Following https://tarte.nuage-libre.fr/c/fediverse/p/194717/we-need-more-users I decided to explore data a little bit more. I’m not the biggest fan of growth-as-as-target so I wanted to see how much the people were participating in the discussion.
The data
I took the data from the API explorer in https://api.fediverse.observer/ with this query:
query {
monthlystats {
date_checked
softwarename
total_posts
total_users
total_comments
}
}
Then parsed the json with this https://jqlang.org/ filter:
jq '.data.monthlystats | map(select(.total_users > 0 and (.softwarename == "lemmy" or .softwarename == "mbin" or .softwarename == "kbin" or .softwarename == "piefed"))) | group_by(.date_checked) | map( {date_checked: .[0].date_checked, total_users: ([.[] | .total_users] | add), total_posts: ([.[] | .total_posts] | add), total_comments: ([.[] | .total_comments] | add)}) | map({date_checked, posts: .total_posts/.total_users, comments: .total_comments/.total_users}) | sort_by(.date_checked) | map([.date_checked, (.posts | tostring), (.comments | tostring)]) | .[] | @csv'
(As you see I filtered for the threadiverse. I also did the same with all software, I’ll put the graph for that in comments)
Then did a good old’ chart
What to think of it
I don’t know. Users’ activity is on the rise and I find it nice
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One thing that annoys me about each statistic about posts is that I don’t know how many of these posts are actually interesting and engaged with.
For example, there is a specific instance that just mirrors reddit content and has barely any engagement. The bot posts mulitple posts per hour, mostly without any comments or upvotes.
It seems rather irrelevant to compare these posts to actually interesting posts with a nice discussion and a couple of upvotes.
My suggestion would be to count and plot the number of posts that have at least a few interactions.
I do feel we need more users, but not just users. It’s “niche” users we need. There’s a lot of techies on the threadiverse (Lemmy, PieFed, Mbin), but not enough people who care about other stuff.
So communities outside that, struggle to thrive.
But we are not going to get “niche” users if we don’t get large numbers of users. Niche interests will only come up here when the population is so large that even the long tail ends up with critical masses.
Those defending “quality over quantity” miss this exact point.
My point about “niche” is that from the current perspective, the niche communities is the more regular ones, because at the moment, the majority of users here is technical. We need more ordinary users, not just more users.
We scare normal, non-techie people away. The Threadiverse in general and Lemmy in particular is very lacking in moderation capabilities, especially by not federating mod reports across instances (PieFed does that, but Lemmy does not).
We need active users, not just users that post something once then disappear. The MAU is more important than the user count.
Needing more users is fine. Sure, we could always use more friends (or enemies, I guess)
But, ultimately, just having people come here first and then whatever hellhole corpo-media second is at least a step in the right direction. I feel like user activity increasing is a good sign that there’s a lot of people out there investing time in the fediverse instead of the corporate hell-loop social media.
We can see a globally slowly downward trend, probably not good but I’m definitely not equipped to analyze that
Makes me wonder if it’s specific softwares that are pulling the statistics downward, or in general. Also the last 6 months seem rather stable on the graph.
Maybe its a question of organization. Perhaps we shouldn’t have generic instances just instances around topics. That way niches can form without being too fractured and if said topic goes away it does not take several other coms with it.
This defeats the purpose of the platform being distributed. For example if all political threads are on one instance it would be a ripe target for the authoritarian regimes popping up right now. I know there are dominant instances, but at least if one drops, people can migrate.
One issue is I think Lemmy’s UX means there’s less friction with local communities than remote communities (not sure why) which is why usually the lemmy.world version of communities typically wins without a lot of effort to steer people
Yes.
Edit: One thing I notice that is annoying are whatever conflicts between moderators and instances and seeing communities close with a message saying to join some new community on another instance. We’re too small to be restarting communities because of whatever arguments mods have with instance admins. Most people do not care what instance they are on. I’ll see people stereotype others based on what instance their account is based on and I’m at a loss that some people have already tribalized themselves based on fediverse instance they made their account on
The best stuff on social media is random hobbies. That needs to grow a lot. We want the people that are really into random stuff. Like maybe they’re just really into fallen tree branches and for some reason there’s a community out in the world all about fallen tree branches, we should want that. Over on reddit I enjoy the treelaw community. Get to learn about peculiarities of trees and property
As a start, fediverse would be nerdy. Going to be tech and privacy nerds. Gamers. Great, grow that. Be active. Get the food communities growing. Get the gardening communities growing. Bird watching. Whale watching. Train watching.
I remember earlier reddit. Like 2007-2010 for me. Back then it was nerdy as hell with a growing gaming and professional sports watching communities. A lot more comedy that wasn’t global politics centric.
