Average Lemmy Active Users by Month

I don't know about you but I was just waiting for an excuse. I ain't ever going back. It's a brave new world for me, part of shifting my whole suite to FOSS. Leaving the old internet behind me.
- In 2022 I was Windows + Twitter + Reddit. In 2023 I'm full-time Linux + Mastodon + Lemmy.
  
  I've rid myself of reddit (never used Twitter thank God) but I'm still on windows. I just got a steam deck though and I'm loving the Linux desktop mode. What branch of Linux does the deck use? I know I could do a quick Google to find out but damn I love how well it runs. Linux isn't nearly as scary as I thought
  
  Nice change you made!!
  
  Linux is a hell of a drug
  
  I ditched Windows because I could not stand them restarting my PC without my permission after an update. And ads! Fucking ads on my start menu.
  
  welcome home
  
  Same
- Same, I didn't know which server suited me so I created three accounts on various Lemmy servers and also one on kbin, but now I'm exclusively using just this account.
- I wasn't really looking for a replacement, just wanted to break my reddit addiction which was hampering my productivity. Lemmy isn't a replacement in the sense, but a nice change and something new to try.
- FOSS
  Same. I adopted a google account a long time ago, but I've finally hit my limit on what they've been doing with youtube and everything. Free and open source alternatives are the way to go, it may take a while to catch on or may never fully, but who cares. Switching to linux recently was the best thing I've ever done.
- Same here
  Well said

What this shows us is that more people are joining lemmy, but even more people are either leaving or going into lurker mode, as Lemmy only counts people who have commented or posted in that time period as active users, whereas most social media counts any activity while logged in as active. You have to realize that people who use reddit as Google search results don't usually interact with the content there and most won't even make an account.
On the upside, with fewer people, it's easy to get noticed here just by contributing good content since you don't really get drowned out here because of the democratic upvote based sorting instead of black box personalized recommendation algorithms. So with relatively low amount of effort, you can make sure your content is being seen instead of relying on analytics and metrics.
The last thing to in mind that Lemmy is only one aspect of ActivityPub, and Mastodon's growth is currently the highest right now because of the ecosystem created by the whale fall of Twitter, which indirectly grows Lemmy as Mastodon users can post directly to federated Lemmy communities.
- I just got recommended this site after posting on reddit re: predatory algos and the necessary regulations needed to protect people and how algos have manipulated the UX so much its disrupted the originally intended purposes; ie insta has effectively become a marketing and advertising platform.
  So in response someone suggested finding alternatives to the popular social media sites and used Lemmy as an example.
  I have been loving it thus far - its old school reddit.
  this is my first comment on lemmy!
  
  Welcome! So far, in my experience, this is a much friendlier community that... many of the alternatives.
  
  Fuck you! Hello.
  
  Agreed on it being old school reddit! There are some UI wrappers that make it look and feel like old school reddit that I use and love you might enjoy. The wrapper is called mlmym and is open source. There are a few hosts you can use, I use this one: https://o.opnxng.com
  A direct link for your lemmy instance would be https://o.opnxng.com/lemmy.world
  https://github.com/rystaf/mlmym/tree/main
- Do votes count as activity as well? Or just posts and comments?
  
  It really should.
  
  Votes unfortunately don't count
- There seemed to be an influx of reddit users but probably didn't like Lemmy's own distinct user base (*nix users for example)
  I am kind of glad it settled down because I much prefer Lemmy over reddit
- That's esteemed Academy Award nominated character actress Margot Robbie to you!
- Damn, I’d better keep commenting, I usually just lurk/vote
- Someone posted metrics for how many users vote. 131k.
- halfyear includes people trying out different instances; monthly shows just the one(s) they settled on

For anyone panicking, this is exactly like what happened with the transition from ICQ to AOL messenger, from MySpace to Facebook, from 9gag/etc to Reddit, and so on.
Website makes a mistake, some people leave. Makes another, more leave. Each time this happens, more 'main' people of said website leave. Hell, I already saw PoppinKREAM here, so that's a great start.
So this is exactly how it always goes. The fact it is still here means it's staying. Look at Threads, or Metaverse, whatever those things are. All dying or dead, barely lasted. Lemmy is still here, people are still posting, so just keep doing what you're doing. It's already working.
- It's like a ratcheting effect. Every time schmeddit fucks up, we gain a few more. And if you can count on Spez for one thing, it's that he'll reliably fuck up on the regular.
- This is why Mastodon is so populated compared to lemmy. Elon just keeps making more and more mistakes.
- Think it really was PoppinKREAM?! Love to read them again.
  
  Them and Portarossa
  
  If it wasn't, it was a damn good imitator.
- Aw man. ICQ. I miss those times.
  
