It is probably due to a number of people stopping using their alts after some instance hopping.

Also a few people who came to see how it was, and weren’t attracted enough to become regular visitors.

Curious to see at which number we’ll stabilize.

Next peak will probably happen after either major features release (e.g. exhaustive mod tools allowing reluctant communities to move from Reddit) or the next Reddit fuck up (e.g. removing old.reddit)

Stats on each server: https://lemmy.fediverse.observer/list

        • Hmm… I think we need to conduct some exit interviews to gather data before we start making any assumptions.

          “Hello, you have selected ‘Delete Account’ is this because you are a Nazi?”

          Y/N (circle one)

          “You have selected ‘no’ and yet you still wish to delete your account? Why are you lying about not being a Nazi then?”

          • About as useful as the ‘have you ever or are you planning to participate in a genocide’ tickbox on immigration forms.

            Although there’s a troubling part of me that worries that Nazism has been normalised enough that people would willingly say yes.

      • Yeah, I tend to think that most of the people who left wouldn’t be valuable members of the community anyway. Maybe they’re too impatient to deal with software that isn’t fully mature, maybe they can’t deal with the fact that most Lemmy instances are somewhere between leftish and outright communism, or maybe the somewhat chaotic nature of the fediverse turns them off. Whatever. I hope they find something that suits them.

        I also hope, for their own sake, that the “something” doesn’t involve going back to reddit.

    • As I said in a comment below, I would like this to be a signal for interest groups to choose one of the dozens communities they have, stick to one and make it grow.

      Looking at gaming or books, always seems detrimental to have the . world, .ml, .sh.itjust.works and so on with the same content posted everywhere.

  • Switching between “Active” and “Top [1h/6h/12h]” at different times of the day has provided me with enough content & interactions to make Lemmy my new home. I always was a lurker on the old site, no comment nor post, not even an account. Now, I’m slowly trying to break from this habit. Being on Lemmy feels like I’m not shouting in the void; when a platform gets too big, you get lost in the crowd. It’s always nice to see recurring usernames on different communities.

  • And at the beginning everyone was worried about “Eternal September”. It’s only been two months.

    People will come in waves, instances and communities will grow and die, just like how it was on reddit, we’ll probably start seeing meme/politics free or even more specialized instances soon. But all of this is going to take time.

    The turning point will be when companies/websites start spinning up their own Lemmy instances as their official one to replace their forums, which I think will happen.

    So, being on Lemmy is a long term investment for me.

  • I dropped off because I am unbelievably sick of seeing the same thing posted across 20 different communities. No matter which sort I am using, my front page is CLUTTERED with the same crap.

  • There are many fatal problems on Lemmy, worst of all is you can’t click this link /c/books and see every /c/book on every Lemmy instance of the fediverse. This is out of convenience to moderators and it is killing Lemmy. One people figure out communities only exist on a single instance, the promise of federation is broken and they fuck off.

  • Pretty sure it’s going to just be like 12 of us. If the third party app thing on reddit didn’t drive users here, unfortunately I don’t think anything else will. At this point if you are already content with the reddit app it’s going to be a hard sell to say, yeah come check out Lemmy, it’s like reddit but if you have a question about your sick betta fish instead of getting a helpful answer in a few minutes, you need to first create a betta fish community, then go back on reddit and recruit users to your Lemmy community. Post content on it daily to maintain interest, and then, if you are really lucky, ask your question and wait a few months and maybe if your fish is still alive (doubtful), you might get a response, but it will probably be just be an anticapitalist shit-post. I’m sorry to say it is this way, but this be the way that it is.

  • Regardless of where the loss in users is coming from the major takeaway here is that we are firmly in a reinvestment phase. This will likely last until Reddit does something stupid related to the IPO but in the absence of that we will probably not see a significant uptick in growth again without major improvements to the threadiverse as a whole. That means that those of us who are personally invested in the growth of the threadiverse should be taking this time to develop the tools and features necessary to weather the next wave more gracefully than the last.

    One of the biggest issue I see here is still community growth. Growing certain communities is significantly harder than others and if you don’t have a lot of crossposting potential it can be damn near impossible. As it stands, I do not see a way to fix this situation without a hot and active ranking system that takes into account the number of users active in the particular community. As part of a change like this I think we would be best served by consolidating a significant portion of the small dead communities. I think we should also strongly prefer specialized instances like lemmy.film or literature.cafe to truly take advantage of the special attention these sorts of instances are capable of providing particular topics. As it stands only a handful of them have enough broader threadiverse activity to be truly useful.

