Total monthly posts exploded after Spez enshitified Reddit, and is still growing steadily month over month.
That suggests that the current decline in monthly active users is primarily because lurkers who only came to lemmy after initially hearing about it on Reddit, went back to lurking Reddit.
The number of users that are contributors is still growing, and that’s what’s important.
Thanks for the positive news!!
There’s also folks like me who came, 15 years on Reddit and I haven’t been back.
Those of us who actually interacted with the platform and left aren’t going back.
I’m close to that too, but I think mine was 13 years. The weird thing that I’ve noticed is that most of the time I was on Reddit, almost no one I talked to in real life used Reddit. I struggled for years to try to get people to check the site out. Now that I left, I swear I hear someone I know mention Reddit exponentially more often. The average person doesn’t give a damn about how shitty the platform has become, because they weren’t around to see what it used to be. The average person WANTS to see ads interspersed with their cookie cutter content with stupid ass features like chat and followers. Good riddance.
Yep, arrived during the initial digg exodus, had tens of thousands of posts at Reddit, modded two subreddits. Closed my account the day during the protests and haven’t been back.
I’m not as active here, mostly due to a busier life but found a new home anyway.
I’m yet to encounter the majority of issues I hear Lemmings griping about. Everyone has been pretty civil toward me. Every time my inbox blows up I feel dread, only to open it and find zero confrontation or vitriol. I’m not running into any racists, sexists, bigots, etc., and I certainly haven’t noticed a decline in content (I browse Top ~6 Hours).
I realize my personal experience doesn’t equate to these problems not existing, but I do get the strong impression that people are exaggerating greatly.
Exactly my experience as well. Sure, I don’t have infinite scroll, but I also don’t feel like an algorithm is trying to make me angry. When I get responses, they’re typically thoughtful or on topic.
infinite scroll
Depends on the client you are using.
For phone or tablets try using the Voyager native app.
For browser try m.lemmy.world which is just the web version of Voyager.
There are other clients like old.lemmy.world for that “authentic” feel.
I’ve been active for a month and in my opinion too many users have radicalised and extremist mindsets, but other than that it’s alright.
Going back to reddit would mean to install that unbearable app they have and having to deal with incompetent admins, so I will stay here for some time.
I can see why it’s off-putting for a lot of people though.
My only issue is the lack of small communities that get posts frequently, and yeah, duh, I should contribute, but theres only so much I can say about my transness.
One thing I miss about reddit is just being able to endlessly read about peoples experiences and stupid shitty trans memes, thats just missing here right now
Exactly this. My small Reddit communities had a few posts per day. The equivalent on Lemmy have a few per year. Still, I don’t miss them enough to go back.
Yeah I’m not going back, just had to substitute with some discord servers so I’m not tempted. After that, I’m good lol
If you share a thought on a Biden/Trump thread, an Israel/Palestine thread, or another topic that attracts strong views, and your opinion is different than the hive, expect some vitriol and confrontation.
I’ve run into it while seriously looking for debate or productive conversation.
The same thing happens on Reddit, though. I think that’s kind of just the internet from now on. /r/worldnews is literally just a pro-Israel, anti-Palestine echo chamber so it’s nice to see another perspective on here. (I only browse Reddit at work not logged in for the record.) Over here, the hive mind on that seems to change thread to thread.
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It’s funny when the US does war in the middle east when a republican is president the media doesn’t even cover it. At least not to the extent we do today. That’s because Republicans are callous and could not give an ounce of fuck. The fact that people want to hold Biden to account should tell you everything you need to know about the two parties. Yes Biden sucks dick. Yes genocide is unacceptable no matter the people doing genocide. Only I’m voting along side the constituents that actually give a fuck.
And that is certainly not the GOP. They only care that it makes Biden look bad.
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Hamas had human shields. What is there to argue about? Should we take innocent lives to punish the guilty? Doesn’t sound like justice to me.