  So much happiness in this little sound.
  https://youtu.be/6iCPIUGnHQ8?si=3HL_hsn34getR53x
  
  I still have my UIN 8833052 :)
  
  Sure, you miss it now.

I don’t care that the fediverse has a ton of traffic. It may not have the most users, but it definitely has the best
- *tips hat
  
  Lem'my
- Very true. I'm still amazed how good lemmy is considering how small we still are.
- 100% agree. Have encountered a few jerkwads on Lemmy but hey, blocking works. The overall vibe here is 100x better than schmeddit.
  
  Quick question regards blocking - how does it work exactly?
  When I block someone, I can still see their message. Just won’t get a notification. I thought, it would be blocked entirely - so I’m a bit confused.
- I much much prefer the niche community here. Much less shit to have to wade through (see: came here to say this x 100000 per post) to get to the good comments and posts
  
  @Pregnenolone yeah I haven't seen a single "this is the way" comment chain since I got here.
  
  I think the #boost #feature also helps with this.
  
  tries to resist urge, fails
  Came here to say this!
  
  This.
- Exactly. I don't need the most users. The internet was better back when it wasn't everybody.
- People complaining about a loss of users are the same people that will complain about performance issues next time there is a huge influx of users that stresses the infrastructure for popular instances.
  
  I’m way less mad about Kbin having issues than I ever was at Reddit

11 million comments this month. 11 million comments from people smart enough to leave behind the other. 11 million comments, likely largely from actual humans.
Lemmy is thriving.
- Plot twist: It's all piped.video bot.
  
  lol ive never clicked a piped link even once
- I didn't completely leave behind reddit. I still view, but I only comment/post on lemmy.
  
  I'm similar, but I occasionally crosspost Lemmy posts to Reddit to try and drive more traffic here :)

All the people returning and forgetting what reddit did and will continue to do. Then the next time reddit messes up, they will come back. 😔
Edit: other stats seem pretty good though! Unless i am misunderstanding them.
- I can't wait until the next time reddit fucks up.
  
  My money's on them killing off old Reddit next.
  
  As long as they need more money for shareholders you can count on it.
- The blue one doesn’t reset count every mount so it’s cululative. It means people come and go. There was a big Reddit rush and some people went back others got annoyed with the growing pains and went elsewhere. But the fact that it’s slowing down means it’s stabilizing to a dedicated community.
- I would prefer to use Lemmy, but it simply doesn't have some things that reddit currently has. It could in the future, but it doesn't have the user base yet.
- The half year probably still includes all the Reddit refugees, maybe that’s why it hadn’t fallen yet

Lurker here. Just writing this as my first ever comment to push those numbers.

This graph is much more reassuring:
https://lemmy.fediverse.observer/dailystats
We are stable, even slightly growing in the last few days.
- It’s really painful that these graphs don’t start at zero. Hard to see if that growth is as dynamic as it looks
- The average comments is far more interesting. Constant growth. Active accounts is skewed by all the alts new people make.
  
  Good point, but I feel like alts haven't been used that much lately as instances have been stables for weeks now
- What the heck happened on Nov. 3rd?
  
  New Reddit UI for some users I think

so there was a wave of sign ups with the Reddit drama, and then people got bored. the graph looks about right to me.
- Uh-huh
  Still, Lemmy probably ended up with more people than before. Also, hey, I came from Reddit drama
  
  I came over from the Reddit drama as well.
- Yep. Makes sense
- Growth always comes in waves and then settles. I spent nearly a decade on reddit until they killed my app. Reddit took over a decade to become really big. I'm not really that worried for lemmy that much, especially since we now have a framework for something other than reddit. Even if reddit goes into nosedive mode, it won't be the end of forums as we know it.

Here's the thing though... I've been on Reddit for over a decade before Lemmy, and whilst there may be less interaction the interactions themselves have been far more sincere. People are more willing to engage, and even with this random comment there's a chance someone would comment below.
The community feel of Lemmy is something, at least I've found, Reddit had lost a very long time ago.
Sort of a quality Vs quantity thing I guess?

I dont get the hysteria, personally.
I came here to escape the crowds, not migrate with them.
- Once a site gets too popular it gets normified and it just becomes nothing but reposts, in-jokes and low effort crap.
  
  Reddit's appeal was never in the popular subs, but in the long tail. Forget about the dozen subreddits with million+ subscribers, what made it interesting is the thousands of subs with a few hundred active users.
- What hysteria?

It doesn't matter. I get all my news here and I can comment if I want. That's enough

For anybody interested, the monthly active users including voters is 131,150 (131k)
The one in the graph only takes into account people who have made a post or comment
Edit: The halfyear active users including voters is 253,166 (253k)
- That engagement ratio is super high when you look at it this way. 118k-ish posters/commenters and 131k total users? Damn. Good job Lemmy.
  
