[Lemmy active users] 28th of September was the only day with more monthly active Lemmy users than the previous one, probably thanks to the release of Boost for Lemmy

I've been following the stats closely. There were actually several times that the active users ticked down and then ticked up the next day, the most recent being September 19/20. But I suspect that may be a statistical artifact, whereas the increase on September 28 is legit. It looks like about 1000 new accounts were created/became active on that day.

User attrition has slowed significantly in September compared to August. We should stabilize somewhere in 30,000 range for MAUs before the end of the year, which is not too shabby. We are unlikely to see another big wave of growth until the code is significantly more mature, but the current userbase is fairly well established and self sufficient.

I can't wait until we get that next wave so we can have more sports fans and humanities types, but you guys are alright for now 😅

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As I said a bit lower in this thread, on Lemmy World we recently switched the default view from 'local' to 'all' for the new sign-ups. But it might be a good thing to do this once, for all existing users. Ofcourse with a proper announcement and an explanation on how to change this to 'local' or even 'subscribed'. It might give communities on other instances a bit more exposure as well.

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- Sounds great. I mean, given the size of lemmy.world it sure doesn't hurt it and it will certainly distribute more user attention to smaller communities, which will hopefully activate smaller communities from remote instance, which will in turn make the overall conversation quality on lemmy better.
  
  Excited to see whether it will be a noticable effect but I would think so
  
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It looks like about 1000 new accounts were created/became active on that day.

I remember @antik@lemmy.world mentioning similar numbers, so that's probably this.

We should stabilize somewhere in 30,000 range for MAUs before the end of the year

That's what I foresee as well.

so we can have more sports fans and humanities types

Discoverability of those communities is probably the first issue to fix. I tried to address it a while back, maybe I should do another one of those posts: https://discuss.tchncs.de/post/2410183

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- We changed the default view for new users on LW from "local" to "all" communities a few days ago.
  
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Permanently Deleted

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- It looks like the majority of communities struggle with not enough content/discussions
  
  This is true, but also subjective. How do you define enough? Enough to doomscroll or enough to check for 10 minutes daily? All we really need to be self sufficient is enough content to keep people coming back regularly, we don't need to replicate reddit.
  
  many de-facto are blogs of mods/creators where others are passive subscribers.
  
  This seems like an exaggeration. Most communities that have quality content also have quality discussion, in my experience.
  
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Did you notice that the Average Lemmy Comments by Day looks really weird? Some of the sudden jumps could be attributed to real life events, but I’m more inclined to think there’s something buggy going on with the way three numbers are logged. Besides, there’s also a sudden dip!

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Just came in from reddit, so from a newbie point of view so far so good, altho the content and users are not as expanded as reddit i think its a matter of time. people are haphazardly looking for alternatives and the only reason people stay is because of the interaction. I for instance immediately tried looking up the threads i was subbed to reddit as well. Its there just not as big and ill gladly trade it in instead of dealing with reddit any longer.

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Be the change! There was a community dedicated to rail enthusiasts in my city that I really liked on Reddit, and it's not super active here but I'm doing my bit and trying to get something posted everyday. It's taken a bit, but the people have come!

Also I think it's one of those things where there are actually people there but nobody knows what to post, or is worried they won't get any engagement. My experience is that there's actually a lot of people that just subbed to the communities here that are similar to subs they liked and then either forgot about it or again, don't want to be the only one talking

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- Yeah absolutely agree with you! When people started "protesting" in the absolute most hypocritical ways i knew it was done (people joining /place out of "spite" was an absolute joke to me)
  
  And in my experience only 2 types of people roam reddit now, the ones who dont give an ef (and thats fine) and the people who complain but secretly don't know they are in a unhealthy relationship and just stick with it because thats all they know and just like to complain.
  
  So id we all put in a bit of effort in it itll be just as big as reddit.
  
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welcome!

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Welcome!

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Welcome!

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Damn, 40k monthly active users on lemmy? That's much less than I expected. And the number's dropping.

