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!
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It’s interesting none the less. One explanation for the plateau is that many people signed up for difference instances, either because they didn’t know how federation worked or they disagreed with the instance and wanted to be somewhere else. Not as many people necessarily went back to reddit as the numbers might suggest.
deleted by creator
I didn’t really look at all the little letters but I like how line go up
Spoken like a true oil and gas stakeholder. Or any other stakeholder, for that matter.
I’ve tried to go back to Reddit here or there, and I literally can’t do it. I only visit it for very select communities that don’t exist here.
The post frequency isn’t the same here, but the quality of the posts and the comments is so much higher. I’ve said this before, but current Lemmy reminds me of Reddit in the early 2010’s before it got shitty. One of the great things about early Reddit was that it was more mature, people tended to assume good intentions more often, and it promoted logical dialogue. That has VERY MUCH been lost in Reddit’s current incarnation.
I blame the karma system. I’ve never seen actually popular forums, which never had anything similar to a karma system, fall into the farming abyss.
They all died for reasons other than having a karma system.
