Hey there everyone! I have a possibly noobish question about the number of active users.

I’ve been watching the stats on occasion and lately, I’ve noticed that Lemmy’s number of active users has been decreasing. (for the last month at least).

While the number has been on an upward trend for the last 6 months

Last month’s stats have been less than rosy.

So could anyone explain how this might affect Lemmy? I think I’ve read before that only people who post or comment count as active users, but seeing it go down is kinda alarming. So am I right in thinking that Lemmy has been losing active users since July 11 or am I missing something?

  • sj_zero@lotide.fbxl.net
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    1 year ago

    It’s a normal situation when you have big migrations like the reddit migration. Same thing happened on mastodon with the various twitter migrations.

    A lot of people migrate thinking they’re reaching the promised land, realize they aren’t getting what the want from the new platform and go back. It’s the nature of bandwagon jumping.

    It’s just fine. The process of growth is dynamic, and the people who remain are the ones who like the platform.

    • Andy@slrpnk.net
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      1 year ago

      To add to this, the best course of action is to:

      • 1- Enjoy and continue to use the platform if you like it, so there is activity for new people to interact with
      • 2- Continue to develop features
      • 3- Moderate effectively to maintain a constructive experience
      • 4- Then wait for the next outrage cycle to generate new interest

      In our case, we already know that reddit is going to announce its IPO eventually. Assuming they don’t do something to piss off users sooner than this, this will likely be the next major event to drive people to check out Lemmy. People who checked it out but fell away will already have accounts, and new people will check it out for the first time. If we do steps 1, 2, and 3 well, when step 4 occurs the retention will be higher each time.–

      • sj_zero@lotide.fbxl.net
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        1 year ago

        Yep!

        If you like the fediverse, then the answer is to be on the fediverse.

        It’s a pretty awesome platform anyway, so it’s worth being on regardless of the entire earth being here.

    • travysh@lemm.ee
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      1 year ago

      It would be interesting to see numbers from the Digg to Reddit migration. There was a lot of pushback initially. Reddit was “confusing” and “ugly”. I used both for a while but didn’t fully abandon Digg for at least a few months.

      Lemmy on the other hand, Reddit made it very easy for me. I’ve been using Sync since at least 2014. Once it went dark I was full Lemmy.

  • morgan423@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    Pretty sure there have been a few spam bot/latent bot purges over the last month on multiple instances. I remember people discussing them a little while back. And it was a ton of bots.

    So part of what you’re seeing is normalization, as the user numbers were always artificially inflated with bots.

  • ekky43@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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    1 year ago

    There was a big influx of new users from Reddit in June. Many of those probably made an account to check out Lemmy, but somehow lost interest. Lemmy user count will most likely stabilize in a month or two.

  • simple@lemm.ee
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    1 year ago

    A plausable explanation is that a ton of people have been instance hopping (making different accounts on different instances) before finally deciding on their primary instance. I have an account on lemmy.ml and lemmy.world before sticking with lemm.ee, so that’s 2 inactive accounts.