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
The amount of furry / anime content on the front page might be putting off some new users
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.
Let’s keep it just under critical mass for Eternal September to not happen.
We need active users, not just users that post something once then disappear. The MAU is more important than the user count.
reddit used to be an internet place you looked at in class or uni when you had a break. I dont know how people get introd to it, but appealing to high schoolers is what reddit did. I made my reddit account when I was like 17, and lurked before that
Grow organically or die
That’s a very capitalist take. Remember how good things used to be? That’s how good the Fediverse is now. We don’t want it to grow or die. If it grows, great. If it doesn’t, great. Quality over quantity, imo.
the fediverse is very low quality unless you’re a furry linux-using anarchist/communist
for those of us who live in a broader reality with more ‘normie’ beliefs and lifestyles, it’s weak. it needs less weirdos who go around projecting their persecution complex everywhere
Yep. This is it.
Where is all this furry shit everyone is complaining about? I see one or two posts break 100 votes maybe every other week.
You’re spot on about Linux though. But I think it’s a good thing to be introduced to stuff you’re uncomfortable with. The constant flood of Linux content convinced me to switch.
every other day i have to block 2-3 furry communities, usually porno ones.
they aren’t no the front page, but once you go a few clicks deeper, boom goes the furry memes/porn.
i’ve blocked like 50 communities and 90% of them are furry content.
most of this was in the past few months, i never saw it the first 1.5 years i was here.
being introduce to furry porn isn’t expanding my horizon, it’s just annoying and weird, and offputting. it’s a sexual fetish. looking at pictures of feet would be similar, but I don’t get bombarded by foot porn here, just furry porn.
Also the linux fetishism on this site is super weird. I’m an IT professional. I use Linux. I don’t idealize it however. It’s just another OS among many. And most of the Linux content is more about being ANGRY about microsoft and apple than anything else.
25 years ago people were going on the same about how linux will save the world… and fantazing that one day microsoft would crumble. it didn’t. it won’t. in fact the opposite happened.
Linux is fine, but it’s a niche OS for nerds and admins. It’s not for regular home/office users and you aren’t a technology Jesus for using it or discovering it. It’s been around since the 1991.
You’re proving my comment made yesterday about a large chunk of Lemmy users being barely literate.
You’ve convinced me that we need more users given the high number of current posters who like to criticize others with insults reminiscent of a bratty 5th grader. We need to dilute that voice.
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.
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.
So true, and so sad. This has been such a disappointment to me, and even a bit of a surprise. I just didn’t realize how badly most people respond to seeing viewpoints they don’t fully share. Personally I don’t get the point of discussion where everyone agrees, but apparently that is quite a rare attitude. So I share your pessimism, but with one glimmer of hope. There is at least one forum which has cracked this problem: Hacker News. The issue being that it’s frequented by exactly the kind of techie Spock-like personalities that aren’t representative of the general population.
Yeah exactly, they dont have downvotes and any upvote also requires karma, so you cant just create new accounts and bot upvote things.
But yes, its also a much more mature audience at that site. Many are older computer nerds. Lemmy has some of that too though.
They also have a moderator that is full time working on keeping the site clean, so there is that.
But yeah, I really miss discussions where you see unpopular opinions and they are not downvoted, because I can handle seeing that. I may not agree and then I will just ignore or comment, not downvote it.
Without good moderation, it will turn into 4chan though. So yeah, the extremes are not good, have to be in the middle.
That’s the old Slashdot model. It does change how echo-y the chambers become when you limit how things get amplified. Those with higher engagement get to push things a lot harder and I’d actually fear the opposite. An Ai model would certainly be able to echo the general feeling of a place and then slowly turn the dial toward a goal, and do it more effectively in that case as it can comment on everything anyway.
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).
As for the title question:
Do we need more users ?
We don’t need more users. It might be nice, there are benefits, but we don’t need it. I agree with you on not caring much about growth-as-a-target, “growth for the sake of growth is the ideology of a cancer cell”. I was here years before the first big reddit exodus with the third-party API changes and I was having a good time back then too.
Just my two cents, but there’s just no reason for people to come here when it’s 80+% political shit and rage bait and virtue signaling. Hell, I’ve got 80% of the content here filtered out as it is, and I want to be here.
Find your nearest non-political hobby community and start posting things people actually want to see and maybe we might see some growth or people sticking around. My current hyperfixation/hobby is Meshtastic, so I’ve been pretty active there lately. If that’s not your thing, then there’s:
- [email protected]
- [email protected]
- [email protected]
- [email protected] [email protected] [email protected]
- [email protected]
- [email protected] or [email protected]
- [email protected]
- [email protected] [email protected] [email protected]
- [email protected]
If you’re like me and not good at any of that, tell us about cleaning your gutters or doing your laundry over in [email protected]
The point is, we need more posts about what make us happy and less about what we’re angry at (which is pretty much goddamned everything).
