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A community to talk about the Fediverse and all it's related services using ActivityPub (Mastodon, Lemmy, KBin, etc).

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Is Lemmy growing or shrinking? (sh.itjust.works)

submitted 8 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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How is the size of Lemmy's userbase changing? Is it growing or shrinking? How diverse is it? What do the current trendlines look like as we approach a year since Rexxit?

I feel like I used to see graphs on this sub fairly regularly, but haven't seen one recently. There was also some ambiguity in the numbers as commenting and voting were added to the active user totals. Now that most (all?) instances have switched to 0.19, do we have a better idea of where things stand?

Aside from sticking around and posting, commenting, and voting, is there anything users should be doing to help grow the platform? (!lemmygrow would be a good name for a sublemmy, if anyone wanted to organize something)

In any case, thanks to everyone who has helped grow Lemmy to its current size!

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[–] [email protected] 52 points 8 months ago (13 children)

At least from the nerd side of Lemmy, communities pertaining to technology, self-hosting, etc. — which I’d imagine to be the larger drivers due to how complicated it is to join compared to a traditional centralized setup (see also same hurdle for mastodon vs Twitter; which doesn’t gain adoption until Thread and BlueSky started to attract the less technical users), I’m seeing troubling signs of slowing down and shrinking.

If people actually want Lemmy in these areas to grow, it is important to be a lot more inclusive, and understand when to not participate in order to foster better community growth.

What I mean on the inclusive side is those FOSS advocates need to back off with the “You don’t understand FOSS, and go make your own instance” comments so other users don’t just bounce right off and leave after being bored with nothing to interact with.

What I mean by understand when not to participate is literally don’t participate in niche communities that doesn’t apply to you. So many Android users commenting irrelevant anti-Apple sentiments in Apple Enthusiasts community, for example. This is driving away actual users who are interested in discussions.

The charts don’t lie. Lemmy is shrinking, not growing. After getting a new lease on life with 0.19 due to what is essentially clever accounting, the community is still slowing down/shrinking. And for the nerdier side of the userbase, unless the community by and large start to interact more inclusively, the whole thing is sadly going to be just a small blip that’ll soon fizzle out.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 8 months ago (1 children)

I'm not quite as pessimistic, but I agree that inclusivity is important to keep in mind.

If people actually want Lemmy in these areas to grow, it is important to be a lot more inclusive, and understand when to not participate in order to foster better community growth.

Android users commenting irrelevant anti-Apple sentiments in Apple Enthusiasts community

I've noticed similar behaviour as well, and it concerns me. There was a related post a few weeks ago on downvoting etiquette which received a surprising amount of pushback (+63/-108).

I think this is a side effect of Lemmy's small platform size pushing users towards browsing by /all. I never browsed /all on Reddit, and I don't think this the best way to regularly use Lemmy either.

Ideally, I think users should mostly stick to their subscribed feeds, and browse /all only occasionally to discover new communities they might want to subscribe to. (I recognize that what I think users "should" do is irrelevant when it comes to actual user behaviour.)

As the platform currently stands, we have a bit of a "chicken or egg" problem. Too many users browsing by /all can stifle the growth of niche communities, and the lack of niche communities can induce users to browse by /all. I'm not sure the best way to fix this, other than to hope that niche communities manage to grow despite uninclusive behaviour.

Do you have any ideas which could help make Lemmy more inclusive?

[–] [email protected] 8 points 8 months ago

As the platform currently stands, we have a bit of a “chicken or egg” problem. Too many users browsing by /all can stifle the growth of niche communities, and the lack of niche communities can induce users to browse by /all. I’m not sure the best way to fix this, other than to hope that niche communities manage to grow despite uninclusive behaviour.

Promotion of communities to [email protected] and [email protected], and promotion of those communities to the wider audience

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