  The 118k is half year aka 6 months
  The one around 35k is month
- I didn't realize commenting was an important metric. I check lemmy everyday but rarely have something useful to say.
- Ooh, that's my preferred global population! That's a good sign!
- This is a great metric-explainer. What impressive numbers. Now we really know how successful this migration has been.

FWIW Lemmy has fully replaced Reddit as my go-to toilet reading material, and I'm sure there are many other lurkers around here who don't post much and thus don't show up in these stats. The more niche communities are still lacking in content, yes, but these things are best left to grow organically over a long period of time to maintain quality. It was the same on Reddit too before the enshittification escalated.

For whatever anecdotal observations are worth, I've recently been seeing a huge uptick in activity from the userbase that is here. Maybe it's been driven by posts like this one or memes about growing Lemmy, but people seem to be posting and commenting more than usual.
- If lemmy has 100 users I’m one of them
  If lemmy has 1 user it’s me
  If lemmy has no users I’m dead
- I don't know about huge but the data on the same page supports the observation on post quantity. It's still steadily increasing.
  Comments might be currently on a stable trend.
  
  It’s also a common finding from those comparing replies to the same posts on Twitter and mastodon: fewer but better replies on mastodon.
- I've been trying to post as much as I find it possible and engaging.
- It's anecdotal. It's not worth anything.

Zoomed out graph including some months before the join wave
Users/month are relatively stable now at 33x users/month compared to pre join wave (users/month is people who have posted or commented)

If reddit taught me anything, it's that a growing network isn't necessarily a good thing.
- A dying one is generally worse though.
- Infinite growth ruins everything. A smaller community is better.

Meh, lemmy is already interesting enough to kill time and past that I don’t care

First of all, rooting for decentralized net 100%. Watching Tumblr, Reddit, Twitter, etc. all get screwed over from the top down sucks. I really appreciate the strong community here - having it smaller and more engaging encourages participation and makes it feel a little more human.
However, I'm considering leaving Lemmy just because somehow it's even more cynical than reddit, and I'm losing interest in opening the app if it's just 99% downers. I mean almost every article is just crushingly bad news. The world is in a rough state for sure, and staying informed is really important! But trying to live on and find the good is near impossible here.
(Yes, I'm subbed to upliftingnews. That's the 1%.)
Is this a demographics thing, or am I just subbed in all the wrong places? Maybe a bit of both?
- Also so many Linux memes
- I’ve been doing my best to add content. I’m currently working on a book review, a video game review, and a Battletech post. Unfortunately posts like that take time and are outpaced by the tempo of news articles and resulting arguments within.
  If you want a more positive experience you should unsubscribe from all the news & politics stuff. Trust me, when you click on “frontpage all”, it will be there. No reason to also have it in your subscribe feed. Go into the creative communities and at the very least comment. Give some feedback, and ideally add something of your own. Lemmy is too small to simply expect content to exist without adding some of your own.

BAD GRAPH, Y-AXIS STARTS AT 20K
- Yeah, the Y-axis really needs at least a break.
- What would starting at zero add besides another row that is unused?
  
  The ability to eyeball how many times less users there are

Now that I've goten addicted to the block feature, I'm probably never going back to reddit. Dont like the content from specific servers while I'm browsing the top pages? Block, they stop existsing. Find myself getting baited into low effort arguements? Block and move on. I feel faaaarrr less stressed out lately
- I feel the same way, my block list is massive. The app I use to browse, the lemmy version of Boost, also has a word filter option too, which isn't on the desktop browser interface (I don't think), so I can block names of certain people and current event incidents I'm not interested in seeing any more, without needing to block communities or users. It only works when the post actually has the words in the title, so ironic memes slip through all the time, but its better than nothing.
  
  Oohh, that sounds pretty good! I'm a bit of an old man when it comes to apps though and try to avoid them unless absolutely necessary, that might tempt me into looking into some of the lemmy apps though!

Keep it in mind
We lost active users because of this
beehaw has been defed from lemmy.world, sh.itjust.works and other instances
some instances like lemmy.film and fmhy went offline
- I’d imagine Hexbear and lemmygrad ran a lot of people away as well.
  
  I've been registered on Lemmygrad. Got banned for saying Stalin is not a superhero and that he made both good and bad moves.
  Noted, moved to lemmy.world
  
  I've had like three accounts banned from .ml for saying, among other things, that the US revolution didn't involve kidnapping children. Trying to have any world news discussion here is completely impossible, and that's one of the more active areas on Reddit. No wonder people try out lemmy and then bail.
  
  Probably but people who make their account on Lemmy.world, the most common instance, also never see them.
  
