Average Lemmy Active Users by Month

I don't know about you but I was just waiting for an excuse. I ain't ever going back. It's a brave new world for me, part of shifting my whole suite to FOSS. Leaving the old internet behind me.

What this shows us is that more people are joining lemmy, but even more people are either leaving or going into lurker mode, as Lemmy only counts people who have commented or posted in that time period as active users, whereas most social media counts any activity while logged in as active. You have to realize that people who use reddit as Google search results don't usually interact with the content there and most won't even make an account.

On the upside, with fewer people, it's easy to get noticed here just by contributing good content since you don't really get drowned out here because of the democratic upvote based sorting instead of black box personalized recommendation algorithms. So with relatively low amount of effort, you can make sure your content is being seen instead of relying on analytics and metrics.

The last thing to in mind that Lemmy is only one aspect of ActivityPub, and Mastodon's growth is currently the highest right now because of the ecosystem created by the whale fall of Twitter, which indirectly grows Lemmy as Mastodon users can post directly to federated Lemmy communities.

For anyone panicking, this is exactly like what happened with the transition from ICQ to AOL messenger, from MySpace to Facebook, from 9gag/etc to Reddit, and so on.

Website makes a mistake, some people leave. Makes another, more leave. Each time this happens, more 'main' people of said website leave. Hell, I already saw PoppinKREAM here, so that's a great start.

So this is exactly how it always goes. The fact it is still here means it's staying. Look at Threads, or Metaverse, whatever those things are. All dying or dead, barely lasted. Lemmy is still here, people are still posting, so just keep doing what you're doing. It's already working.

I don’t care that the fediverse has a ton of traffic. It may not have the most users, but it definitely has the best

11 million comments this month. 11 million comments from people smart enough to leave behind the other. 11 million comments, likely largely from actual humans.

Lemmy is thriving.

All the people returning and forgetting what reddit did and will continue to do. Then the next time reddit messes up, they will come back. 😔

Edit: other stats seem pretty good though! Unless i am misunderstanding them.

This graph is much more reassuring:

https://lemmy.fediverse.observer/dailystats

We are stable, even slightly growing in the last few days.

so there was a wave of sign ups with the Reddit drama, and then people got bored. the graph looks about right to me.

Here's the thing though... I've been on Reddit for over a decade before Lemmy, and whilst there may be less interaction the interactions themselves have been far more sincere. People are more willing to engage, and even with this random comment there's a chance someone would comment below.

The community feel of Lemmy is something, at least I've found, Reddit had lost a very long time ago.

Sort of a quality Vs quantity thing I guess?

Lurker here. Just writing this as my first ever comment to push those numbers.

I dont get the hysteria, personally.

I came here to escape the crowds, not migrate with them.

It doesn't matter. I get all my news here and I can comment if I want. That's enough

FWIW Lemmy has fully replaced Reddit as my go-to toilet reading material, and I'm sure there are many other lurkers around here who don't post much and thus don't show up in these stats. The more niche communities are still lacking in content, yes, but these things are best left to grow organically over a long period of time to maintain quality. It was the same on Reddit too before the enshittification escalated.

Zoomed out graph including some months before the join wave

Users/month are relatively stable now at 33x users/month compared to pre join wave (users/month is people who have posted or commented)

For whatever anecdotal observations are worth, I've recently been seeing a huge uptick in activity from the userbase that is here. Maybe it's been driven by posts like this one or memes about growing Lemmy, but people seem to be posting and commenting more than usual.

For anybody interested, the monthly active users including voters is 131,150 (131k)

The one in the graph only takes into account people who have made a post or comment

Edit: The halfyear active users including voters is 253,166 (253k)

If reddit taught me anything, it's that a growing network isn't necessarily a good thing.

Meh, lemmy is already interesting enough to kill time and past that I don’t care

BAD GRAPH, Y-AXIS STARTS AT 20K

Now that I've goten addicted to the block feature, I'm probably never going back to reddit. Dont like the content from specific servers while I'm browsing the top pages? Block, they stop existsing. Find myself getting baited into low effort arguements? Block and move on. I feel faaaarrr less stressed out lately

Keep it in mind

We lost active users because of this

• beehaw has been defed from lemmy.world, sh.itjust.works and other instances
• some instances like lemmy.film and fmhy went offline

First of all, rooting for decentralized net 100%. Watching Tumblr, Reddit, Twitter, etc. all get screwed over from the top down sucks. I really appreciate the strong community here - having it smaller and more engaging encourages participation and makes it feel a little more human.

