In recent weeks, I have posted an absolutely staggering amount of content on Lemmy.
My goal is simply to support the platform. I hate huge corporations.
Now I’m taking a break. I won’t post anything or I’ll post very little (I still feel a little guilty!! Who will post new content 😢?)
But I need to focus on improving my own life and relax.
However… I’m just curious.
Is the number of Lemmy users actually increasing, decreasing, or staying the same? Is that data even available?
I salute you. And please take care of yourself first.
Its been at a pretty consistent 50k which means we retained 25% of the users from our peak. Its 37.5k at the moment with 1.8k on piefed. There is another 18k users once NodeBB federations integrates.
Its a decent little community, enough to be self sufficient and enough for new users to feel like they arent joining a ghost town.
From what I’ve seen, no - the number of people actually regularly on here is going down, as I’m just seeing the same people more and more. When I use voyager you can see when your personal upvote/downvote score for every user on every one of their posts, and I’m mostly seeing people with a != 0 score, meaning I’ve interacted with their comments before. Means I’m not frequently seeing new people.
People like me who came here to escape the reddit bullshit of authoritarian power hungry mods and admins, insane censorship of anything right of “far left”, and reinforcements of echo chambers through moderation, quickly found out that, if anything, Lemmy is already worse in some regards than reddit.
How do you enable that Voyager thing?
Under settings go to “User Tags” and turn on “Track Votes”
It’s definitely worse. I have only stayed because it isn’t corporate bullshit. It’s still shit though.
Yeah I’m only still here because it’s something that still can have some decent conversations sometimes, and hey I’m always down for a good debate/argument with people of differing opinions. It’s definitely not going to grow to any great heights without massive changes across the board though.
No, the MAU (which is what I assume you meant) seems to be going down very slowly. Though it probably will start going up once again someday. Possibly when the new digg is released to the public or when Reddit pulls another shit that not even the current Redditors will be able to tolerate.
I personally don’t have a problem with the current state. I like it here. I recognize lots of people every day comment and post. It feels cozy.
I’d say “surely reddit can’t get worse” but we have the greedy fuck spaz at the helm. So yeah. It CAN get worse
Yep its nice to see you all :)
Nice to meet you too!
https://lemmy.fediverse.observer/stats
Currently trending down. And it’s all your fault for taking a break. 😔
Probably will bump back up in September
yeah
Replying to this to make the line go up
Interesting that user counts are lower, but posts and comments are still going up. Hopefully, that doesn’t mean more bot activity 😧
The graphs there for posts and comments are for count of posts on lemmy directly, total, not per month. The posts/month seems stagnant, although its hard to tell as the data shown there is burried by a couple of bot instances that completely hide the overall trend.
People post and comment from other platforms like Piefed
The posts and comments listed there are, locally hosted total values (not per month)
I don’t even know what is fundamentally different between Lemmy and Piefed aside from Piefed’s web interface. AFAIK, they’re basically the same thing but Lemmy is primarily developed by a harmful douche. 🫤
Is there any reason beside that to choose one or the other?
PieFed, like Mbin, was written from the ground up, and in a totally different language than Lemmy.
But it interoperates with Lemmy, so yeah it’s very similar. Except the LARGE list of features that PieFed has that Lemmy lacks, and a handful of features that Lemmy still does better on.
Moreover, Lemmy will likely not ever catch up to PieFed. One reason being that certain features are incompatible with the authoritarian mindset - e.g. when a moderator removes your content, why should you as the poster be notified of that fact?
But also, PieFed is written in Python that is a heck of a lot easier to code in than Rust, so the fact that PieFed not only caught up to Lemmy but has already surpassed it in SO MANY ways is a strong indicator of its future success.
But aside from the tankies building in tankie philosophy right into the core of the Lemmy software, it depends on whether someone wants those additional features or not. Like polls, flairs (both user and post), categories of communities, which btw are user customizable and shareable, combining all comments across all cross-posts (helping to reverse the fragmentation effect inherent in federated platforms), and so much more.