  It absolutely did. Instances should have acted on that day 1.
- I was wondering what happened to lemmy.film.
  
  Nobody knows unfortunately, but we created !moviesandtv@lemm.ee as a replacement
  
  @Shyfer yeah it shut down which was disappointing.
  Luckily due to the decentralised nature of federation there are movies communities at lemmy.world, kbin.social, and lemm.ee.

I know this is just anecdotal, but I have literally not seen a single mention of Lemmy anywhere online or in the news in the last 3 months, including on Reddit. "Build it and they will come" only gets you so far...
- Because everyone who wants to use lemmy isn't posting about it on reddit.
- I post on my country sub every week in the self promotion thread.
  We also published a news in a well known national open source website.
  I agree with you, people have to advocate about it, it's not magical.
  
  It's also important to note that 0.19 has been a long time coming. I think part of the reticence to engage in full on Lemmy evangelism is that people recognize that the platform still needs work. Once everything starts working more smoothly and moderation tools get some upgrades, it'll become a lot easier to recommend Lemmy to the average person.
  
  I would like to start doing this as well. Feel free to post a template of what you usually say to lure people in. I think more people here would be willing to go on a little misonary run 😉
- You make a good point.
  Mastodon by comparison has attracted a number of people basically campaigning for its adoption with webpages and sign up drives.
  I’m not clear on the details but I’ve picked up that some of that energy comes from people who see Twitter as politically important and so view Mastodon advocacy as a political act worthy of funding.
  Reddit I imagine doesn’t attract that kind of interest.
  But still, as you say, adoption could be better with some more community organisation.
  Generally, the lack of synergy with mastodon is a continuous source of disappointment for me in how segregated the Fedi actually is and how insular masto actually is.
- Which means that the fact that so many users have stayed is even more impressive.
- I commented on an admin post today saying "Lemmy is thriving" and the comment never appeared 🤣
- I agree. No one knows Lemmy.
  Still, as long as there is enough activity on it, I’m happy.

IDGAF IM HERE TO STAY. LEMMY IS COOL AND WTF EVEN IS A SNOO 😤😤😤

I think it would be wise for us to adopt a hashtag system so you can search by topic as opposed to by community. We're so segmented into smaller sub communities and different servers that it's difficult to find what you want to read.
- Upside is that this change would effectively consolidate small communities across instances so they aren't so fragmented.
  Downside is that there would be less control over what content is tied to each tag because I'm not sure how moderation would work. You can end up with issues where people maliciously flood a certain tag with junk.
  
  The upside of communities is that each can moderate themselves, and you can block the ones that don't moderate to your standards.
- Wouldn't Mastodon just be that? Lemmy and Mastodon federate - and you can see one in the other.
  Twitter-likes are tag based. Reddit-likes are community based? I think it's fine and good if communities merge or get subsumed by an equivalent on another instance.
  
  Yes and no, ideally we would also still have communities. You can imagine how a topic like Henry Kissinger's death could be talked about in both of a politics sub, and noncredibledefence esque military based sub.
  The point is basically to give better search functionality and bridge these communities by topic in a way.
  
  you can see one in the other.
  Right now, you can't see Mastodon toots unless they go out of their way to link a Lemmy community. I hope we'll get better integration at some point (a way to subscribe to users or hashtags, maybe), because that would give a lot more activity
- @PopOfAfrica wait doesn't lemmy have hashtags? Or do you just mean everyone should use them more?

The actual content is way better now than it was the first couple of months after the Reddit thing. Initially a lot of the comments were either Reddit related or people trying to force communities that didn't necessarily have the population to survive, yet. That's all fallen away now and the content feels much more organic. Someone opening a Lemmy instance for the first time is going to find today's front page much more engaging than what it looked like in June/July.
Lemmy is becoming its own thing rather than a reflection of Reddit.
In some ways a lot more responsive as well. The news that Kissinger died was all over Lemmy for hours before I noticed one post about it crack the front page of Reddit, for example.

Weird, because I feel like it is more populated that it was after the huge influx of users because of the APIcalypse.
- Lemmy is one of the healthiest fediverse communities. It's starting to get to the point where it can emulate the hours of infinite scrolling people do on reddit. Whether that is a good thing is debatable.
  
  It's starting to get to the point where it can emulate the hours of infinite scrolling people do on reddit.
  That is the case for me since Sync for Lemmy popped out.
  Whether that is a good thing is debatable.
  This reminds me of my mom watching TV novels back in the days when they aired daily, and now she watches the same novels but through streaming... Ahh some things never change
  
  I'm really glad that it's small. I'd rather see genuine posts about 3D printing or aquariums or mountainbiking rather than ragetext memes or influencer shit on the frontpage of reddit. I do hope we kinda dial down the copy/paste bot content from reddit though, especially the memes.
- The people who are here are more willing to post. So less of us overall but also less lurkers.
  