The world is a shit place. People are really flirting with the idea of fascism in America. Its insane but they are doing it. Americans are lucky now to have relatively peaceful lives despite corporations wanting to oppress them. Why we involved ourselves with the middle east is toothpaste we can’t get back in the tube. At what point as Americans are we allowed to bow out of the discussion? To me, it’s when we cast our ballot and its for the side that is the lesser evil. As individuals we are purposefully cut off from the reigns of power and until the people seize them again we have no choice but to keep making the humbling choice.
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I’m still seeing so much growth in new content and communities, idk if the raw number of users is the metric we even should care about. Is it the best measure of quality?
I also think a big part of it is how active users are counted. Saw in a different thread that it only counts accounts who have commented or posted in the last month. Well… I browse and vote on probably an average of 30-50 posts and many of their comments every single day, but the last comment I left was over a month ago.
I also wonder if the active user count is counting people who made multiple accounts across different instances and was therefore always massively overinflated to begin with. I have 5 lemmy accounts - one on lemmy.world when I first joined, one on lemmynsfw for happy fun times, and 3 more trying to find a different instance with the de federation policy and hoster that I wanted after lemmy.world was going through their ddos downtime issue.
I mostly lurk or comment like this but I’ve found the community to be much better over here. I can’t see myself going back.
Long time lurker here, 99% of the time I go to post a comment I delete it before posting like ah fuck it. I’m trying to engage a bit more now there are more users.
I feel like content is always getting better too
So, following the 90/9/1 rule, 90% lurk, 9% comment, 1% create content, we are primarily losing from the 90%? That seems to be a good thing for the long-term. As long as we aren’t losing from the 1% I’d say we’re good
I feel I have better engagement here. It is still missing some more niche communities that Reddit had, and I’m trying to be active to grow them, but it has been slow.
I’m still lurking here!
lurkers are also not counted in this statistics. ifaik only active users who are posting or commenting are counted. so there might be more users out there who are active and just lurking and they are not counted.
Yeah, it’s plain to see that engagement is steadily climbing. The top posts keep getting higher and higher numbers and new, interesting communities keep popping up.
Are active users classified as posting or does just logging in count?
Smaller communities aren’t necessarily a bad thing. Compared to reddit I rarely feel like I’m commenting into the void.
Or into the thunderdome where no matter what you say, someone will fight you for it
Them’s fightin’ words, pal!
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Don’t call me buddy, guy!
I’m not your guy, friend!
I’m not your friend, my enemy!
I’m not your enemy, darling !
im no buddy of yours bucko
I disagree!
Exactly, lemmy needs to grow but if it just continues to grow and grow eventually it will just turn into what reddit is now. I’m happy to have something small to be a part of for now… i don’t think you needed me to tell you this but they say commenting is good for lemmy, so here i am
What’s the easiest way to find communities across different instances? If I could figure that out, I would just forget about reddit.
I use an external Lemmy instance list.
honestly it’s replaced reddit for me in a good way, because it has just enough new content that I can check it before bed every day and scroll for a bit, but not enough to where I spend entire lunch breaks on it. sometimes I go days without even checking it. if anything it’s made my relationship with my browser / phone healthier than reddit.
Exactly. Lemmy is an anti-doomscrolling platform and that’s very healthy and amazing.
I somehow replaced reddit with instagram reels and youtube shorts.
Ah, they got ya by the dopamine balls
Yeah they do. Would you believe me if i said giving up social media is harder than giving up nicotine?
Give yourself some grace, yes corporate social media is addictive and yes it is easy to get lost mindlessly scrolling but the important question to ask is why is your brain so exhausted and stressed that mindlessly scrolling is the only thing you really have the mental energy to do so much of the time?
Western society repeatedly slams through the narrative that social media addiction is the reason people are miserable and it is all a pathetic attempt to distract us from the fact that our lives suck because of actual horrible things like not being able to afford rent, being in endless debt, not being able to afford healthcare and any number of other awful stresses.
If you need to blob out and scroll after getting out of your shitty job that pays shit where you are treated like shit and sitting in shitty traffic on the way home for who knows how long that’s on society for only providing predatory options that abuse you.
