We’re seeing an increase from 53k active users at the beginning of July to 72k active users at the time of this post.
According to Lemmy’s documentation, an active user is "someone who has posted or commented on our instance or community within the last given time frame.” Lurkers aren’t considered active users, so basically these are content creators on Lemmy.
Sources:
It feels like a threshold has been crossed. Reddit related content is there but not so dominating as before. People are memeing other things, news and politics discussion is popping up, particularly popular posts from more niche communities as well, it feels like a much more healthy mix of content now compared to the beginning of July and especially compared to when I joined during the reddit blackout.
Absolutely, and it’s been very refreshing to see discussion get broader and be filled with memes and other interesting content.
It will take a while to get somewhere close to Reddit, but if we talk about how it feels, I see it getting closer and closer day by day.
Considering how toxic reddit was getting, I’m okay if lemmy doesn’t get close to it.
I rarely ever posted on Reddit, I’m trying to share my original content here now.
I looked at the front page of Reddit without logging in a few hours ago and the site is almost unrecognizable. I’m sure there are people that prefer this iteration but I’m fine moving on.
I think this has been the first week when I didn’t have to like put Lemmy down cause I was just seeing posts I had already seen. It’s nice to have a good feed to scroll again, and not feel like I have to deep dive posts and read every comment just to see something new. Feelsgoodman.
So much this. Exploring this place at first felt a bit empty so to say. Not that much stuff to see or read. Now there’s tons of comments, posts and upvote activity that makes this place feel fresh and alive now. FeelsGoodMan indeed, and we’re the oned giving it life.
I feel good reading about what you said about feeling good. You inspired me to say my first fediwords, and I wanted them to be about feeling good.
Thank you. It feels good to be inspiring others, as I was inspired by other’s excitement and happiness to be here. Welcome
I love all of you beautiful bastards
We have hit the critical mass; and that is a cause for celebration. A month ago when I joined, I thought that people would come, post a bit. See the limited content and leave. And I will admit it was painful to use Lemmy back then since a solid 90 percent of posts where about the site or were rips from Reddit. Fingers crossed for the future of Lemmy
It was also painful to use Lemmy back then because any time there was a new post it would push all the old ones down the screen and you’d often literally have to chase the links that you wanted to click. That on top of how generally slow and unreliable the platform was back in June. The technical improvements to Lemmy over the last few weeks have been absolutely amazing.
Oh I remember that!
I agree overall, though I’m not convinced the threshold has been passed or reached just yet. If this level of growth can be sustained though, it just might.
I wonder if this will be used as a case study for critical mass of social networks in the future. We have Tildes, Squabbles and Lemmy all competing for scraps off Reddits table and so maybe what we’ll end up with is a fairly clear ballpark for what kind of active user count is needed to reach the snowballing point.
Is Tildes really ‘competing’? The invite-based signup obviously invites the most dedicated and ‘quality’ individuals, but I don’t see how that’s gonna help with critical mass.
As for Squabbles, I’m suspicious of yet another centralized platform. Honestly, I’m just sorta ‘done’ trusting wannabe billionaires.
All three are quite different, which actually makes following their respective growth more interesting to me.
I suppose it’s fair that Tildes is not truly “competing” since they’re invite-only. I don’t have an account there but I’ve heard they want to focus on long-form high effort posts, so it’s never going to be real competition on terms of size, though it will be interesting to see whether a site with that profile can grow enough to thrive.
I’m not a fan of Squabbles personally but some people obviously are since they’re at 30k users soon. It’s run by a single person, and I am a little worried about whether that persons individual preferences influence development too much and in general the way development is heading. I don’t like the layout and I think the logo and name are a hindrance in terms of mass adoption.
On a larger scale though, Squabbles doesn’t allow any NSFW, and that is the benchmark I’m most interested in. Can a site of this nature reach critical mass without it?
Honestly, now that you say it…that does sound like quite the case study.
Yeah, I’m glad I’m not really the only one who feels this way. I mean the most important part of a “social” media network is to have people on it. Also I can’t really see anything that tildes has that Lemmy doesn’t. I might be missing something, but it seems pretty inferior. But as for the centrallised platforms; yeah I’m pretty done too.
