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?

  • DarkFuture@lemmy.worldEnglish
    2·
    12 minutes ago

    Been here since November. Seeing a lot more upvotes and comments on posts than when I got here.

  • Cyniez@lemmy.world
    7·
    3 hours ago

    It appears that Twitter users are migrating to Bluesky, while simultaneously engaging with Reddit and Discord. Meanwhile, Reddit users are making their way to Lemmy or maybe not I exacly don’t how but LEMMY IS GOING UPP.

  • hansolo@lemmy.today
    9·
    3 hours ago

    Thank you for your service.

    Also, thank you for asking. Yes, I’m increasing, and I’m eating more salads now to help prevent it, OK?

  • Auth@lemmy.worldEnglish
    431·
    14 hours ago

    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.

  • FreedomAdvocate@lemmy.net.auEnglish
    197·
    15 hours ago

    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.

    • rozodru@lemmy.world
      5·
      8 hours ago

      honest question because personally I’m not seeing it or maybe I’m just blinded to it but how is it worse? From what I’ve seen the moderation hasn’t been anywhere near as heavy handed as on Reddit with the exception of nuking bots. Maybe because I’m just blocking certain instances that I’m not seeing it.

      • TubularTittyFrog@lemmy.world
        4·
        4 hours ago

        It’s not. But mods generally just ban/threaten you if you post anything they disagree with. just like reddit. they have an agenda and if you are not on board with it 100% you are to be purged.

        for example i’ve been banned from multiple lemmy communities because I dared to disagreed with the ‘autism/non NT make you superior’ narrative quite a few communities here were pushing. or questioning the ‘perfection’ of Linux…

      • TrickDacy@lemmy.world
        81·
        6 hours ago

        I think they give away their real complaint when they mentioned “anything to the right of far left” as if reddit only allows far left views.

        • FreedomAdvocate@lemmy.net.auEnglish
          13·
          3 hours ago

          Have you not been on reddit in the last 5 years? It’s a highly censored, tightly controlled, far left echo chamber.

          • Dholi@lemmy.caEnglish
            2·
            2 hours ago

            far left echo chamber

            Here we go again with people who call themselves right-wingers making themselves the victims.

            You want to explain how /r/Conservative bans anyone who has a different opinion? Or why /r/worldnews is controlled by AIPAC interests that support the genocide in Palestine through the terrorist IDF army. Or why /r/protectandserve is a heavily moderated far right-wing subreddit that supports police brutality?

            It’s almost like people with fucked up views don’t like to get told they’re fucked up. Wow, what a revelation.

            • TrickDacy@lemmy.world
              2·
              2 hours ago

              Thank you for taking the time to call out these specific examples of ops claim being a ridiculous farce

      • Appoxo@lemmy.dbzer0.com
        2·
        7 hours ago

        Not the moderation but the general sentiment.
        You always see users going on and on about Linux for every slight mention of Microsoft or Windows.
        Same for other stuff like news. Everything is about the US and rarely anything else.

        Everything feels politicized. And if not it’s an OS war.
        And if not that it’s “Why are you not using this piece of software” solely because it’s (F)OSS.
        But if you for example question why they are using Plex (which isnt foss) they deflect by saying Jellyfin is not secure enough.

        As if they are targetted by state actors trying every zero day to gain acccess to their infrastructure.

        • Probius@sopuli.xyzEnglish
          4·
          10 hours ago

          Hmm, I already had that enabled. I see it now on your comments, but not on other people’s posts even if I upvote them and for people like The_Picard_Maneuver that I know I’ve upvoted in the past. I guess it’s just buggy.

    • doingthestuff@lemy.lolEnglish
      72·
      15 hours ago

      It’s definitely worse. I have only stayed because it isn’t corporate bullshit. It’s still shit though.

      • FreedomAdvocate@lemmy.net.auEnglish
        5·
        15 hours ago

        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.

  • asudox@lemmy.asudox.devM
    94·
    22 hours ago

    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.

      • mesa@piefed.socialEnglish
        1·
        3 hours ago

        wow piefed is kinda taking off :) Thats awesome.

        Its not like we cant all get what we want. Some will want lemmy, some will want piefed, some will want mastodon/kbin/mbin/etc…etc… Posts/comments show up in all. Its nice to have options.

      • 🇰 🌀 🇱 🇦 🇳 🇦 🇰 🇮 @pawb.socialEnglish
        335·
        23 hours ago

        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?

        • OpenStars@discuss.onlineEnglish
          486·
          23 hours ago

          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.

          • Admiral Patrick@lemmy.world
            11·
            5 hours ago

            Yeah…I’ve had to do a LOT of work client-side in Tesseract to give Lemmy half the features Piefed has. Eventually I’m gonna start targeting Piefed, but there’s some under the hood stuff I’m waiting to be resolved before I embark on that voyage. Mainly, I’ve heard that the main Piefed experience and the API are not 1:1 and not everything is exposed in the API. :(

          • 🇰 🌀 🇱 🇦 🇳 🇦 🇰 🇮 @pawb.socialEnglish
            21·
            22 hours ago

            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.

            • OpenStars@discuss.onlineEnglish
              121·
              21 hours ago

              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)

          • gedaliyah@lemmy.world
            9·
            21 hours ago

            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.