However, I'm considering leaving Lemmy just because somehow it's even more cynical than reddit, and I'm losing interest in opening the app if it's just 99% downers. I mean almost every article is just crushingly bad news. The world is in a rough state for sure, and staying informed is really important! But trying to live on and find the good is near impossible here.

(Yes, I'm subbed to upliftingnews. That's the 1%.)

Is this a demographics thing, or am I just subbed in all the wrong places? Maybe a bit of both?

I know this is just anecdotal, but I have literally not seen a single mention of Lemmy anywhere online or in the news in the last 3 months, including on Reddit. "Build it and they will come" only gets you so far...

IDGAF IM HERE TO STAY. LEMMY IS COOL AND WTF EVEN IS A SNOO 😤😤😤

I think it would be wise for us to adopt a hashtag system so you can search by topic as opposed to by community. We're so segmented into smaller sub communities and different servers that it's difficult to find what you want to read.

Weird, because I feel like it is more populated that it was after the huge influx of users because of the APIcalypse.

The actual content is way better now than it was the first couple of months after the Reddit thing. Initially a lot of the comments were either Reddit related or people trying to force communities that didn't necessarily have the population to survive, yet. That's all fallen away now and the content feels much more organic. Someone opening a Lemmy instance for the first time is going to find today's front page much more engaging than what it looked like in June/July.

Lemmy is becoming its own thing rather than a reflection of Reddit.

In some ways a lot more responsive as well. The news that Kissinger died was all over Lemmy for hours before I noticed one post about it crack the front page of Reddit, for example.

I don't care I'm here to stay. Only community I miss is formuladank for F1 shitposting. Been trying to get it going here but no traction yet. Everything else, Lemmy 4 life.

I used Reddit for years and maybe posted twice, here i just feel more compelled to participate. I find it hard to put into words, but Reddit feels like social media, which I hate, and lemmy feels more like an old school forum.

Why would more users be better? As far as I'm concerned whatever number of users are right now is the right one.

Permanently Deleted

I feel dumb for having to ask but what exactly is "active users half year" vs "active uses monthly"?

Is half year just mean one or more comments/upvotes in the last 6months?

Don't let yourself be fooled. Lemmy is doing great. It's got a lot more user than half a year ago and it will continue to grow. You should look at the bigger perspective here. People are starting to understand the point of the Fediverse more and more and it will eventually take over enshitified platforms such as Reddit

It's ok, it's just us cool kids left

Don't worry fam. Spez has several moves left in the Elonshitification playbook.

He hasn't even begun to malign ethnic or religious groups, accept no blame, and blame said groups' advocacy organizations for the problem!

i comment more than monthly on lemmy

Unfortunately it’s mostly bot posts and people of all the same thought processes with nothing to add to any conversation.

I think its because we aren't allowed by default to post images, which I completely understand after what happened back a couple months ago. I've been using Lemmy for more then 4 months actively but yet I still don't have permission to post pictures because of the fact that I'm too lazy to even try to get it enabled. This is a major reason why we aren't seeing a lot of content.

Also, this tends to be mostly a leftist leaning app, so maybe some people get drawn away.

Sorry, dumb question but what the heck does Active users Halfyear mean? They've been on for a half year and are still active?

Went to the website link looking for context and couldn't find it so I'll ask here. What is the significance of the blue Halfyear line?

Imma here, just a lurker

Don't pressure yourself to become an active monthly user. Just take it easy. I came here to have a peace with me not constantly shitposting to gain karma.

I am now an active user, lurking over

This place, it's ... beautiful. I've joined the communities with the topics i'm interested in and the posts I see are only (mostly) what I asked for.

The average person is reasonably educated, capable of arguing a point in good faith. It's not you against the world or the world against you here, it's more like, did you consider it from this point of view. That's nice!

The trolls and corporations have gotten board and are going home. The people with 2 backup accounts have stopped using them because their primary choice stays up, online and stable.

We could use a little extra mod tools and discovery, but this is a nice laid back place to relax and catch up on some random subject matter or ask for a little help in between life and sleep.