Well, at least for me, there's no going back to reddit.

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I wouldnt be surprised if much of the extremism on lemmy puts a lot of users off, tbh. Ive been seeing more and more remarks about it.

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- Extremism? I've found it to be much less extreme than says /r/europe or /r/conservative
  
  What kind of extremism are you talking about?
  
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- Yeah. Commies can eat a dick. Huge turn off for this place.
  
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Monthly active users are an important metric for companies trying to sell advertising. It's less important for a community based application where profits are irrelevant. What is more important is how valuable the content is to you, and if it's not, you can put in an effort to provide content you, and others, find valuable.

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- Although less important in other places, knowing that there probably about 400 people sharing most of the content (1% of 40k), is still important.
  
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- I think a negative trend is really important... if we are shrinking we are shrinking. Content will decline if the trend isn't reversed.
  
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Fuck Reddit, but I also feel like Boost will give us a boost. It's got some features I've yet to find on other apps and hopefully will make Lemmy a little easier for people like me who made the switch

It's also pretty much exactly like the app for reddit was which had a big following so hopefully will make it easier for former boost on Reddit users to switch to lemmy

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The activity seems to reflect those numbers.

Happy you're enjoying it!

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We need more normal users on lemmy tbh. So far, my impression of lemmy is that it's full of tech enthusiast. I'm one too, so I largely enjoyed it, but eventually it gets annoying and tiring listening to tech bros and FOSS diehards whining about something not being open source or something. I just want more normal content from normal people. I hope boost and sync gets more former Reddit users to sign up.

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Porn and Linux everywhere.

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- I wish there was porn everywhere
  
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- I feel like you're implying that there are categories of content that don't belong to one of those two groups and tbh I can't think of any
  
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Just have to be patient while reddit continues to ruin themselves. They just got rid of ad personalization opt-out, what's next?

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I joined reddit using boost. So it's natural to join lemmy using boost. Kinda feels like home ig.

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I had already stopped using Reddit, just waiting for boost to drop. The only content I find lacking is adult content. Memes, gaming, and news all have enough users here that even though it's less than reddit I'm not missing out. Maybe it will get me to spend a little less time on my phone. But between this and Mastodon I'm happy to pioneer a new kind of social media.

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Do you mean porn? There’s a whole instance; lemmyNSFW.

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- Unfortunately, I'm gay. I'll see if they have anything I like.
  
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Nice, Boost was definitely mentioned in a lot of the applications I approved.

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Hey, good to see you here!

I was wondering, would it be possible to have !sexmemes@lemmyf.uk as NSFW for the whole community again?

I get that a few posts might need to be tagged as such from time to time, but most of the content there is mostly SFW, and quite funny.

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- You too!
  
  It is tagged NSFW now. I messed around with in not being a few times but have left it tagged for a while now. It definitely gets more activity when not tagged. Which way were you meaning in your post? You confused me with the last part.
  
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This thread, while pointing out that there's some negative trends in active users that can be concerning, actually gave me some hope that there's many more people here with interests besides Linux and communism. Honestly I find this promising for the long term existence of Lemmy.

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Hey now, we've also got anime, flurries, soil scientists and mechanical keyboards.

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- Are you a soil scientist furry who likes anime?
  
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- I would also like Magic the Gathering and Warhammer. Lol but I still haven't gotten the navigation part down yet
  
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I created an account on Lemmy.world earlier this summer but it remained dormant for the most part because I tend to participate in these kinds of forums from my phone. It's similar to a preference to watching movies and television shows on a television. I wasn't streaming until apps and services became available to stream and watch directly on my TV. I just wasn't going to watch on my phone or computer except once in a blue moon.

After experimenting with several apps, Boost for Reddit was what I preferred and used for a long while back there. As soon as Boost became available for Lemmy, the ease of participating here for me was as smooth as silk. For others that Boost was a fave with, it's probably the same.

It's great that activity is on the rise on alternatives such as Lemmy.

