So since the mass-exodus from Reddit we can see that the total amount of active users has gone down rather heavily: https://i.imgur.com/MeQok2F.png
This can seem a bit sad at a first glance. Where are we heading? But one has to remember that back during the summer many of us created several accounts to settle at an instance, there were also problems with spam-bots of various kinds.
So active users in itself is actually not that interesting. At least not the comparison with the peak. Instead we can watch the total amount of posts, how is that looking?
Well it's steadily going up actually: https://i.imgur.com/i3Vse7Y.png
Though the increase has gone down slightly. This number however is influenced by other parameters as well. There are several reposts bots and such that mass-post to different instances. But it's definitley a good tell it's not going down.
Another interesting factor is comments: https://imgur.com/hWT8xvF
The amount of comments per month has gone down, but not by all that much. A 10% decrease from the top or so. What's interesting here is that the decline has plateaued, which could indicate that the userbase has settled and become somewhat consistent. This is great news.
All in all, it seems like Lemmy has settled into a rather comfortable spot, with a decent amount of users, posts and comments. That is very slightly decreasing. Ideally we'd like to see this trend reverse, and perhaps that might happen naturally with due time when things have settled even more. For Lemmy I'd reckon the growth will look a bit like this. Whenever Reddit does something horrific (and it will happen more), we'll see a mass-exodus with more users over here. Then it'll decrease for a bit, settle and hopefully we can rinse and repeat. Anyway - that's some irrelevant thoughts from me on the subject.
Just wanted to post these rather good statistics!
The number of servers going down was an obvious eventuality. The actual work and cost involved running an instance is a lot heavier than many people would expect the minute said instance starts scaling up.
And almost nobody wants to put in the effort to run a instance just for themselves either and they'd also have to worry about all the stuff that goes with federating. Doesn't make sense for most.
The number of instances lemmy has (about 1,000) is not even close to the number of servers mastodon has (about 11,000), so if i am trying to be objective and look at the evidence i would say the attractiveness of lemmy at least currently has peaked.
I don't really agree. The thing is that Twitter is absolutely dogshit now for even regular old people. It's chock full of rightwing bullshit and misinfo now and only premium users float to the top of comment threads and that filters for some of the worst people on the platform. It's a majorly degraded experience. Twitter is also more of the moment and doesn't so much serve as a library of archival information well categorized into subreddits.
Reddit on the other hand has pissed a lot of people off a lot but the average person is at the most a little annoyed and just kept using the site. And it's still got 10+ years of backlogged content on it and tons of subreddits.
Also when someone leaves Twitter it's like shutting down a subreddit in a way. So as more significant people leave, more people have a reason to also leave. Nobody can unilaterally shut down a popular subreddit in the same way that a really popular twitter user can unilaterally pull up stakes and move elsewhere. They'll just open that sub back up and cram in new scab mods.
Point of the above is that Reddit's decline is nowhere near as far as Twitter yet and it has a lot of stored value and built up communities that cannot be replaced overnight. That will take years.