I gotta be honest...I am hanging on by a threat. The communities that I was engaged with on Reddit before the Snoopacolypse were pretty niche. I wasn't there for r/funny or r/videos, etc. I found similar communities on Lemmy, but they have soooooo little activity. I have to modify my sort just to see content, as its so old. When there are posts, they typically get very little discussion.

I am on Lem.ee, and I have the hardest time posting anything from mobile. It looks like it fails, and if I sort by new, it isn't there and never shows up - HOWEVER, I start getting replies, so someone is seeing it somehow.

I detest what reddit did and is still doing - but Lemmy is not filling that void for me, and its frustrating.

I like that I can somewhat recognize usernames across all the lemmy post I comment in. Im not sure if anyone really notices me or recognizes my username and goes 'Oh hey its smokeydope again' but I do that for some other active lemmy users and it starts to feel like we are all acquaintances working together to make an interesting experience for eachother and not just competing for attention without adknowledging eachother.

meh. who am i, a fuckin executive? i don't care about graphs

frankly, it feels like lemmy has both grown and gotten worse - it attracted enough attention that there are now morons, bootlickers, corporate simps, and dickheads posting now, and upvoting each other's posts

Frustrating because of all the decentralized platforms lemmy feels the closest to the original. I’m still on Reddit because there’s more there but the app fucking sucks so much.

I'm contributing because I'm a bit of a meme repository and I get a more positive reception here than I do on Reddit.

Lemmy is in a healthy state.

But what we forget is that not long ago Lemmy was very empty at least in my experience. So I left for some period, but when I came back July this year it was just completely changed. And it stayed this way, I don't need reddit anymore personally

Still on Lemmy exclusively, but it's not my first time using a reddit alternative. This is normal. A large influx of users when reddit fucks up, but some slowly migrate back. Until reddit fucks up again. The problem is none of the alternatives survive long term.

How many people made 2-3 accounts to compensate for outages? Less outages means less alts being active .

Of course that won't accout for the whole amount of people leaving, but I bet if we could get that metric it wouldn't seem near as bad

This tells me there's like 35K super cool people in the world, everyone else is mid at best.

Hey, that's me

I mean, isn't this exactly what we would expect? Big influx of people when reddit does something unpopular and people want alternatives, then a decrease as the anger fades and people either decide they don't like Lemmy for some reason, or just settle down into their normal, less active amount of posting, stabilizing at a number of users lower than the peak but higher than before the influx. Assuming that Lemmy still is around the next time Reddit gets people mad, it'll happen again, just like how Mastodon gets an influx of new users whenever Twitter does something to upset it's userbase.

I have to admit that I still go back to Reddit regularly. There‘s just (still) more interesting / engaging content and more interaction there. Although I would be happy to go „all in fediverse“.

If I could post images, there would be more content... I don't understand why I can't.

Looks like the rate of decline is slowing. I bet it starts trending the other direction soon.

Juuuust keeping the lights on.

I think we'll need a more polished, tuned, crisper product in order to actually retain a significant userbase of less techy sorts. Which is probably still some time away.

For better or for worse, though, I don't think the social media landscape is going to change too much in the foreseeable future.

But really, this isn't good enough. It's lacking the layer of polish that the mainstream public expects, it's basically still in alpha. Development takes time is all.

Oh no! Anyway...

On my phone both lines are the same color.

So every month is higher than the month 6 months prior, that seems pretty good. Obviously won't be true 6 months after that July but certainly speaks to the community that has grown here and remained here.

buggy, infrequent updates, lack of content, an ideological hive mind...is anyone really surprised?

What is considered as active ? Is someone connecting to his account and lurking considered active ? Or, someone who just up/downvote without commenting or posting ?

Latest Jerboa release doesn't work with Lemmy 0.19 so i spend less time here

Quality over quantity. Reddit trying way too hard to capture the "normie" users is exactly what began its downfall.

Ooof, Dwindling

Huh, apparently my phone's web browser is still logged in.

Anyway, I can't use my account anymore. My password stopped working and the reset password doesn't work. I can't login to any app or via web browser or anything. I went out of my way finding a way to log in just to complain about this. If any admins see this, please send a password reset link to my email, otherwise this will probably be my last post. I'm not creating yet another account just because it stopped letting me log in.

yeeet

The Fediverse is DYING! Everyone panic NOW!

How many are bots

Too many armchair lefties here.

COME TO SOUTH AMERICA FOR A WHILE BEFORE YOU THINK FAKE COMUNISM = GOOD.

It's dead Jim.