Hopefully we’ve not just crossed the activity threshold for people to stick around and shitpost but also for people to figure it’s worth posting some quality stuff here
Depending on what type of quality content you’re after, they might be more related than you think. Shitposting keeps the attention of the larger crowd, and the presence of a large audience makes certain high quality stuff feel more worth it to post.
I would imagine this applies for stuff like AMAs and posting OC artwork etc in particular but I’m sure more things than those.
While there is less reddit content I do feel this past week it just got replaced with meta/threats, and personally it has been kind of even more tiring than reddit content as it has tended to feel like an echo chamber where everyone read the same post and spread a lot of negativity about how Lemmy won’t survive Meta if we don’t block instances that don’t block threats and the like and also the idea going around that if someone wants to federate he is either ignorant or stupid, and talking about that, the elitism on this threats treating everyone on insta and threats as stupid people and saying they don’t sant any of those people here because it dumbs down the content… This last week has been really toxic on the larger communities.
Sorry for that little rant, I had to get that out of my system jeje.
I’ve been lurking, thanks to these users for providing content for me to enjoy while procrastinating.
As have I — this site has effectively wholly replaced reddit for me outside of search.
Holy smokes! Honestly I don’t know if we have or will make much of a dent in r*ddit, but at this point I don’t care. We’re building a new enthusiastic community and doing it fast. It’s a lot of fun.
Yeah, completely killing Reddit was never in the cards in all honesty. Creating legit competition is good for everyone and this is definitely an awesome place already.
If I can speak for myself I literally switched over today cos boost stopped working only yesterday.
Welcome, stranger. Make yourself at home.
Joey for Reddit still works, if it stops completly I’m gone too from reddit and only use lemmy on mobile. not gonna using reddits shitty garbage app.
Dang, that was my reddit app. As much as I loved it, I’m a little disappointed to hear it’s still working.
probably will die every minute now. it’s a mystery to me that it is still alive. either reddit has forgotten about it or dunno. some people speculate that the dev is maybe talking with reddit about a deal and that’s why it’s still alive. but who knows.
Could be, I remember he did a survey shortly before the blackout about what we thought he should do. Maybe enough people said he should try to work it out? But yeah, who knows for sure…
I don’t miss Reddit at all. The Lemmy community is wonderful and vibrant. Very reminiscent of the early days of Reddit
Honestly this has been my mindset since I joined Lemmy. I deleted my reddit account of five years yesterday. I have no intentions of going back.
Commenting so that I can continue to be a positive statistic. 🫡
I disagree.
I’m doing my part.
I’m thrusting my fart!
I’m doing my part!
I’m parting my do!
I’m doing my part!
I’m throwing my dart!
I‘m doing my part!
I’m parting my do
I’m doing it, too!
Joining you
I might as well try.
Me too
Samesies
It’s weird these numbers are so small, it should feel dead. But there are a lot of great discussions and a lot of good laughs to be had here.
The level of engagement for the very small numbers here must be quite impressive.
I guess it’s the old quality vs quantity.
I suspect the type of person who was motivated to move to Lemmy is the type of person who posts more often.
There are also people who are posting here more because they want to participate and see Lemmy grow. I know that is me and I can’t be the only one. I’ve posted more on Lemmy than the last 3 years of Reddit combined im pretty sure. I always just lurked over there but I want this to go well so I participate more.
I used to have a high barrier of thought prior to posting but now I just post whatever bullshit is on my mind at that moment just so I can keep threads active. Like I’m doing now
I had a mindset that I had nothing of value to contribute to the conversation. On here, I type out what I would have at Reddit, but I was just wrong. I get plenty of people who engage with me.
On reddit I always had the feeling that someone else had already made my point for me. Here I find myself submitting all those comments and posts that I just deleted halfway through before.
Ditto that.
And the frustration that comes of that isn’t so much “I didn’t get to make a point, for which I lost the opportunity to receive credit” but more “I didn’t get to engage with the discussion in realtime without having a sense for how others would react, appreciate, or challenge my views”. Reading things afterward has that line of discussion set in stone in a way that’s unlike being a participant.
