world 1 points 11 months ago

There're always going to be hotheads and bad faith actors in any platform, but I have noticed it is much more rare here on Lemmy. Much less vitriol as well.

[–] AmbientChaos@sh.itjust.works 8 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) (2 children)

Agreed on it being old school reddit! There are some UI wrappers that make it look and feel like old school reddit that I use and love you might enjoy. The wrapper is called mlmym and is open source. There are a few hosts you can use, I use this one: https://o.opnxng.com

A direct link for your lemmy instance would be https://o.opnxng.com/lemmy.world

https://github.com/rystaf/mlmym/tree/main

[–] LostCat005@lemmy.world 2 points 11 months ago (1 children)

OMG thank you so much! holy amazing.

[–] irreticent@lemmy.world 1 points 11 months ago

Check out https:old.lemmy.world for an old reddit lime experience.

[–] irreticent@lemmy.world 1 points 11 months ago

https://old.lemmy.world is like old reddit.

[–] Tetractys@lemmy.world 8 points 11 months ago

Fuck you! Hello.

[–] pineapple_pizza@lemmy.dexlit.xyz 35 points 11 months ago (2 children)

Do votes count as activity as well? Or just posts and comments?

[–] meldrik@lemmy.wtf 44 points 11 months ago (3 children)

It really should.

[–] Blaze@discuss.tchncs.de 12 points 11 months ago (1 children)

Strong agree

[–] Coelacanth@feddit.nu 4 points 11 months ago (1 children)

I can see the arguments for both, to be honest. Ideally I'd like to be able to see statistics for both. Active Users and Active Contributors?

[–] meldrik@lemmy.wtf 1 points 11 months ago (1 children)

You can already see how many posts and comments users make. Isn’t that the same?

[–] Coelacanth@feddit.nu 4 points 11 months ago (1 children)

Well, as mentioned that is also covered by the Monthly Active Users metric that already is available. But in addition to that, I think it would be interesting to see the number of users who read and vote but don't post or comment. Even though posting and commenting is the biggest part, actively voting is still an important part of the ecosystem.

[–] meldrik@lemmy.wtf 1 points 11 months ago

True, could be nice to see data on content consumers, and not just the content creators.

[–] Ategon@programming.dev 11 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) (1 children)

I changed the algorithms in programming.dev to take into account voters in the activity. Since stats are all calculated locally you can view any community from programming.dev to get the monthly active users including that change

e.g. https://programming.dev/c/technology@lemmy.world shows 27.8k users/month on p.d which is almost as much as the value here for all of lemmy excluding voters

[–] meldrik@lemmy.wtf 2 points 11 months ago (1 children)

That's crazy! User/month goes from only 7.5k active to 27.8k. And that's just people voting. What about people who only read a post?

[–] Ategon@programming.dev 3 points 11 months ago (1 children)

Dont have access to those stats in the database so adding on voting is the best I can do

Theres a post read table but its only people who have explicitly marked something as read and is way less than the post likes

[–] Deebster@programming.dev 2 points 11 months ago (1 children)

Do posts get marked as read when you read the comments? There's the x new comments feature, so something must be storing that timestamp.

[–] Ategon@programming.dev 4 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago)

I dug through the code and turns out the post read table does store when its read (with number of comments when it was read stored in a person post aggregates table), it just only stores it for people from your instance so I cant get accurate numbers from all of lemmy (and why it seemed like there was a low amount)

[–] ComradePorkRoll@lemmy.world 6 points 11 months ago

Agreed. Lurkers are what keep these sites alive.

[–] Die4Ever@programming.dev 13 points 11 months ago

Votes unfortunately don't count

[–] omnissiah@iusearchlinux.fyi 30 points 11 months ago (1 children)

There seemed to be an influx of reddit users but probably didn't like Lemmy's own distinct user base (*nix users for example)

I am kind of glad it settled down because I much prefer Lemmy over reddit

[–] bobby295@lemm.ee 7 points 11 months ago

Damn, I’d better keep commenting, I usually just lurk/vote

[–] some_guy@lemmy.sdf.org 3 points 11 months ago

Someone posted metrics for how many users vote. 131k.

[–] perviouslyiner@lemm.ee 2 points 11 months ago

halfyear includes people trying out different instances; monthly shows just the one(s) they settled on