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 https://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.

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:

Lemmy.ml below has a similar curve, plus some sort of data artefact.

As does lemmy.ca, below:

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.

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.

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!

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[–] ZeroCool 20 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago) (1 children)

One issue is that lemmy is too anonymous and that leads to it not attracting content creators that don’t actually want to be anonymous and want to create a presence.

So what? I find it strange how many people on link aggregators like reddit and lemmy/kbin don't seem to understand the point of a link aggregator. There are plenty of places to go on the internet if you want to create "a presence." But link aggregators aren't it. The closest it gets are novelty accounts and power users.

A lot of reddit's issues trace back to the fact that they stopped being satisfied with being a link aggregator because there isn't much money in it. It's been all downhill ever since they started morphing into a more traditional social media website and trying to attract more content creators by doing things like making userpages their own subreddits and adding half-assed knockoff "features" from more popular social media sites/apps. Lemmy isn't profit driven and therefore doesn't need to parrot reddit's mistakes. There's nothing wrong with link aggregators being link aggregators.

[–] fidodo@lemmy.world -1 points 10 months ago

If you want the network to grow organically you need content to attract people there. There are content creators that use Reddit as their primary platform and it's a big part of their growth. You don't need to worry about lemmy getting corrupted because it's open source and distributed. I don't think having content creators is the problem, it's having the platform being monitized around it that is.