For a lot of people the only thing they actually have the energy to do after work every night is mindlessly scroll, it is a grace that people at least have that to turn to even if it is predatory. It is a symptom not the core issue.
Also true. And there are plenty of worthwhile/educational things to be found on the apps that can help a bit more than they harm. But yeah, it being a symptom is spot on.
I just discovered Lemmy, and I’m so happy about it. Instagram replaced Reddit for me these last five months, and I can really feel how detrimental it is for me. It’s like an ADHD-machine. No community, no discussion, just this as quick and loud phase as possible vibe. You look through one recipe video and you get recipes for several days. People dancing and dancing with huge smiles and these creepy eyes. Honestly it’s all so dystopian.
So keeping on with Instagram is not an option, going back to reddit is not an option - and I was really considering becoming like this person who is never in his phone, really mentally healthy, but wildly uninformed about the world and the general discussion 😅
The feel of this place with the Sync app is just so * chefs kiss *. Feels like what reddit was.
Horseshit. Lemmy is plastered in content about climate change, the Middle East, and other depressing shit.
I think they mean doom scrolling as in algorithmic dopamine loops
Exactly, and that the content eventually just ends. I didn’t mean that every post is positive news.
Doomscrolling does not literally mean your feed is full of negative content lol, it’s just mindless scrolling
100%, all I really want is something I can look at and perhaps sensibly chuckle at when I have a few minutes… Not a pasasitic brain worm that really wants me to pay attention to it.
The only problem I have, is that I can’t seem to find the porn.
There’s an entire instance dedicated to it: lemmynsfw.com
I tried, but they never approved my account. I know they do it in waves, but I applied a month ago
a lot of servers are really weird about porn, ngl. its not that they just don’t allow it on their server (which, cool, thats fine), its that they go out of their way to block it. its a new wave of puritanism and i don’t really like it. although porn isn’t that hard to find if you are on a good server.
Do you know of a good server for that? Because I tried to sign up with Lemmy n sfw they never activated my account, and it was like a month ago.
And yeah, I’m not sure why the sex positivity movement seems to have completely reversed itself. There is this idea that the idea of sexuality of any kind is somehow inherently wrong. Which is stupid. I need all the fetishes
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There’s hundreds of us! Hundreds!
But hey, apparently that’s enough, I haven’t been bored on Lemmy yet. And as the enshittification of Reddit continues there might well be some other exodus.
Honestly there are enough quality posts and comments here that keep me engaged. It feels like a lot of creative people made the move.
Lurker here. This is my first post. I ain’t leaving either.
I saw a discussion the other day that may have been part of it. They were pointing out that many users when first joining lemmy created accounts on multiple instances. Whether they needed to find a community they preferred or do to ddos attacks and other issues causing outages a lot of those accounts have likely become inactive more as time went by. So the numbers may not be decreasing so much as been inflated by individuals coming up as multiple active users early on. I haven’t looked into how they are verifying what users are active though, so it could be wrong. If someone knows more please respond.
Yeah, my first account on Lemmy was actually on Beehive, but I was confused by their sign up process (there wasn’t a page update telling me I had to verify my email, it just happened in the background and didn’t appear to do anything when I clicked sign up). I sorted it out when I checked my email an hour later, but that killed the vibe for me. So then I made this account, but jerboa didn’t support Aussie zone at the time so I made a shitjustworks account and used that for a while until I started becoming more active in the Aussie zone communities and tried to jump ship just for the ease
But yeah, I saw quite a few people who were very confused about the whole instances thing and a few others that have jumped ship a few times because of it. And as I mainly browse local top day, then all top day once that runs out of content, and my instance federates with all the instances I want to interact with, I don’t see a reason to use either of those other accounts I created
As far as I have heard, “activeness” is measured by whether a user posted a comment/post the past month, so lurkers/voters are not being counted. This does likely skew the numbers quite a bit.
EDIT: Found this nice answer from ~5 months ago. Yup, it appears to only count post+comment and leaves out voters and lurkers. :(
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Let’s be honest it works for memes. Memes are 99% of the time just reposted garbage anyways.