    Another thing I would like to suggest is a change in recruitment strategy. At this point it seems like we are unlikely to pull a significant amount of users from Reddit without more reddit-policy-driven migration, but there are tons of highly educated and engaged users over on Mastodon that would make serious positive contributions to the tone and quality of the discourse over here. For some reason there seems to be minimal overlap between the two communities and that blows my mind. Not only that but I actively see folks disparaging Mastodon in fediverse related communities on a regular basis (and even sometimes in the Mastodon communities themselves). As far as I can tell, these are largely lingering sentiments from a Reddit/Twitter dichotomy. Remember, as things develop the lines between threaded social media and microblogging are likely to blur. A significant number of Mastodon apps already provide a threaded view and one of kbins explicit goals is very much to bridge the gap. With this in mind, Mastodon (and federated microblogging more generally) seems like the best source for new potential users.

    • The small comms I’m subscribed to don’t show up in any sorting, I have to actually visit them to see there was a new post. I heard the devs are doing something to improve it, so hopefully that’ll make small comms more viable

    • I think we should also strongly prefer specialized instances like lemmy.film or literature.cafe to truly take advantage of the special attention these sorts of instances are capable of providing particular topics.

      Definitely

    • Another thing I would like to suggest is a change in recruitment strategy. At this point it seems like we are unlikely to pull a significant amount of users from Reddit without more reddit-policy-driven migration, but there are tons of highly educated and engaged users over on Mastodon that would make serious positive contributions to the tone and quality of the discourse over here. For some reason there seems to be minimal overlap between the two communities and that blows my mind. Not only that but I actively see folks disparaging Mastodon in fediverse related communities on a regular basis (and even sometimes in the Mastodon communities themselves). As far as I can tell, these are largely lingering sentiments from a Reddit/Twitter dichotomy. Remember, as things develop the lines between threaded social media and microblogging are likely to blur. A significant number of Mastodon apps already provide a threaded view and one of kbins explicit goals is very much to bridge the gap. With this in mind, Mastodon (and federated microblogging more generally) seems like the best source for new potential users.

      A thing to look out for is that the microblog fedi (outside the big handful of instances that fill .world’s role there) is strongly in favor of stricter instance-level moderation compared to the more “individualistic” view a lot of the Reddit migratees tend to have. If we want people from the microblog fedi to participate we (collectively) need to up our moderation game. (And in my personal opinion instances like .world have grown too large to accomodate any reasonable expectation of moderation, except for select individual communities set up there)

      • stricter instance-level moderation compared to the more “individualistic” view

        I definitely think letting users block posts and/or comments from specific instances is way better than full defederation (maybe the instance admin could set a default block list for new users)

        but now I’m thinking maybe communities should be able to block instances too

        found a feature request for it https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/3022

      • If we want people from the microblog fedi to participate we (collectively) need to up our moderation game. (And in my personal opinion instances like .world have grown too large to accomodate any reasonable expectation of moderation, except for select individual communities set up there)

        Improved moderation tools would help, however are you familiar with the filtering/muting tools available on Mastodon/Firefish/Misskey? These, coupled with an ability by individual users to block entire instances, help relieve some of the need for more moderators to help by enabling individuals to essentially self-moderate/curate their experiences as desired.

        I think both improved moderation and individual filtering/muting tools would help greatly both to encourage microblog folks to join in, and make the experience better for those already here.

      • This is a good point. Maybe indicates that recruiting to instances like beehaw.org would be more effective. Once they’re here though I think that is exactly the sort of community that would be likely to take on moderator positions.

    •  OrangeSlice   ( @14specks@lemmy.ml ) 
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      188 months ago

      Key difference is that Bitcoin people want/need their numbers to go up,up,up as a measure of success.

      Here, we are hoping to cultivate a healthy community (at either/both the instance and fediverse level). From my experience on various subreddits, focusing on growth is not a good way to do this.

      Communities are defined more by who is not allowed in than by who is in the community. Lemmy phase 2 kicked off back in June, and it still needs some time to find its footing at a sustainable rate of growth.

      • I said it somewhere yesterday, but community building is more about moderation and organic growth than it is getting everyone on board all at once. The threadiverse is fantastic but its also running on a pair of software with substantial bugs and basic features missing

      • Key difference is that Bitcoin people want/need their numbers to go up,up,up as a measure of success.

        Nah, you’re making the mistake of only paying attention to bitcoin short term when the price goes up, so you only perceive people who get in short term while the number goes up.

  • That’s a personal opinion, but I would also be happy to see some groups spread on different communities to decide together on one community and make it grow together.

    Browsing /all and seeing still another book or gaming community first post always makes me question if that post would not be better used in an established community.

    And I know this will happen naturally overtime, I guess sometimes I would just like things to happen a bit faster and on a organized way.

