by fedidb.org
this post was submitted on 20 Nov 2023
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Let's look at some numbers and do some napkin math:
Currently, the top post of Lemmy can usually get a little more than 2K upvotes, which puts Lemmy at about late 2010 to early 2011 reddit level of activity, which is right before reddit hits its explosive growth phase in 2012 with SOPA, Kony, and the Obama AMA. While active user count has been going down, the amount of post and comments have both been steadily going up.
You also have to realize that in more than a decade, there was never a reddit alternative that has EVER hit this level of activity. (unless you count 9gag or the_donald for some reason.)
My hypothesis is user account consolidation. I made several accounts across multiple instances (to deal with outages) but now only use a couple of them. So maybe people are not using their alts as much
That is a very important point that doesn't get mentioned enough. Lemmy is the largest and most active reddit alternative around. All the other sites that tried to capitalize on the API disaster have laughable numbers of users and most posts rarely have more than 10 votes or interactions.
How's kbin doing? Granted they federate with Lemmy so it's like asking about an instance. But not quite the same
Kbin is doing pretty well, they are still holding on to about 6,000 MAUs. Lemmy still has around 32,000, for comparison. Lemmy peaked around 66,000 MAUs at the end of July, but a big chunk of that was probably alt accounts that have since gone dormant.
Kbin's main developer had some major IRL events that coincided with the reddit exodus so he wasn't really able to do much work on the code for a while. But now he is back, and another team has also made a fork of kbin called mbin.
https://kbin.social/u/ernest
Federation is still pretty janky with kbin, so I think that activity should pick up on both sides once we get some software updates and more intermingling of the kbin and Lemmy userbases.
OP is also spot on about this being the largest that a reddit alternative has ever gotten. I'm pretty sure alternatives such as discuit, squabble, tildes, etc have never even approached 10k MAUs, so we are already well past that. If not for the fact that this platform is federated, there would probably already be much more activity. However, the federated structure should become more and more useful as we grow larger, so it's a worthy sacrifice even if it's stunting activity for the time being.
i am hopeful still. and i prefer this to be quieter and hence, safer, honestly. personally, i am not an active user because i'm the type of person that feels shame just for existing, but internet is helping me socialize. still not to the point of having something useful to say without wanting to delete it immediatly, but when i see these posts, i automatically get strenght to give my support. i am not able to maintain a community, be a mod, i don't know how to code, i just can post supportive messages or be a helpful user adding resources and so. but i should be doing more, yep. i am ashamed of posting, but not contributing probably would be more shameful haha sorry people... hehe
That is a very astute observation, and I would not worry about the temporary decline for this very reason.
Also, looking at your username.. ”can somebody please find Margot Robbie so that I can make sense of all this”
That's esteemed Academy Award nominated character actress Margot Robbie to you!
Not to be confused with Esteemed Character Actress Margo Martindale?
lol forgot about fucking KONY
wonder what that ol' fella is up to these days!
(is he dead? he's dead isn't he?)