I bet that if you tried out PieFed for a day, you’d fall in love with it. You can also do entirely different workflows with it, like trigger notifications to be sent to you that really helps you to stay on top of posts from communities that are very low-volume (and so have trouble making it into your Subscribed feed, like poetry rather than politics or worshipping Arch Linux), but those are likely to take more than a day to figure out - there’s definitely a learning curve. Also note that ymmv with regard to the different apps not (yet!) fully utilizing all the features offered by the PieFed back-end.
Moreover, Lemmy will likely not ever catch up to PieFed. One reason being that certain features are incompatible with the authoritarian mindset - e.g. when a moderator removes your content, why should you as the poster be notified of that fact?
So Piefed sends me a PM when actions have been taken against my account/content?
Don’t even need to acknowledge the flairs and polls; sign me the fuck up.
So Piefed sends me a PM when actions have been taken against my account/content?
Honestly I do not know - Notifications on PieFed, along with searching, are both features that are still a bit wonky and behind everything else. Side-note: you will legit want to keep your old Lemmy account, and use it especially for searching for content, and also if you choose piefed.social whenever that goes down for upgrades, which it does far more often than a normal instance (it literally says that btw, it deploys new features sooner than other instances so it is the “test bed” to try them out:-D but if that bothers you then use one of the other ones like piefed.zip, piefed.world, etc.).
So that one may be a bad example for me to use… but on the other hand, Lemmy has been out for YEARS and that feature requested for YEARS, whereas PieFed is still being built and new features are added WEEKLY. So I would expect to see that feature “soon” on PieFed, whereas on Lemmy I would expect to see it “never” (b/c of the authoritarian mindset precluding them even wanting to do it). Just like so many other of the continually growing set of features offered by PieFed.
Not to get too deep into the tankie bashing, but nevertheless it does seem worth pointing out that the philosophies of the Lemmy devs have gotten them into some financial trouble, as people do not want to interact with them, e.g. to first learn the super-difficult (even compared to C++!!) Rust coding language and then try to contribute code. In contrast, pretty much every programmer already knows Python and so a lot of people can - and do - contribute to PieFed.
TLDR: PieFed is so much newer than Lemmy and honestly it is a bit behind in some ways, but even so PieFed is already running circles around Lemmy in not only the pace of development but also the raw set of features already developed.
And if I can add: even Reddit stopped adding features YEARS ago, unless you count things like those Doge coins that generate profit for the company but do not add anything new to the user-base. To see a thread-based forum platform actively adding brand-new features… damn it is so refreshing! (and yes Lemmy does that too, but on the scale of YEARS rather than, again, mere WEEKS)
Piefed was also designed to be better at serving more people, especially outside of North America and Europe. It does more with less data, so people on slower internet in large parts of the world can participate just as easily.
I just mentioned this in another comment but I’ll add it here so you can see it more easily:
25-fold iirc, b/c on the one hand it uses a LOT less data per post, plus it shows 5x more posts by default, so less need to paginate and such.
Here is a post describing that in detail: Comparing network utilization of Lemmy, Kbin and PieFed
I read this on Sh.itJust.Works and am now commenting from piefed.social.
I haven’t dug in much but really like it.
I like Piefed much better. :)
Lemmy, Mbin, and PieFed - they are all “good”, but yeah, me too :-P
I would convert my instance to piefed if there was a migration script, iirc they’re working on it, so I’m looking towards that.
I wouldn’t hold my breath, I’m on the Zulip (https://chat.piefed.social/ ) and Matrix chats and the migration script isn’t really worked on by anyone.
Instances like quokk.au just went nuclear and recreated their instances with Piefed when keeping the domain name.
https://piefed.blahaj.zone/ went the subdomain route.
Instances like quokk.au just went nuclear and recreated their instances with Piefed when keeping the domain name.
Does that even work? Wouldn’t that kinda break federation?
It worked 99.99%, the only issue was PieFed doesn’t allow capitals in community names which meant one community broke as the name didn’t match after being made lowercase.
The instance and communities federate correctly
You can ask @[email protected] for details
I don’t rightly know but… to a first degree of approximation, if both are fully compliant with the ActivityPub protocol then why would it? (they are not I would guess, but that is a more nuanced take than I have knowledge of:-D)
Ok I’ll bite. What are some good piefed instances to consider?