    •  Hot Saucerman   ( @dingus@lemmy.ml ) 
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      158 months ago

      I personally don’t mind having multiple communities on different servers because some of these servers go down… a lot.

      Makes sense to have “backups” sort of littered throughout the Fediverse, imho. I like seeing what different groups have to say about the subjects, too. Like, a thread will be wildly different on lemmy.world and beehaw.org, because I’m fairly sure beehaw is still defederated with lemmy.world, meaning I’ll see very different groups of people on each instance’s community.

      •  Kichae   ( @Kichae@kbin.social ) 
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        It would be nice if servers could be tuned to prioritize locally hosted communities over remote ones. There’s a real opportunity for each community on the same topic to have distinct flavours and cultures, but so long as they all appear to be the same damn thing and appear with the same frequency in the content stream, it’s never going to happen. It’s not like people really look at the remote server domain.

        It’s really nice that the Local feed exists, but when people just bulk subscribe to 8 different communities with the same name, stick to their subscription list, and then treat them all as the same place, that just kills a lot of potential for heterogeneity.

        • It’s really nice that the Local feed exists, but when people just bulk subscribe to 8 different communities with the same name, stick to their subscription list, and then treat them all as the same place, that just kills a lot of potential for heterogeneity.

          That’s what people are used to from Reddit. They’re used to having one giant subreddit about one topic. That’s why everyone’s centralized themselves on lemmy.world or kbin.social. That’s why one of the most requested features is the ability to make “multireddits” (or otherwise combining all different communities into one)

          This is a culture problem to solve, technical solutions can only do so much to help.

            • If you are explicitly aware that different instances specialize in different concerns I can absolutely see the use for a feature like that, but most people want a feature of that sort just so they can “paper over” federation and pretend to have one giant community with one giant moderation policy / culture / priorities.

              And that is before getting to the absolutely horrible idea of automatically generating multi-communities by merging communities with the exact same name regardless of their instance.

  • It’s probably more likely that we’re losing more of the “Fediverse is just Reddit 2.0” kind of people - which is great because that’s 10k or w/e less Redditors that’ll go back on the platform they actually want to use.

    Fediverse doesn’t have an ocean of communities and content (yet), but that’s fine with me since I’m more active here and trying to offer more insightful comments outside of the Reddit staple “this” kind of comments.

  • Tankies and American democrats are scaring away the hoes. Source: I’m a hoe that has barely been coming here lately. There’s not enough people here for niche communities to thrive, and the front page has been getting worse and worse. Today I saw this post on the front page, pretty close to the top.

    https://lemmy.ca/post/3725038

    I’d like to be clear that I don’t care who americans voted for 7 years ago, but that’s not why I don’t think I should be seeing this. It’s just, sheesh man. THIS is what the community wants and thinks is important in 2023? I’m trying to find a niche amongst THIS?

    It’s very similar to my problem with Gemini and every other “alt tech” platform I’ve tried to join. Worst case scenario it becomes a sewer for everyone who got banned from other sites for political extremism. Best case scenario, you end up with nothing but the demographic of upper class americans who do nothing but sit on their computers all day, which is not my scene either.

    I’m starting to wonder if I should just leave the internet altogether.

      • It’s so silly. People around the world explain their culture and don’t assume everyone knows about it, give their location appropriately, and do not believe they are the center of the world. It’s like:

        Random question posted: Why is eating octopus more and more popular?

        Random user: In my region, we really don’t eat much octopus. I am from Guadalajara, Jalisco, Mexico. We eat red meat much more. But I guess octopus is growing in popularity worldwide due to [expanation].

        Another random user: Where? Here in Portugal it has always been “popular”.

        Average American user: Midwestern here. I don’t see octopus much and I don’t like it. Call me stereotypical, but I love my meat and T-Ravs. Anyway, I believe the popularity is due to Biden’s administration. [Details about Biden’s changes]. …So that all America has seen this rise, especially on the East Coast."

        🤷🏻‍♀️ …Why?

    • Regardless of platform, if you don’t want to see politics then block the political communities from your feed. The article itself is pretty factual and I don’t see why any real conservative would support the clown show that is the GOP right now.

    • It’s true, the front page, as it stands, is awful. I have to filter out so many trump/elon crap and (for nsfw accounts) so many sexual fetishes I didn’t even know it existed. “Active” and “Hot” are infested with (sorry guys) low effort memes, and I have to click for “top 6 hours” or “top 12 hours” for something that starts looking interesting. Yes, I know the big R and other social media have the same problem, but that’s not the point.

      Now, this is where the content “sorting algorithm” becomes a thing to “boost engagement”… but sure we can do better?

      Personally, I would like to see more active posts from small communities or instances over most populous ones. Self-posts, even better. What if there was a user preference for frontpage sorting?