100% agree, I can just check once a day, skipping basically everything you mentioned + the non-memes in the meme comms and that’s it, no need to open the threadiverse again until the next day.
We also need artists and creative people on board, yes, even the ones who draw porn, but the threadiverse users seemed kind of hostile towards many things during the reddit exodus they decided it wasn’t a good place.
Wonder if they’d have a different experience now, since most instances have defederated hex, ml and grad, and those were the loudest when it came to brigade and complain about anything sexy.
There are barely any places that defederate from lemmy.ml, including PieFed.ca that you are on. Thankfully PieFed allows us to block all users from an instance, but new users will have to discover on their own that they even should do this, and until then will be exposed to all of their comments and posts.
It would be a huge improvement if politics were corralled into the political communities.
There are accounts that double post in both politics and news as well as other communities, I assume because people who have politics filtered actually secretly want to see politics… (/S)
I agree with everything that you’ve said. I would also add:
Find your nearest non-political non-tech hobby community and start posting things people actually want to see
Because if we’re going to cast the same net reddit does, people with a more varied set of interests need to come here. Can’t be all linux, politics, and news. We’re going to need people who like baking. We’re going to need sports fans. We’re going to need music.
I could type new communities we need to be active all day. Humans are surprisingly a diverse set of creatures. You have one set of interests, I have another. Different set of interests. And both are totally valid.
The thing people here don’t seem to grasp is that OTHER interests and OTHER people using the fediverse isn’t a bad thing. If a bunch of boomers come here, and make their own communities to talk about Taylor Swift, and whatever else they talk about on facebook. That’s good that it would be here! Not bad!
They could talk about gardening, and model trains, and whatever else. It wouldn’t appeal to you, and thats ok.
We’re going to need sports fans.
This. We are in huge lack of sports discussion here on lemmy. I’m looking at other places for sports content because it’s just not here. I miss live threads.
There’s also [email protected] I have been meaning to check out the current tournament.
[email protected] has live threads. The bot supports a few sports.
I agree, Go Guards!
We had the same thought. Right before I saw your reply, I added some hobby communities to my comment as examples.
This place is so flooded with politics and raging over the news that I’m about to choose a random hobby community that’s active and pick up said hobby just to be able to have something besides Star Trek and Linux to talk about here lol.
What social media isn’t filled with politics and rage when looking at the all category? I don’t know any social media that is broad appeal that doesn’t have that stuff unless you stick only to your subscription feed or use filters.
Only social media I’ve seen that’s been free of that stuff by default have been niche topic focused communities like a video game forum that only allows off tangent stuff in the offtopic section.
Orrrrr…pick a non-active community. Or both. And start posting in your local community. By that, I mean I live in Cleveland. There are 3 Cleveland communities. All dead. I’m the only one posting in one. I still get replies and upvotes. So people are there. They just all lurk until I post.
Do that. And post in a dead community. And post in an active community. We need activity basically everywhere besides tech/politics/news.
Consider redirecting people from the two other dead communities to the one you post to
What we REALLY need is more posts about Linux.
Do you use Arch btw
Yes. I’m here for the long tail, the niche communities. And what do I see? Not enough photos of houseplants! Come on, you must have some too. And to add to the list, [email protected] looks nice.
You’re the pineapple blossom post! That’s such a nice picture.
I’ve been intentionally trying to be less of a lurker and more active in comments. [email protected] is one place that I’ve tried to be more active because I love reading, thinking, and talking about books. I was also posting updates about a green lynx spider on my lemmy.world account before I switched to piefed, this is a good reminder for me to post an update on my girl (RIP) and her beautiful little babies.
Lots of us lurkers need to be more active, myself included.
Hearing this from someone that from what I can see has one post and four comments in 3 months is more than a little ironic.
I may have created two accounts when I got here, and I will be baited into replying to snarky comments only from this one! I also like the low-key split-personality feeling, and experimenting with a different set of subscriptions. Anyway, so I’m no content-generation machine. But I’m doing my part to keep up the signal-to-noise ratio!
Just my two cents, but there’s just no reason for people to come here when it’s 80+% political shit a
As a contra point, I’m glad that its like this, a lack of politcal debate is toxic to democracy and that way be dragons.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bread_and_circuses
In a political context, the phrase means to generate public approval, not by excellence in public service or public policy, but by diversion, distraction, or by satisfying the most immediate or base requirements of a populace, by offering a palliative: for example food (bread) or entertainment (circuses). Juvenal originally used it to decry the “selfishness” of common people and their neglect of wider concerns. The phrase implies a population’s erosion or ignorance of civic duty as a priority.