I like it because it’s a lowkey anarchist server. Administration isn’t as overbearing as some places, and you have a lot of freedom to do what you want. It’s been active for 2 years and I know it’s funded for another 2 at least. Plus smaller servers help spread the load (and hopefully load faster for you).
There’s also anarchist.nexus, but they’re not open for registration.
What level of anarchy are we talking here? (You and I tend to differ on some (not all) of our politics 😉)
A lowkey level :P The admin is a lot less extreme than myself, and pretty accepting for most things outside of hate content.
What do you like about these?
It is the same set of considerations that govern Lemmy instances: the admins are irl people who have whatever ideas they like to see happen in the world, and it’s their personal machines and effort that they are putting into administering the instance, so they get to do whatever they please. If you like those philosophies (which they tend to say in their sidebars), then you can make an account on them - FOR FREE - and if not, then you are free to go elsewhere.
Fwiw, piefed.zip avoids defederation as much as possible iirc and has an affinity for gaming topics, piefed.social is one of the oldest but note that it tests deployment of all the newest features, so it can break more readily than a more stable instance, piefed.ca is located in Canada and geared towards people who live there but like the Lemmy version, all are welcomed, and piefed.world is run by the same admins who handle lemmy.world, with all that that entails - some people love that fact, others will hate it, and again it’s all fine and good bc there is room for us all to coexist peacefully across the Threadiverse:-).
😳python?!
Yep and its pretty easy to read when looking at the source code.
C is easy as well… For me, even more easy than python, as I read like 100x more C++ rather than python…
I don’t even bother to write python anymore 🤣 I let it generate by AI nowadays
Reddit is written in Python. It was originally written is Common Lisp, but they rewrote it in Python since it is easier to find developers.
Damn! How inefficient 🤪 but that explains a lot
Python dev tend to vibe code while C (and other similar programming language) devs tend to plan more prior coding.
As a decision maker, I would let my devs only use python for proof of concepts or for build scripts…
“Everything I don’t like is tankie” freaks just love shoehorning “tankies” into everything it’s so funny
If you’re using the browser, the Piefed main page is a lot more data efficient, if you care about that sort of thing.
25-fold iirc, b/c on the one hand it uses a LOT less data per post, plus it shows 5x more posts by default, so less need to paginate and such.
Here is a post describing that in detail: Comparing network utilization of Lemmy, Kbin and PieFed
Feature-wise there are some differences, but they both are part of the same fediverse so you’ll have access to the same content.
Personally I am used to the Lemmy UI, and I feel like it’s not as easy to see if a mod report was being taken care of on PieFed vs Lemmy
PieFed is currently at ~1.7k MAU, last month it was 1.6k. I suppose the 400% increase is over and that was just some people from lemm.ee, any significant future increase will most likely come from people switching instead of new users. Lemmy dropped from 54k MAU in April down to 41k.
Yes the lemm.ee switch-over crowd is over so it will be interesting to see the more natural growth after that.
e.g. from January to March PieFed (edit: 's Monthly Active Users) more than doubled in size long before lemm.ee’s troubles were widely announced.
Typically as people hear about the new features and are astonished by how PieFed offers exactly what people have been outright begging to see brought to Lemmy (heck, in some cases even Reddit) but they simply won’t do it. In fairness, perhaps they cannot, given their current pace of development, but also their prioritization may differ from those of the end-users (I have noticed that particularly things that involve federation between instances - e.g. modlog actions - typically receive much lower prioritization than things that will work inside a singular instance, perhaps reflecting the bias that the main Lemmy devs are also the admins of their own personal instance? for good or for ill, it is what is is: this is their platform, and if someone does not like it then they are free to go ahead and make their own from scratch, which both Kbin, before it was forked to Mbin, and now PieFed have done just that:-D).