For everything else though, I agree. Bots shouldn’t be used
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I’m fine with the post especially in niche communities just to keep them alive. But yeah comments seem useless.
One of the best things I’ve done is to uncheck “show bot accounts” in settings.
Lemmy is losing users, but Reddit is using losers.
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Honestly, good. The Internet was better when people were spread out across many small message board and chat rooms. The golden age of the Internet was when you’d do a search for something and 500 different forms and little websites would pop up.
Now’s it’s all reddit, “X,” and shitty corporate owned nonsense. We turned 2020 Internet into 90’s cable TV.
Gonna add a comment to my upvote: I agree with this so fucking much. I look back at the joyous days when I had… fuck if I know how many websites, each dedicated to its own thing, most with its own userbase, so unique and so defined. The only good thing about Reddit for me was gaming communities that, unfortunately, replaced actual forums that once allowed me to engage with passionate people and look for relevant info, even if it’s been years since its creation.
It’s probably just me being unaware, but gaming communities these days feel dead outside their respective subreddits and some Discord servers - and the latter is an even worse experience because the form factor of an endless IRC-clone that actually seems to save chat history is pretty fucking dumb more than it is convenient. If anyone has any suggestions there, shoot.
To be honest I kind of like it here.
I’ve been here for like 6 months now, maybe more. Posts SEEM to be getting more engagement than when I started. It definitely doesn’t seem like there are fewer users.
The vibrancy of communities is what matters, not total numbers. I have definitely noticed a solidification of new communities into places that feel longterm sustainable.
I mean also people are really tired and beat up, in the US most people are worse off than they were before the pandemic (not good). I don’t blame people for not having the mental bandwidth to join a new social network.
🥚#
My mental health is so much better than when i scrolled reddit. Everyone here is so nice and doesn’t talk like 14 year olds with an ego. Also theres front page furry porn
I also find the limited number of posts and comments keep me at a healthy level of browsing. On Reddit I could get sucked down the rabbit hole of even one post, reading comments and replying to stuff for hours. There’s really very little of value that can ever be accomplished at that depth.
Me too man. I had a really unhealthy Reddit problem.
Theses days, after about an hour of scrolling I’m out of content, which feels sensible.
I agree with this, and on top of that the lack of infinite scroll is a feature to me because it requires me to deliberately consider each post before the next page rather than just spamming downward looking for that next dopamine hit.
The front page furry porn is going to turn me into a furry one day…
Sadly I can’t share this experience, my instance is non-nsfw
Maybe it’s time to set up an account in another instance
“Everyone here is so nice”.
Oh yeah? Well, you can freaking go hug yourself buddy!
Fuck u/spez and fuck Tencent.
You know what? Fuck the enshittification of the internet too.
That’s what this is all about, people are putting their trust in systems that aren’t trustworthy, who will sell you to the highest bidder. Or any bidder frankly.
Yeah, this fuck Spez thing is cool and justified and all, but we all should be really more worried about Tencent 😳
Organic ,non bot, actual real conversation, is not going to skyrocket. It’s going to grow like a real world thing. This is good imo
So much agree on this. I also feel like there are comments on Reddit posted with the sole purpose of gaining upvotes. Here there is no need to do that so the content you do get is a lot higher level
I love how so many of us former reddit lurkers found a home on Lemmy/the fediverse. I have absolutely loved being a part of the greater community here, I don’t know how else to describe it but it feels like my Internet home. I love all you fellow nerds. Obligatory fuck spez.
We love you, too. Even S’ned is warming to your presence.
👉😎👉
👈😎👈
I feel the same way. Also, fuck spez. Lol
I still love Lemmy. It’s nice to be able to post or comment without getting an automated response telling you you’re doing 15 things wrongs for trying to participate like happens on schmeddit.
Was there some stat released somewhere showing lemmy “losing users”? I’m pretty new and plan on sticking around, the quality here is infinitely better than reddit.
I feel the communities that I’m part of here have decent engagement. Even if it’s losing users, I feel it’s still high quality.
Yeah. I’m more concerned with quality than raw numbers.
