cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ca/post/12971023
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!
Lemmy is big enough that we don't need to wait for that. We can grow organically, but there are still some issues that need to get worked out. 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. I rarely see high effort OC on lemmy and I think that's a big reason for it. People that create content that takes tens of hours to create aren't going to bother with a platform with no kind of verification option where they can show that they're actually the real creator and not a copycat account since you can have the same username on any instance. I think that could be fixed if there were a special instance for verified accounts only that content creators or notable individuals could use to post from.
Personally speaking, and I don't think it's too controversial of a view, but I kinda like that about lemmy.
I have come to hate "personal" focused social media and prefer "content" focused social media. I don't care about random people or someone hoping to become an internet personality, I'm here for varied content and a selection of opinions in the comments. I don't want those comments to be from the same people, and if they are, I'd prefer to be oblivious to that. I kinda like how lemmy goes further than Reddit in that it gets rid of cumulative karma counts too, hopefully means we avoid seeing a Lemmy equivalent of karmawhoring.
There was loads of high effort OC on Reddit, people typically weren't doing it to create a presence (and if they were, they couldn't have picked a harder platform to accomplish that, other than maybe 4chan)
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.
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.
That's not an issue. Reddit was equally anonymous yet it did just fine (relatively speaking). The different users' usernames that can theoretically appear the same can be fixed by making it mandatory to show your instance next to your username, rather than hiding it if you change your default username. But even without that anyone can hover over your profile name and see which instance you're from, so really you can't actually deceive people regarding the nature of your account.
I think it's too hard to remember both a username and an instance for every user of note. My proposition is simply there being one instance for people actually trying to create a presence. It wouldn't impact any other users anonymity.
Bepis
That makes me think they it might be a good idea to have an instance called @therealdeal.com or something. You could even make it a complete service where you provide services for promotional/marketing activities, etc.