I finally switched to PieFed now that Voyager has more or less stable support for it. Fuck the Lemmy tankie devs
Everything I personally dislike is tankie! You dorks sound like those conservative idiots who call everything leftist Marxist communist
New account, 2 comments, both in this thread defending the tankies over at ml…
They are transphobic, tankie assholes though. Here’s a good list of the .ml shit: https://lemmy.world/comment/18997412
piefed is its own category there, but kbin/mbin might be included in “lemmy” - I didn’t dive deeper.
piefed is growing recently but it’s not in the millions ;)
Mbin has <1k monthly active users. Kbin has <100 total, and if you dig deeper, only one server (in Poland) self-reports as using Kbin.
No PieFed is not included in “Lemmy” in this software b/c it looks at the software that the instance reports as using.
Even Lemmy is not in the millions, its peak was ~55k MAUs somewhere in Spring of 2024. Well, the “posts” counts could be in the millions (according to the Lemmy stats page it was 12.2 million a couple months ago), but those stats can be fairly misleading, so I typically only ever go by monthly active users that seems verifiably closer to what people actually see happening. e.g. so very MANY people have alt accounts all across the Fediverse so the total number of accounts is highly misleading, but the number of “active” ones seems more reliable? (even then it could be an over-counting, especially if bots are active and being counted as well)
40k MAUs is barely even a highly active sub over on Reddit.
Even Mastodon only reports ~700k MAUs, and falling, though at its peak it was closer to 2 million. They really dropped the ball on making the software easier to use - unlike Lemmy (and Mbin and PieFed), each Mastodon instance does NOT show posts from other Mastodon instances, by default - or at least that was true for an exceedingly long time though I thought it was going to change this summer iirc? Maybe that change only affected “searching” for posts though? I don’t use Mastodon so don’t really care - but I understand why people prefer BlueSky, b/c for them centralization is the point, if that is what it takes to make the software actually work.
A LOT of the criticisms that people on Reddit have about Lemmy actually pertain to Mastodon rather than Lemmy in particular.
The entire federated concept really was not ready for mainstream deployment, at the time of the Rexodus. We here are those with the “early adopter” mindset, which is very much different than the mainstream normie one.
Unless they went to PieFed - which many did - and then it would look like a net decrease on those charts for Lemmy.
Yeah, well, fuck those guys.
Nice one for posting so much! I’m a prolific poster as well but you’ve got me beat. It’s a lot of work but I love to see people happily chatting here. I’ve no clue if it’s quieter atm overall, but don’t know that lemmy will fail. There’s enough of us atm, and not many alternatives.
I finally motivated to start up a (hopefully) less biased, more international news community to combat the US-heavy dominance of .world. I loaded her up today. Guess we’ll see how it goes. I guarantee I don’t find motivation every day.
Why not use [email protected] ?
Huh. Well mine looks to have totally different kinds of links and articles, so maybe they compliment each other.
There’s also [email protected]
It’s usually recommended to post to an already established community to avoid single poster burnout, but you do you
This ain’t a sprint. This is a marathon
I don’t know if Lemmy is the future but ActivityPub social media is.
It is only matter of time.
I no longer feed my shit post on corpo socials. This is an aspect of the class war. Don’t feed your enemy.
I was worried at first that Lemmy would be basically dead compared to Reddit. But holy hell, its active enough and its qualitatively better than Reddit could ever be. I never realized how shit it was until I actually decided to leave permanently.
Many of us stopped actually “engaging” on Reddit long before we finally left it - the amount of trolls just waiting to pounce on anything at all that was said just got too damn high!
There are (so MANY!) trolls here too, but you can block them all and then breathe an enormous sigh of relief and finally enjoy the rest - I am saying that here that is at least possible, whereas on Reddit it just simply was not.
Yep on reddit I’d just end up scrolling for ages. Here I actually have conversations with people, you get to know people which I really like.
I believe it’s is slowly going down over time. But this is going at such a slow rate that reddit enshitification might lead more people to here in the future before there is no more great content on here.