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I can confirm it's the same for me. I was actually trying to avoid lemmy for a while and would only hope on for 5 minutes or so a day, but now that boost is here it feels really natural to want to participate, and even just scroll top for a while

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Kind of the same for me. Just to add that I only heard about Boost after the whole thing came about

Tried some apps, and decided to wait until this one became available.

It's a very similar experience IMHO, love the customization options.

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Thanks for your feedback, and welcome!

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With all the political extremism and propaganda on here I'd be surprised if numbers stabilize any time soon.

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You'll never fully be able to escape crazies in a network built out of human beings. That said:

It's important to remember a lot of people in the Lemmy-verse are there because they were banned from Reddit for being too obnoxious.

The next update will allow users to block entire instances which should help cut down on some of that
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- Also, moderation here is way more lenient than other platforms.
  
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Depends on what you're here for, reddit had a bunch of extremists but they were cut out of r/all so it was less obvious. Here you get a glimpse of everything and should take care of your home feed by subscribing to what you want to see. On my first scroll of lemmy I start on my home feed, then browse all if feel l haven't found anything to read, adding to my subscribed communities if I find anything good.

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- Seems like instance admins already sort of have the ability to hide communities from all, like how Reddit would hide certain subs from r/all
  
  https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/2943#issuecomment-1581485335
  
  https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/pull/2055
  
  I think it's still not in the UI yet but maybe coming soon, and 3rd party UIs/apps could implement it
  
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I've been just blocking every political sub

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- I've been blocking most as well, but I don't like that solution because social media is the de facto modern town square. We need to have these conversations somehow.
  
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- Same. I get enough political slop everywhere else.
  
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Finding an app I liked really helped improve the experience, since it made things feel less clunky. Most of my use is through mobile now.

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There's 4 million posts on lemmy a day? Where?? I go thru maybe 500 on top day and by the end of it I'm in things with like 3 upvotes and 0 comments

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There are instances that just mirror content from other sites which leads to a ton of posts with zero discussion. They have been defederated by the larger instances because it spammed the all-feed.

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I think a big part of the problem is the sign up page, which is being worked on. Also, lemmy.world goes offline just about every day and is one of the larger instances so lots of new users go there and then have a bad experience. And it needs to be made easier for users to find out about all the third party clients available to browse Lemmy because the default client leaves much to be desired.

Most people won't go out of their way to switch instances when lemmy.world goes offline enough to make them quit the fediverse, or try navigating around the base client and become upset at all the unnecessary button bloat and missing basic features like blocking an instance.

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lemmy.world goes offline just about every day

Is it still the case now? I was under the impression the site was much more stable since a few weeks: https://lemmy-world.statuspage.io/

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- I haven't noticed any outages recently. I'm pretty sure the situation has gotten better at this point.
  
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- Maybe. I switched to lemm.ee about a month ago
  
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Is it possible that people browsing anonymously and/or logging in with the same account on multiple apps influenced the numbers?

I admit that I've been bouncing between Sync and Boost since the release. I like both for slightly different reasons.

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I think users are only logged in users, to be confirmed

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- I thought monthly active users was the number of accounts that have made a comment or post in the past month.
  
  Logging in with the same account on different apps shouldn't influence the numbers at all.
  
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Precipitous drop in average posts on the same day, so definitely possible something was counted twice.

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~3.5M posts per day across ~40k active users?

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I think that's total. As servers go offline, the total number of posts can go down. I guess "average" refers to the total posts on the network, checked every hour or whatever, then averaged across the day.

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Bots and automated tools to be blamed here if stats are accurate.

I cleaned up my feed but now I only have around 7-15 posts in the feed section each day and ~3 are interesting.

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I've been on Lemmy for a while but just disliked the previous app options. Now with boost its becoming a daily thing to check in! Love boost

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Glad to hear!

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the 30th also gained slightly over the 29th, from 38,867 up to 38,940

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I personally had 4 active accounts in August, until I settled on one instance I like. Very likely many others did the same, so these numbers are far from perfect.

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