          • Mike D@piefed.socialEnglish
            5·
            19 hours ago

            I read this on Sh.itJust.Works and am now commenting from piefed.social.

            I haven’t dug in much but really like it.

          • Lena@gregtech.euEnglish
            11·
            22 hours ago

            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.

            • Deceptichum@quokk.auEnglish
              4·
              18 hours ago

              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.

                • Deceptichum@quokk.auEnglish
                  2·
                  17 hours ago

                  A lowkey level :P The admin is a lot less extreme than myself, and pretty accepting for most things outside of hate content.

                • OpenStars@discuss.onlineEnglish
                  12·
                  21 hours ago

                  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:-).

              • Petter1@discuss.tchncs.de
                12·
                14 hours ago

                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

                • mesa@piefed.socialEnglish
                  1·
                  2 hours ago

                  Honestly as long as its a “supported” language and well built, I would argue the language doesn’t matter as much as its execution.

                  I make my $$ on python, but C/C++ is soooo much better than when I started back a couple of decades ago. both are “fast enough”. Im glad there are people like you that like to work with the Cs of the world :).

            • bigfondue@lemmy.world
              3·
              20 hours ago

              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.

              • Petter1@discuss.tchncs.de
                12·
                14 hours ago

                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…

                • Lena@gregtech.euEnglish
                  2·
                  10 hours ago

                  Damn! How inefficient 🤪 but that explains a lot

                  Although I’m not a big fan of python, or dynamically typed languages in general, I think its DX is a lot better than stuff like C. Unless you really enjoy leaking 40GB of ram per second.

                  Python dev tend to vibe code

                  What? Maybe the percentage of vibe coders among python users is higher, but that’s irrelevant. Just hire the real developers…

          • tranes@lemmy.ca
            1514·
            22 hours ago

            “Everything I don’t like is tankie” freaks just love shoehorning “tankies” into everything it’s so funny

        • stephen01king@piefed.zipEnglish
          16·
          23 hours ago

          If you’re using the browser, the Piefed main page is a lot more data efficient, if you care about that sort of thing.

        • m-p{3}@lemmy.ca
          2·
          19 hours ago

          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

      • zaphod@sopuli.xyz
        7·
        22 hours ago

        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.

        • OpenStars@discuss.onlineEnglish
          2·
          21 hours ago

          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).

      • gigachad@piefed.socialEnglish
        136·
        23 hours ago

        I finally switched to PieFed now that Voyager has more or less stable support for it. Fuck the Lemmy tankie devs

    • Showroom7561@lemmy.ca
      9·
      19 hours ago

      Interesting that user counts are lower, but posts and comments are still going up. Hopefully, that doesn’t mean more bot activity 😧

      • PlzGivHugs@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
        5·
        18 hours ago

        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.

    • troed@fedia.io
      5·
      22 hours ago

      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 ;)

      • OpenStars@discuss.onlineEnglish
        2·
        20 hours ago

        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.

  • junble@feddit.dk
    11·
    7 hours ago

    Haha, det betyder ikke så meget. Lemmy har ikke fået min virksomhed til at tjene penge.

  • sunzu2@thebrainbin.org
    351·
    23 hours ago

    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.

  • mnhs1@lemmy.world
    331·
    21 hours ago

    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.

    • OpenStars@discuss.onlineEnglish
      7·
      20 hours ago

      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.

      • mnhs1@lemmy.world
        2·
        9 hours ago

        I haven’t encountered a troll yet and the encountered bots so far are useful repost bots. Reddit is just filled with obnoxious people that I couldn’t stand, moderators with small dick energy that moderate to whatever rules they prefer (like permanent bans for using very common non-targeted slurs) and just annoying trolls on subs like WorldNews and Canada that get away with racist shit all the time.

        • OpenStars@discuss.onlineEnglish
          3·
          8 hours ago

          Then you must be avoiding politics and the major news communities here - which is good advice for anyone to follow - in which case the rest of the Threadiverse is outright kind. Reddit used to have such people but they stopped talking years ago - I know I did.

          One thing to note about Reddit mods: the Rexodus broke the power of anyone who resisted, so the tiny dick energy thing is by design as in anyone there nowadays is a collaborator to its authoritarian regime, who of course is a very different type of personality (a conciliatory style: think “cop”, where power flows downhill) than what used to be the case years ago. I am speaking though of small niche subs - the largest ones had already enshittified by then, for different reasons. Power corrupts.

          But the Threadiverse is new, and so the early adoptor mindset reigns supreme. There are definitely authoritarians though - some of the more major ones you cannot see since Lemmy.world has defederated from them, thereby protecting you from that. Lemmy.ml still exists though, and if you ever say anything slightly negative about Russia, China, or North Korea (or in some cases simply not supportive enough of them?), then you can be banned from every community across the entire instance including ones you’ve never commented in before. So such things do exist here… but yeah there are also kind people here too, and that’s awesome! (Whereas on Reddit I simply gave up all hope whatsoever for anything positive, buried amidst all the mountains of trash)

  • LadyButterfly she/her@piefed.blahaj.zoneEnglish
    29·
    23 hours ago

    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.

  • Thekingoflorda@lemmy.world
    27·
    23 hours ago

    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 (: