Number of (active) Lemmy users seems to stabilize and I think this is a great thing. Indeed we got a lot of users when reddit shutdown its API (I was among them despite being a long time oss user), many have left, but the community seems now to stabilize to ~ ½ of the big grow in june '23. I think this is very nice for lemmy, we can be proud of this project.
The stats come from: https://fedidb.org/software/lemmy
I’m from a time on the internet when a sizable forum had a few thousand people registered and a few hundred active users. For people who want a 1:1 replacement for high volume, endless scrolling social media I guess any decline is bad. But frankly I am extremely “retvrn” about the pace and size of the old internet, so I’d still be happy with even fewer users, lol.
I set up multiple profiles on different instances as there were quite a few downtime events when I started. Now things are a little more stable and I only use two. I wonder how much of that decline is from redundant profiles going dark without actually losing the user.
I wish I could view other instances as a guest. I love the voyager app so much but it doesn’t seem I can do this.
I don’t want ro set up loads of accounts just to browse.
I’m on lemm.ee which I think has de federated with a lot but still got the tankie subs. So I’ll be interested to know what I’m missing. Lemmy.world needs my email so that one can fuck off. Don’t know what else to choose.
I chose mander.xyz and feddit.nl partially because neither require an email address. I haven’t really kept track of who all they have and have not defederated from. I think both don’t defederate much. I use the block feature in Connect liberally to remove the communities I don’t care to see, like the tankies.
Take those graphs with a grain of salt. There are several websites that track activity and all of them show different results. I also assume that almost every lemmy update affects these graphs, since things did break quite a few times.
This is from the official lemmy site join-lemmy. It says 820 Servers, 41k Active users
spoiler
This is from fedidb (same site the screenshot from the post comes from). 923 Servers, 39,832 Active Users and 433,819 Total Users
spoiler
Then we have fediverse.observer. Based on that graph, monthly active users are growing. 845 Servers and 43,631 Active users and 1,944,442 Total Users
spoiler
And finally we have lemmyverse. Which uses the method to find the “sus” servers and users, so 863 Servers and 1,741,848 Actual Users
spoiler
To me personally it seems like the content is becoming more regular and better in quality overall. ¯_(ツ)_/¯
Yeah of course, it depends on the method and lot of things. Anyway, I agree with you, I’m happy with the content and the spirit of the users (less trolls and haters than on reddit or commercial social networks, more like the internet users I knew late 90s or beginning 2000s).
imo biggest thing to watch going into this year is whether or not the groups rework on Mastodon (currently listed as in-progress on their roadmap) improves federation between the two communities. At this point, how well a service federates with the larger network is probably the single most important aspect with regards to establishing natural growth. Not surprising as the strength of the fediverse is fundamentally interoperability.
Im not sure how up to date that roadmap is, but the pull request for group support in Mastodon has been open for 1.5 years now. And for reasons I dont understand it was made intentionally incompatible with Lemmy. So dont get your hopes up.
Roadmap is updated recently. They did a poll to establish priorities given the recent surge in users sometime around November.
Coming back to this topic after some time. What do you think about the private group criticism of FEP-1b12? Is this resolvable without leaving the standard set by FEP-1b12? My first instinct is yes, but I imagine you’ve given this a lot more thought than I have.
Private groups are definitely possible, in fact we are planning to implement them in Lemmy soon. I already made a pull request for local only communities which is a first step in this direction.
What defines an active user?
Users active in the month. Likely only people who have posted or commented.
I wouldn’t be surprised if further enshitification leads to periodic bumps.