That doesn’t mean there shouldn’t be more other stuff as well though.
My experience is that Lemmy is decent for tech-related stuff but outside of that, it can be difficult to find active communities depending on the hobby. I just went looking for a good Spanish learning or general language learning community and the few that I found have been inactive for months. Maybe I wasn’t looking in the right place (I searched in Communities > All).
I don’t think maximum growth should be a goal for Lemmy, I just think it needs a critical mass of activity to keep it interesting. Currently I think we just about have that for many tech/FOSS related topics but not so much outside it. The problem, I think, is that a lot of people who aren’t into tech/FOSS issues don’t know about Lemmy and don’t see why they wouldn’t just use Reddit or Discord.
we need more posts about what make us happy and less about what we’re angry at (which is pretty much goddamned everything).
Unfortunately the “political shit” and “ragebait” is important.
The Fediverse is what you make of it. If you subscribe to a bunch of communities posting political shit and ragebait, that’s what you’ll get. That’s not a problem with the threadiverse, that’s a problem with your curation. One that it sounds like you remedied, so I’m not sure why you feel the need to call it out as a problem.
Look at it from a new user’s perspective; someone who has not curated their feed or otherwise “made the fediverse what they want” yet. e.g. They land on Lemmy World or another big instance and their default sort is “active”. Doing that now in an incognito window, and half the front page is rage, same on the second, and the stuff that’s not are some random shitposts and Linux filling in.
Truth be told, looking at that, I probably wouldn’t want to sign up. Especially if I didn’t know that different instances have different cultures, etc.
Assuming they’re a normie (which we desperately fucking need here), I just don’t see that they’d want to stick around. Aside from trolls and spammers, the only people we seem to consistently attract here are the “Wah wah I was banned from Reddit” types and, while there’s certainly a sizable pool to draw from, I wouldn’t exactly consider them the pick of the litter for growing the fediverse.
The point of OPs post is that usage here is declining, and I am simply pointing out that I feel all the rage and politics is not particularly inviting.
Edit: And you know what? I’m just going to fucking say it. There’s too many armchair activists here who won’t let you enjoy a single moment without reminding you that something bad is happening somewhere in the world and that you have some kind of moral obligation to be angry all the time about it. And if you’re not angry all the time then you’re somehow part of the problem.
Rage bait, tiktok/twitter/facebook/Instagram reposts, politics just happen to be what tends to get the most activity across social media. That’s what you see when you view social media without an account whether it is lemmy or popular corporate run sites.
Its why filter tools, avoiding all, and sticking to subscriptions has been a thing for a long time prior to the reddit third party hammer.
I don’t know any social media that isn’t explicitly niche focused that isn’t a terrible default experience. And by niche I mean like some old school forum that only talks allows talks of a specific topic like video games.
Broad appeal talk about whatever topic you want is going to be generally trash by default, since so many different topics and communities are sharing the same space.
We really need better onboarding for new users, maybe ask them about their interests to give them a default set of subscriptions (it would probably just be a tweaked version of the community search page). And default to the subscribed feed, not the All feed
Isn’t that how Piefed onboarding works?
Yes.
I’ve seen so many discussions like this about what needs to be done. So I did those things.
Very few noticed and I quickly got tired of popping up and saying “oh yeah I fixed that” to everything. Besides it makes me look like a smug asshole.
You should be a proud smug asshole (endearing) for fixing the missing capability of Lemmy poisoned the well.
I wouldn’t have stuck being in the threadiverse if it wasn’t for piefed. It would just be a failed third attempt to join Lemmy since the reddit APIpocalypse.
Same. I almost left Lemmy, until PieFed allowed another option.
yea I think so lol
I love piefeds default :)
And as much as I dont like parts of bluesky, they did the onboarding the correct way.
I don’t disagree that we need more positive and high quality hobby content. Sure.
But personally I’m so sick of dudes complaining about “political shit and rage bait and virtue signaling”, whatever half of that banal nonsense is even supposed to mean…
In fact, I’d go as far to say that people who whine about everything being “political” is a bright fucking red flag to me. My immediate assumption upon reading that is “this person is a Trump supporter who voted for this exact shit to happen because they want it to happen, and they don’t want to be confronted by the fact that other people don’t.” I know exactly what kind of people don’t want to hear about “politics” anymore now that Trump is elected, trampling our institutions, and fucking everything up. Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain, right?
We have a lot of non-voters that love to complain about the results they helped achieve.
I agree, I think something that has been lost in conversation about progressive politics and leftism more broadly (in US-centric circles at least) is that as much as people on the left disagree about absolutely everything, in general (with plenty of exceptions) politically left movements and cultural spaces tend to be far better at identifying common values and truths that are universal and holding individuals and communities to those values and truths.