  Yeah, it seems like the most logical assumption, anyway I'm happy here, hopefully it would not take too long for more niche stuff to kick in!
  
  I lurked for months because of lemmy.world's policy of only allowing real email accounts for registration. Reddit allowed anonymous accounts for years which encouraged easy participation at the cost of bots.
  
  This definitely applies to me. I had a Reddit account for 5-6 years, but never made a single post and only wrote a handful of comments. I just feel more comfortable interacting here.

I don't care I'm here to stay. Only community I miss is formuladank for F1 shitposting. Been trying to get it going here but no traction yet. Everything else, Lemmy 4 life.

I used Reddit for years and maybe posted twice, here i just feel more compelled to participate. I find it hard to put into words, but Reddit feels like social media, which I hate, and lemmy feels more like an old school forum.
Why would more users be better? As far as I'm concerned whatever number of users are right now is the right one.
- I definitely get the old school forum vibes. Reddit felt like talking into the void sometimes if a thread was popular and you weren't there from early.
- Same. I participate much more here than I did on the red site.
- It helps that our community is small enough that people are able to comment with people that they have something in common with. Compare that to Reddit when it felt like there was no meaningful conversation because there was too much of an ocean of users.

- DID YOU KNOW HENRY KISSINGER DIED
  
  Don't care tbh
  
  Seen so many posts about him and honestly had no idea who he is or why people hated him lol
- As an entry level tech worker, I feel both seen and attacked. Fair play to ya.
- There's definitely a "downvote if you disagree" ethos here. There's not even a pretense of "this contributes to the conversation, even if I disagree" reason for upvoting.
  I know this is how it worked in practice on reddit, but at least the rule was that you were supposed to upvote contributions and downvote things that didn't contribute, and at least a few people followed that rule (or maybe only me).
  I wouldn't be surprised if that drives some people away - they see a bunch of downvotes on their comments and think people don't want to hear from them (even if there are more upvotes than downvotes).
  
  @limelight79
  There’s definitely a “downvote if you disagree” ethos here.
  Is there? That's a shame.
  I'm on kbin and we don't federate downvotes so I don't see any of the downvotes the lemmings are giving to each other (or to me for that matter). Last time I hit "view on original instance" on lemmy.world I thought they might be developing that culture but I didn't realize it has become rife across the Lemmys.
- I'm just an old man lost in a world of Linux and geek memes I don't understand.

I feel dumb for having to ask but what exactly is "active users half year" vs "active uses monthly"?
Is half year just mean one or more comments/upvotes in the last 6months?
- I believe the chart is if you are looking at last activity date.
  Was this persons' last activity date in the last 6 months? Last 1 month?
  Not sure how they are actually measuring that activity - whether that's logins or posts?
  
  It's based on posts and comments.

Unfortunately it’s mostly bot posts and people of all the same thought processes with nothing to add to any conversation.
- So just like reddit then?
  
  Maybe not anymore since they all migrated over.
- Really? I've had the complete opposite experience. Every time I comment it seems that I'm interacting with actual people. And I've found the conversations to be a lot more wholesome in comparison to reddit. Maybe it's my selection of posts though...
- Yeah... say anything that's not extreme lefty propaganda and the Hexbears and Lemmygrads jump on you
  
  Really? I haven't seen them in months. Maybe they are blocked on my instance?

It's ok, it's just us cool kids left

i comment more than monthly on lemmy
- This is my first comment in months. I've been lurking and reading.
  
  doubt ;)

Don't let yourself be fooled. Lemmy is doing great. It's got a lot more user than half a year ago and it will continue to grow. You should look at the bigger perspective here. People are starting to understand the point of the Fediverse more and more and it will eventually take over enshitified platforms such as Reddit

Don't worry fam. Spez has several moves left in the Elonshitification playbook.
He hasn't even begun to malign ethnic or religious groups, accept no blame, and blame said groups' advocacy organizations for the problem!

I think its because we aren't allowed by default to post images, which I completely understand after what happened back a couple months ago. I've been using Lemmy for more then 4 months actively but yet I still don't have permission to post pictures because of the fact that I'm too lazy to even try to get it enabled. This is a major reason why we aren't seeing a lot of content.
Also, this tends to be mostly a leftist leaning app, so maybe some people get drawn away.
- I was really on-board of the idea of Lemmy in the beginning. It all made a lot of sense, and I felt like a part of the community.
  But now it feels like its just an echo chamber of people, who seems to have very extreme beliefs.
  It's starting to be clear that the whole "ML - Leninism Marxism" was actually a big part of Lemmy.
  I'm a centrist, slightly leaning towards the left, but I don't feel like I truly belong in the demographic of Lemmy any longer. Reddit is starting to pull me back, and Boost still works, which only makes it harder to resist...
  