But thank you for making such a great effort. You deserve a break (:
Why do you care? What’s your goal? 5300 posts in 2 months is beyond the realm of mortals.
we peaked mid 2023, i have posted 2.8k comments in 2.5 years, so my work complements yours
I’ve posted like 1.2k comments in a matter of 6 months. My account is 2 years old, but I went back to Reddit shortly after. So I was silent for a Year or two
I don’t remember my stats from my lemm.ee (rip) account but I’d imagine it was nearing the thousands
Slowly going down. The learning curve is too steep for the general population (personal opinion, happy to debate).
I wonder how much of that decrease is a result of instances shutting down and their users migrating off of Lemmy to platforms like PieFed and others. The users may not be completely gone, just not on Lemmy.
Piefed helped a number of communities reparent to their homeserver as-is when lemm.ee closed down, definitely a valid theory. [email protected] community final posts if you’re keen to farm data.
if you’re keen to farm data.
I have enough projects already lol.
PieFed MAUs increased by 400%.
Any ideas what difference that make sto the total activity stats throughout the fediverse?
At a rough glance, it looks like PieFed’s active users went up by roughly the same number as Lemmy’s went down!
Although that’s just the last couple of months - on top of that, the “Threadiverse” (including Lemmy, PieFed, Mbin, nodeBB, and flarum, though the wider “Fediverse” also includes Mastodon, Pixelfed, and other stuff that isn’t based on community forums like we do here; note from here on I’ll focus exclusively on Lemmy) activity has been going down for quite awhile now, basically since the Rexodus.
According to people talking on r/Redditalternatives, Lemmy just isn’t interesting enough. Before Blaze’s (and others) heroic efforts to counteract it, previously the other top reason was that it was too confusing to have to pick an instance first before signing up (which is a legitimate thing for Mastodon even if not so much for Lemmy).
I get it: not everyone uses Arch Linux and hates Windows hard enough for this audience. Purity beatings will continue until morale improves.
Also Lemmy can be so incredibly toxic - sharing any kind of nuance will almost certainly be lost in the flood of people piling on not even for what someone says but if it sounds vaguely like something else that is popular to hate on. Argumentative people are just looking for excuses to argue, period. You personally have helped with that a ton, thank you so much for caring and sharing positivity vibes 😽❣️!! You are helping people not want to leave and go back to Reddit (which sounds odd I know, but remember that the tiny niche subs there really are different than the larger ones, and people can be much kinder in them than the more popular subs there, or the more popular communities here).
You personally have helped with that a ton, thank you so much for caring and sharing positivity vibes 😽❣️!! You are helping people not want to leave and go back to Reddit (which sounds odd I know, but remember that the tiny niche subs there really are different than the larger ones, and people can be much kinder in them than the more popular subs there, or the more popular communities here).
Sharing this feeling as well, thank you so much @[email protected] for all your posts and comments on the platform!
Right back at you bro! ❤️
Thanks so much for taking the time to write that out! It is a lot of work, but I love seeing people hanging out happily chatting in a nice thread. 😊
I love it too, but it is something that does not happen “naturally”. A lot of people feel intimidated by e.g. someone spinning up a bot that will send 20-100 identical messages at someone (yes that’s a real story that I was reading about earlier today), and while that one is on the extreme side, more mundane methods of trolling work almost as well for a fraction of the effort.
So thank you for your efforts to resist the trend and create a space where people can actually enjoy things:-).
That’s really nice of you thanks. You really are welcome 😊
I believe that is more valid for Mastodon instances than for Lemmy ones.
Except that you are still correct in the operational sense that most will not bother. See e.g. the migration to BlueSky rather than Mastodon.
PieFed really might make for a qualitative shift though, in offering so many options such as categories of communities (akin to multi-Reddits), and polling, and flairs (both user and post) that Reddit users were used to and it makes them feel really like they are “slumming it” coming over to Lemmy that lacks all of that. The categories of communities and user-customizable and shareable feeds in particular really help with “content discovery”, as too does PieFed’s wizard that walks a first-time user through the process of setting up and joining what the user indicates that they are interested in.