Whereas on the right the endless stumping about valuing freedom of speech turns out to mostly be a mirage when it comes to innocent, vulnerable people being physically murdered on camera by the state, on the left institutions and individuals are much more often held to a standard of values and called out if they fail to reach it.
When people enter a space where progressive and left voices haven’t been systematically silenced and it is a new experience for them, they often react negatively and feel rebuked. I know some of my first encounters when I was younger with actually left spaces initially made me bristle with how willing they were to say no to things that weren’t healthy, to challenge oppressive structures even if they were so normalized they were invisible to me… it can be an uncomfortable process but ultimately more often than not leftist spaces actually try to do it and it that is a good thing.
I entirely agree with people having agency to decide when politics comes up on their feed and when it doesn’t, but the idea that we are all just being a bit too negative and obsessed with the news and we should cheer up is honestly insulting in 2026 given, you know gestures at everything. Everything is political, if you have the capacity to complain about being subject to “too much politics” be thankful for your capacity to experience that state of choice.
Also, and this is on a personal note, talking about politics doesn’t make me depressed, it helps me feel less depressed and anxious because I know other people feel similarly and the more educated I am about what is happening the less scared and confused I feel.
The red flag is at least, “they have so much privilege in our society they can ignore politics”, if not what you stated
Thanks for the links🙂
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.
Niche hobbies and small communities (that are active) is what is needed
Yes! We need more esp32 users to come up with bonkers ideas.
Comes with numbers. Not before.
Unfortunately yes
This is the number one thing I would bring up tk the question “do we need more users”. We need more users if we want more niche communities, and I want more niche communities without having to post.
For that we need a LOT more users. It’s kind of a chicken and egg situation.
Hopefully we can capitalise on the next Rexit.
In the past lots of people moved over but left because of the terrible UX. I think PieFed has solved most of the UX issues.
Reddit had the additional benefit of being found through google… that’s how i learned about the site.
you cant google your way into this place - and that’s a huge limitation, when it comes to expanding the user base with random normal people.
If you Google for “beans no pooping challenge” https://lemmy.eco.br/post/113558?scrollToComments=true at least appears on the first page of results - that’s progress, baby!
This is it exactly. I made a hard cut with Reddit, but I’ll admit to missing the sysadmin subreddit. The place was full of very smart, helpful people and also cranky. The PowerShell subreddit was another great resource. I haven’t been willing to go back, but those sorts of communities only exist when you hit a certain mass of people on a platform.
Yes.
Do we want Reddit amounts of users? No.
But there’s a lot of growth between here and there.
100% agreed. A Reddit clone with Reddit amounts of users will end up almost as bad as Reddit. The thing that makes Reddit worse in that situation is that they are a public company.
This platform would have to evolve a lot before it can deal with so many users. There has to be some significant innovation and improvement in moderation and administration, or more users would inevitably lead to endemic misinformation and power tripping and all of that shit you see on Reddit.
I mean the intent here is for moderating capacity and tools to increase with user increases. Reddit grew but grew before its own moderator capacity allowed for it. Now I would argue its overall activity levels are inflated by AI, trolls and spammers. I’m on Piefed and in terms of the discussion about growth, I think about new instance admin tools can mitigate and prevent bad behaviour, trolling, AI and spamming from (usually) new accounts that otherwise would cement themselves on as regular spammers and trolls.
It’s one thing to grow, but you need to grow the ability to deal with the problems that can derive from that.
One of the benefits of our “own” system is like you said, we can build the tools as they come.
Reddit and other platforms, we were always beholden to what they gave us.
With the fedi, you want something better? Build it! Or support those who are doing so. Its much more productive than just complaining all the time.
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.
PieFed labels bots and bot-like accounts, allowing you to choose options like blur or show the content semi-transparently.
I‘m not worried about myself. It’s easy enough to block stuff I don’t like. All I wanted to say os that counting daily posts without excluding bots doesn’t make much sense to me.
Out of curiosity, which instance?
The instance is called lemmit.online, and the most upvoted post on the whole instance is “This bot is bad for lemmy”.
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
Here’s the thing imo. Bots used well can be really useful. The most attractive part about Reddit/Lemmy though is the comments. Seeing what people have to say about stuff is quite nice.
BUT. I can see how bots can be super helpful to subscribe to content where community interaction isn’t that important (like art posted by artists on Instagram, Twitter and so on). The main attraction is the art itself. Not the comments.
This way, I can see what my favorite instagram artists are up to without selling my soul to zuck.
Yeah I did plan to interact with whatever gets cross posted from reddit
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.