  Extreme leftist politics, memes, linux, a weirdly active Star Trek community (comparatively) and blocking furry/anime porn communities daily. That's been my experience so far.
  
  I feel the same way sometimes. I'm a centrist as well, a lot of the people on both sidee in this platform do have extreme takes and have the "You must agree with me or I will ban you" attitude. I wish it was a bit more diverse, whenever I come on Lemmy it is completely saturated with leftists post. I have nothing against people on the left, its just the fact that content is so obviously saturated with it.
  
  I left Lemmy for like 6 months because I got tired of the echo chamber. I'm usually inclined to the left but this was just too much and too extreme. There were some pretty interesting topics that I learned here, like how badly designed society is and why cars are an artificial need. Those "intellectual" discussions (if you could call them that) kept me engaged, but even those spaces were ruined by people totally closed to the idea of a middle-ground.
  
  I'm not actually seeing tankies around, any more -- lemmygrad banned me within days so that their minds wouldn't be polluted by my arguments, and whatever happened to hexbear I don't know they seem to have largely defederated again.
  
  I am honestly put off by people who really go by Marxist-Leninist schtick. This whole thing reminds of the old anecdote about a dialogue between a jew and God about the Holocaust: "I guess you had to be there". Seeing privileged white kids run around the internet calling for good old Lenin/Stalin times are no better than bonehead Nazis fighting their own fears materialized as Yet Another [racist slur of your choice].
  It's entertaining for like five minutes, but the joke gets tiresome very quickly.
- being left leaning is not the issue, but when opinions even slightly to the right of extreme left are censored and removed, it doesn't encourage participation or conversation
  
  Where is that happenening outside of lemmygrad? I have literally never once seen that happening outside of that place...
  Though it happens literally 24/7 on alt-right social media or reddit /r/conservative 😂 you can speedrun any% ban time by saying "I think covid was handled poorly" lol
  
  Plenty of liberal techbros around on lemmy. Also are you aware of the Nazi Bar phenomenon.
- No images is I think a lemm.ee-only thing, other instances are still allowing it. It was severely size-limited even before the whole CSAM situation to save on storage, and, IIRC, paraphrasing sunaurus: "Imgur exists."
- Can you explain to me what happened a couple months ago why people can't post pictures? And what should one do to enable it?
  
  CSAM Spam. That's what happened. Most people thankfully only noticed the moderator posts, but those understandably don't want to have to filter that all day long.
- Im not sure how lemm.ee handles it but a lot of instances that aren't lemm.ee dont have uploads disabled
  For example this post has an image uploaded to .world
- Idk reddit even has become wayy more leftist. Its just the inevitable trend

Went to the website link looking for context and couldn't find it so I'll ask here. What is the significance of the blue Halfyear line?
- Probably user active during the past 6 months (posting, commenting, ...) vs user active during the past month
- It’s just a borderline misleading and useless user engagement metric.
- Active users in the last six months. It will drop off when the usage peak is no longer included in the six-month period.
- I believe it's there to massage perception 😂
- My guess green resets count every month. Blue resets every 6 months. So blue is cumulative of total users cover the last 6 months. It shows that new people keep on coming but others are leaving every month.

Sorry, dumb question but what the heck does Active users Halfyear mean? They've been on for a half year and are still active?
- A lot of accounts are interacting (voting, posting, etc.) on lemmy-visible activitypub services within a 6 month timespan, but most accounts are not active users interacting every month.
  It's actually a very positive graph. Many of the new accounts would be spammers, bots, throwaway accounts, alts of banned users, users making account on multiple instances because of downtime, etc. So it's normal to see growth over longer spans of time that aren't completely reflected in monthly active user statistics.
  The current plateau is probably for the best, it gives developers time to catch up somewhat with the last growth spurt. There will be other social media platform clusterfucks in the future that will kick off future growth spurts.
  
  That's a good point. The devs, mods and everyone needs time to brace for the next wave of reddit exiles! As one of the API refugees, I remember how rough those first couple of weeks were...
- My guess: monthly user add all the unique users in the last month. Half year add the unuque users in the past 6 months. This is why is bigger, but it grows slowly in the months with less unique users.
  
  Seems like a reasonable guess!
- I'm guessing unique users who have been active on Lemmy within the past 6 months.
  
  Makes sense to me!

Don't pressure yourself to become an active monthly user. Just take it easy. I came here to have a peace with me not constantly shitposting to gain karma.