In contrast, Lemmy users are supposed to go… (somewhere? but where? where are these "somewhere"s ever mentioned? on a side-bar somewhere? extremely rarely I would believe they might be, but the vast majority of the time usually not) to find the content that they want to see. Often they end up browsing All rather than Subscribed, and get so frustrated with that that they simply leave Lemmy altogether, and then report their complaints over in r/RedditAlternatives. PieFed solved that particular problem though, as well as several others, so at this point I think any discussion about “the learning curve” needs to be split into one for Lemmy, where it really does remain too complicated for the average Reddit non-technical normie, vs. PieFed where it does not anymore.
And I need to be careful or else this will turn into a HUGE tangent, but also the political extremism and bOtH sIdEs SaMe-ism on “Lemmy” is an enormous turn-off for people as well. Yes they can block each troll on an individual basis, or the same with communities, no they can’t TRULY block an entire instance (that horribly mis-named function would have been better termed a “community muting” rather than “instance blocking”, which still allows comments from users on that instance to appear everywhere else, plus able to reply and even trigger notifications, etc. - IT IS NOT A BLOCK). Anyway, how this relates is that mainstream non-technical normies just get overwhelmed, and don’t enjoy the political extremism having to be an opt-out rather than opt-in feature, with most of the ways presented by the software to opt-out not TRULY opting “out” rather than merely claiming to do so. In contrast, one of the first things that PieFed does is to set up a block-list of keywords, offering the options All, None, and even a third one Some to allow the content at a lower frequency. I have never put any words into it… but I appreciate that the feature exists, for the sake of those who want / need it to be able to enjoy their social media of choice.
I predict that for all these reasons plus a few others, Lemmy will continue to die off. The die-hard userbase seems not to care actually, even being oddly proud of this? While PieFed - which just increased its userbase +400% - will continue to grow, and maybe PieFed will actually be the thing that captures more of the Reddit users. Lemmy certainly will not be, nor Mbin, and I cannot say for certain that PieFed will, just that it seems to me to be the only thing that possibly could (Sublinks seems dead in the water atm, due to the primary - only? - dev having a baby).
I’m curious what you think makes email easy enough to understand for the general population, but lemmy to hard.
<rant> I work in IT, user support. I’ve seen so many users still using AOL, Yahoo or ISP email accounts that were created for them automatically; they can’t figure out basic things like setting up Gmail with MFA or downloading Outlook for work from the app store. More importantly, they just don’t care; their eyes glaze over the moment you mention something like encryption (hacker talk to them) or privacy (you must be hiding something). They cannot tell the difference between Firefox or Chrome (all browsers are Internet Explorer). And these people are college educated doctors, lawyers, teachers, etc without a clue how technology works. I’ve changed the Chrome or Firefox icon to Internet Explorer on thousands of computers because even after giving them tutorial after tutorial, as soon as I leave the site, they are clicking that damn blue E and loading up MSNBC… </rant>
It took me a while to get my head round, but I’m in my 40s and shit with tech
What harms people is not the lack of knowledge but unwillingness to learn.
That said, there is only so much attention span to go around:-).
That email comparison annoys the fuck out of me. How is any of this like email?
- Domain + Username
- email is also very flawed (think spam, and spoofing, etc)
- its federated
- people usually just pick one of the big platforms, but there are other options.
- email servers get banned from interoperating with the network all the time
The comparisons could go on. I’m sure there are contrasts too. But email is a point of reference most people know about. Unless they don’t have an email address. I guess.
And you think the average user thinks of ANY of this when they’re using Lemmy for the first time so they must conclude “oh it’s just like email”? This has absolutely nothing to do with using the platform.
I answered your question about the similarities man. Settle down. You asked any and I gave you it. You didn’t ask for how it’s exactly like email.
Also, I think tech nerds tend to look down on others in this topic. “It’s too difficult, it’s too much to learn.” —- and thus it won’t be profitable? What are we worried about?
Activity pub and related networks didn’t just shrivel up and die right away due to this problem. I’m arguing with a stranger on the internet via a newer activity pub platform, in fact.
I don’t really have a whole lot of content to contribute. Although, I’ve been saving porn images, gifs, and videos to my hard drive for like… maybe about 2 decades? I’ve been thinking about posting some of that.
o7 i may have to start posting art here, thank you for your service and inspiration!
I’ve gained some weight since joining. Does that count?