Lots of science, tech papers got big discussion and were the foundation for the community to grow. They had hobbies. They watched sports. Played video games. Gardening. Cooking. They’d talk about that too. Fun/educational communities
We have to be a lot more than just politics and grouches. If I just went by the grouches opinions TikTok would just be propaganda and then I see friend’s on it and it’s mostly cooking and comedy skits. Lots of anime memes. – Growing the anime/manga community would be pretty big for the fediverse. Anime/manga fandoms are hyperactive posters
There’s a list of hobbies communities pinned on !communitypromo@lemmy.ca
I dont think more users is very important. Its not going to make Lemmy change from mostly memes anyway.
The mentality of the largest Lemmy instances is still to moderate away opinions they dont agree with, so this place is never going to be good for any discussions where people disagree strongly.
Most users downvote what they dont agree with. Its a circle jerk echo chamber where we all agree or get downvoted.
But we can all enjoy memes together. :) Its kind of nice. Lemmy is chill and easy. Even kid friendly.
I like that communities/instances have opinions and go in a direction. That’s what make decentralization useful rather than one big average thing that always pushes towards the status quo in the end. Make your own community with your own rules without all-powerful overseers, that’s a system I believe in
Doesnt really work in practice. If a community exists on Lemmy world, you are not going to have success running the same community somewhere else.
Its just the nature of things. Even Lemmy is mostly centralized to large instances, despite its federated technology.
Yeah if you want to do the same community it’s going to be harder, but if you want to make your own community with your own content and views it’s different.
Also, the history of the internet contradicts your point, communities have moved servers since the beginning, there never was a unique central point for everything. Lemmy is a bit inferior here because it only allows you to see communities one by one, but piefed can group communities into feeds that you can directly follow. By not placrng focus on a single one piefed can push for much more diversity
If I get about 50% likes and 50% dislikes on a comment then I feel my comment was closest to the truth. This tells me that lemmy is not an echo chamber.
The post the other day about lemmy needing more users and engagement gave a little nudge to me commenting more. I guess same thing happened with many users and you can see the spike in the graph.
I had the idea to revive dead c/ by reposting from reddit. It’s controversial to use a bot
Maybe limit the bot to only copy the top post that week.
Yeah it’s weird that top post for the day doesn’t work
I think more isers would be good, though I like how the fediverse is right now. It’s small, but it has enough content to have me coming back, but not so much that I’ll spend the entire day browsing.
Is this accounting for bots that are essentially RSS feeds?
No, I’m taking the data as it exists on the API …
The amount of furry / anime content on the front page might be putting off some new users
The amount of furry / anime content on the front page might be putting off some new users
I don’t see this on mine. Isn’t NSFW enabled by default?
This is why I don’t generally believe in all being a good “starting” view for new users. Local would probably make more sense until the user has subscriptions, and then defaulting to subscriptions once the user has joined communities. This would mean an always active feed to start, prioritizing the “local” community for users to participate in the instance they belong to, while also not bombarding them with content from the firehose.
My 2 cents, probably easier to say what to do than to do it though, being a programmer myself. 😎
I’m not saying it’s necessarily NSFW content
lemmy is basically NSFW because of this, yes. the amount of furry anime porn that reaches the front page is crazy.
i don’t get why it being pushed, but I suppose it’s just the userbase is very active and passionate about that stuff so it rises to the top.
I’ve been blocking communities and posters as they pop up. It works until someone spins up a new instance for it, but then you can just block that as well.
yes, i can.
but it’s problematic if I have to do that every day. It’s almost a daily part of my use of lemmy.
I don’t want to have to block stuff as a part of my daily use.
this is actually the reason I don’t use tiktok or instagram. because my user experience was block block block, everytime I used it. And it never stopped shoveling the shit I didn’t want to see into my face. and a lot of it was pornographic clickbait crap.
i liked it back when it was smaller, but around 2020/2021 both platforms decided to shove tits in my face non stop. and i wasn’t on those platforms for tits. I was on there for my hobbies, but it kept pushing porn on me. so i stopped using it entirely. i still use youtube because youtube isn’t constantly shoveling porno shit in my face.
that’s kind of what lemmy feels like. except it’s with furryies, linux, etc. even when I block stuff more of it keeps popping up. i want to see more generalist content related to general interests, not content from people who are fetishists.
i have been on lemmy over two years. my first 1.5 years i hardly ever had to block anything, because shit content i dont’ like wasn’t flooding my feed. when i first got here it was just a lot of general news/science/information and link aggregation about nerdy stuff, which i really liked and why i liked reddit. i know there was furry porn on reddit from it’s inception, but I never had to see any of it unless i went looking for it specifically, like a lot of the fetish stuff on reddit.
Pro-capitalism garbage is putting me off, yet is everywhere. I like that it’s different, not everyone wants the same things
Need to gain slighty more than we lose every year to stay healthy.