Imma here, just a lurker
- Wahhhhhhhhka

I am now an active user, lurking over

This place, it's ... beautiful. I've joined the communities with the topics i'm interested in and the posts I see are only (mostly) what I asked for.
The average person is reasonably educated, capable of arguing a point in good faith. It's not you against the world or the world against you here, it's more like, did you consider it from this point of view. That's nice!
The trolls and corporations have gotten board and are going home. The people with 2 backup accounts have stopped using them because their primary choice stays up, online and stable.
We could use a little extra mod tools and discovery, but this is a nice laid back place to relax and catch up on some random subject matter or ask for a little help in between life and sleep.
- capable of arguing a point in good faith
  Yeah I've seen a shocking number of people here acknowledge when they've been wrong. It's great!

I gotta be honest...I am hanging on by a threat. The communities that I was engaged with on Reddit before the Snoopacolypse were pretty niche. I wasn't there for r/funny or r/videos, etc. I found similar communities on Lemmy, but they have soooooo little activity. I have to modify my sort just to see content, as its so old. When there are posts, they typically get very little discussion.
I am on Lem.ee, and I have the hardest time posting anything from mobile. It looks like it fails, and if I sort by new, it isn't there and never shows up - HOWEVER, I start getting replies, so someone is seeing it somehow.
I detest what reddit did and is still doing - but Lemmy is not filling that void for me, and its frustrating.
- I feel you. The Network Effect is real, and the niche subreddits need a HUGE overall userbase to work at all.
  The total population of Lemmy + Kbin is about the size of a medium size city subreddit.
  I'm staying here for now. I sometimes cheat and browse reddit not-logged-in. I don't know what the answer is.
  
  I think it’s fair to reply to niche-sub threads with a little PS:
  BTW, I've recently shifted my online engagement to Lemmy, as I find it aligns more with my values and the way I like to share content. The community there is very welcoming, and they’d be incredibly receptive to the insights shared in this thread. Hope to seeing you there!
  
  The mirrors from alien.top are perfect for this use case. I had about 40 subreddits which I followed but didn't participated much. I had them all mirrored to different communities and now I don't need to go to reddit anymore.
  (Unfortunately, LW has blocked alien.top, so if you want to do something similar you'll need an account on a different server)
- I'm liking the "cosiness" of the discussion threads on most posts, personally. On Reddit a popular thread would have hundreds or thousands of comments already by the time I got there and it felt like my responses were just being lost in a sea.
  
  Yup. Once you hit a certain amount of comments on Reddit, any comment you make was completely pointless.
  
  I unsubscribed from all the subs that big years ago. It's funny to see how people used Reddit so differently
- Please take a look at https://fediverser.network and let me know what communities you are missing.
  
  I think you may have misunderstood. I have FOUND communities, but there is not much engagement or activity. I have resorted to discord channels for most of them, but it is not the same.
  Some of my most active subreddits were different 3d printing and 3d modeling groups, groups for games like Overwatch, and Payday. Different AI focused groups, but specifically groups like the Stable Diffusion sub, Subreddits that discuss my favorite shows, or styles of music. None of that is active here. It isn't that they don't exist on Lemmy, they are just ghost towns. I joined multiple instances and am very active and engaged on multiple accounts, on some of these groups - but there is not response. I was in the top 3% of karma earners on Reddit - and I did that by submitting and commenting a lot. That just doesn't happen here (yet).
- Try fiddling around with your language settings maybe? Sometimes the language filter can hide posts in a weird way.
  Ultimately, if your only interest is in a handful of niche communities, then Lemmy isn't quite there yet, I agree. I am also missing a bunch of niche communities, but I enjoy most of the popular content that's on Lemmy anyhow, so I'm not too bothered by the loss of the niche stuff for now.
- I hear that, but also...
  Well, I was doing the same, but noticed that even in the niche subs, the conversations seemed to be getting more and more... juvenile? Like prior to the Snoopacolypse (as you called it, and I love it! The term not the event in case that needs any clarification:-P), it was a point of pride for me that I had never blocked anyone in my life - whereas now I don't think twice before doing that bc who has time to waste on someone not engaging in good faith!? Especially if they lack enough self awareness to even realize that fact about themselves while they are doing it. (Tbf, possibly watching Innuendo Studios' analysis of GamerGate that uses many tactics of the Alt Right in America had something to do with my changing views as well:-).
  Ymmv ofc, bc different subs means entirely different people & thus experiences interacting with them, but I'm just saying that rather than stick with the subset of that community that remained after Rexit, I eventually just find myself going or even wanting to go there less and less, instead enjoying engaging here more, even at the expense of not being able to talk about those matters. I haven't posted there for months, nor even commented for a month, and barely go once a week to read. Bc I use Kbin and the mobile browser experience here is so horrible to write a comment, I find myself not commenting here often either - but when I do I have much more fun doing so, not having to be anywhere near as defensive as that other place that shall not be named.
  I hope you find something that works best for you as well, wherever that may be.
- Same for me. I browsed Reddit exclusively for a bunch of small but active communities about books and niche games or shows. Most of those either don't have a place on Lemmy, or the place they have is a ghost town. Too little posts, and even fewer engagement. I frequently see posts with upvotes in the single digits and zero comments.
  I don't plan on going back to Reddit, but at the same time I don't think that Lemmy is a valid substitute yet. Maybe it's also a problem of discoverability? Like, I heard of Lemmy during the APIcalypse, but I've never seen it mentioned anywhere else, and I don't know how a normal person looking for a community online is supposed to find Lemmy, or even learn the existence of it.

