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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

This graph is much more reassuring:

https://lemmy.fediverse.observer/dailystats

We are stable, even slightly growing in the last few days.

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

so there was a wave of sign ups with the Reddit drama, and then people got bored. the graph looks about right to me.

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.

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)

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.