I think you explained it a bit more eloquently than me. This exactly.
I’m glad to hear from you anyway :)
That’s exactly why I’ve always been a mere lurker. Maybe I should change that!
Thank you for your service! o7
No need to thank me, shitposting is my godgiven duty o7
Super impressed with growth over the last week alone. I really was worried how I would adjust to not being on Reddit after Apollo died but I feel pretty encouraged now.
Me too! Replacing Reddit for me is not so easy but I’m getting better at using Lemmy. Still browse “popular” on Reddit in an alt to compare a bit but so far so good
Only thing I feel like I am missing is r/onepunchman the rest is no loss for me. And I have spend some time to get more news feeds here on Lemmy. I can get used to this.
Nm found !opm@lemmy.world
Amaaaaaazing username! Love it!
Haha thank you <3
Yeah, I stuck with Reddit for a while because I didn’t like Lemmy on Desktop, but now I’m using Memmy so I have no excuse. I just wish the search function were a bit better.
I feel like the real headline here is that active users are about 8x what they were a month ago.
I like that lurkers are more likely to post comments here. No need to fear downvotes, hostility, or feeling like their comment is redundant.
To be fair, that is still going to happen. Everyone just needs to learn the phrase, “Don’t be a dick!”. ;)
That’s the thing, right? In trying to force everyone onto a dumpster fire of a main Reddit app, instead, they forced their MOST TECHNICAL and active user base to look at other options.
They even chased off their resources doing things for free, such as a massive bot detection network and large-subreddit moderation.
Everything is snowballing out of control and it’s barely getting started.
I’m waiting for the real protest. When a large collective of moderators decide to form an agreement to protest for compensation all at once. It could happen now that these moderators are seeing their friends being removed from self-created subreddits.
TL;DR: Don’t bite the hand that feeds you.
Turns out the real protest was the Fedifriends we made along the way
While there is definitely a bunch of content popping up now thanks to to influx of actuve users, there still are some more niche communities that were pretty active on old reddit that i guess just can get to critical mass on lemmy and so are pretty dead. I hope that can change going into the future though.
If the community you’re looking for exists but doesn’t contain posts, the best thing you can do is to start posting yourself, no matter the quality you think your content has.
Humans tend to follow others, which leads to both positive and negative feedback loops. If nobody is posting, anyone discovering the community will think “oh this place is dead, no point in posting”.
Being the first to break the ice and do something in a group setting is scary, but once somebody is doing it it’s much more likely others will join in.
It’s often uncomfortable to be the first person to start dancing to the music, but have you noticed how much easier it is for everyone else to join in when that one guy starts going off?
That’s a great way of looking at it.
On first read I really thought you said “… a bunch of content pooping up…”, which would have been very lemmy actually :-)
While this is encouraging, I wonder how many users have multiple active accounts, like I do.
Just create a slightly different personality for each account.
And with different purposes and contributions
Hmm I like this but maybe I will do one for each mood I am in.
So far so good but I haven’t found the blackjack and hookers yet.
I tried to come up with a good “Bender’s blackjack and hookers” type TLD name for an instance but couldn’t come up with anything clever
Doing my part to add statistical significance. This feels like using Reddit a decade ago. And that’s a great thing. Lots of room to expand and improve. It’s the age of discovery for the fediverse, and I’m looking forward to seeing how things evolve.
There really is an eerie similarity to how the web felt like a decade ago. I had been aware of how much we’d lost to enshittification, but seeing Reddit’s decline at the same point as other platforms accelerating theirs really drove the point home.
I’m kinda shocked that such a healthy community was born on today’s Internet, bugs, blemishes and all. It gives me hope that we might be able to claw back part of the Internet from the megacorporations. Maybe?
We already have a fairly mature alternative. A couple more fails from Reddit and this place will become even bigger. There is definitely hope.
honestly I’m happy for know and use Lemmy platform, I thought that Reddit was a unique thing: but this is awesome, is its evolution
welcoming the new home with open arms 🙌🏻