I like that I can somewhat recognize usernames across all the lemmy post I comment in. Im not sure if anyone really notices me or recognizes my username and goes 'Oh hey its smokeydope again' but I do that for some other active lemmy users and it starts to feel like we are all acquaintances working together to make an interesting experience for eachother and not just competing for attention without adknowledging eachother.

meh. who am i, a fuckin executive? i don't care about graphs
frankly, it feels like lemmy has both grown and gotten worse - it attracted enough attention that there are now morons, bootlickers, corporate simps, and dickheads posting now, and upvoting each other's posts
- I for one like an open and public forum that allows for opinions I don't agree with. A diversity of opinion definitely seems like a big plus to me.
- I see people saying this but I (thankfully) haven't seen them much yet.

Frustrating because of all the decentralized platforms lemmy feels the closest to the original. I’m still on Reddit because there’s more there but the app fucking sucks so much.
- And they just keep intentionally making using anything but they apps terrible experience.
- I go there to passively consume short videos of stuff that isn't here, but fuck if I'm gonna comment or vote. I don't even sign in.
- At least there's one survivor out there, geddit
- I truly don't mean this as a derogative comment, but as someone who just uses the website, and not an app, do you feel like you're absolutely need to use an app to use Lemmy?
  
  I think they meant the Reddit app.
  
  The app experience is much better than the browser experience imo
- If you haven't tried it, check out kbin, it has a slightly different UI which I prefer
- I've been using the rif app with ReVanced patches and my own API key, much better than the 1st party app. Eventually it'll probably break, but it works for now!
  
  RedReader works by default, no patches needed.

But what we forget is that not long ago Lemmy was very empty at least in my experience. So I left for some period, but when I came back July this year it was just completely changed. And it stayed this way, I don't need reddit anymore personally

I'm contributing because I'm a bit of a meme repository and I get a more positive reception here than I do on Reddit.
Lemmy is in a healthy state.

Still on Lemmy exclusively, but it's not my first time using a reddit alternative. This is normal. A large influx of users when reddit fucks up, but some slowly migrate back. Until reddit fucks up again. The problem is none of the alternatives survive long term.
- The Fediverse has been around for a couple of years now and it's an open protocol rather than just a single organization, so I'm liking its odds better than most.
- Traditionally, the alternatives to Reddit were worse than Reddit. This is the first time that that is no longer true.
  You can also make an argument that Reddit was the improved version of Digg. History can repeat itself if the Fediverse proves to a superior model.
- It's actually quite a good sign that Lemme is as stable as it is. It's not populated, but it's stable. That means that there's always something to come back to.

How many people made 2-3 accounts to compensate for outages? Less outages means less alts being active .
Of course that won't accout for the whole amount of people leaving, but I bet if we could get that metric it wouldn't seem near as bad
- This is true. I made accounts on like 7 different instances when migrating, but now I only ever use like 2
- I'm on the main kbin instance, and I've requested ownership of quite a lot of magazines.

- I'm surprised it's such a small number but very happy to be one of them :)

Hey, that's me
- SQUIRREL! 🐿️
  
  POPCORN! 🍿

If I could post images, there would be more content... I don't understand why I can't.
- You can but some instances (like yours) don't allow it.
- On Lemm.ee you have to use an external image host and post links from them due to issues with keeping people from posting illegal imagery. Not sure how other instances have gone about mitigating that (if they have, they may just not be as cautious).

I mean, isn't this exactly what we would expect? Big influx of people when reddit does something unpopular and people want alternatives, then a decrease as the anger fades and people either decide they don't like Lemmy for some reason, or just settle down into their normal, less active amount of posting, stabilizing at a number of users lower than the peak but higher than before the influx. Assuming that Lemmy still is around the next time Reddit gets people mad, it'll happen again, just like how Mastodon gets an influx of new users whenever Twitter does something to upset it's userbase.