I joined during the first Reddit exodus, and it seemed like for ages the amount of Lemmy content was generally increasing (sometimes quickly, sometimes slowly, but overall increasing). Now it seems that when I sort by New, I get through everything since my last visit much more quickly than I used to. Is that my imagination, or is the activity declining?
https://lemmy.fediverse.observer/stats
Total posts by month appears fairly linear.
Thank you, I had been looking for actual data and couldn’t find it. You’re right, does not seem to be declining.
I wonder if there an increasing percentage of bot posts, since I have prolific bot accounts blocked.
I wonder what’s up with that number of servers decline.
Consolidation? Which is fine to that extent.
I’d wager many experimented with hosting a younger Lemmy, and hosts who couldn’t sustain it got shaken out over time.
I wouldn’t assume the rise in posts/comments is all bots, either. I don’t have anyone blocked, and it doesn’t feel overrun to me.
Yeah, it would figure that if the activity is flat but the number of servers is declining that it’s either consolidation or that people are abandoning very small instances.
And activity is rising as far as I can tell, look at the graphs at the bottom.
Some of it had to do with there not being enough admins to go around afaik. Lemm.ee for instance couldn’t find enough admins so they shut down. Moderating an instance seems like one of the hurdles that go along with running an instance. I could imagine some people dipped out of Lemmy for a little while if their server was deleted since they’re starting from scratch again. It took me a good month or so to make this account and ramp back up my own activity here for instance.
The admins across the servers do a good job of keeping bots out imo. If it ever becomes a problem the admins could look to adopt BlueSky’s moderation tools down the line, I feel. As BlueSky makes it easy to filter bots, misinformation spreaders, and have user level content controls.
Total Lemmy Active Users by Month
There’s a big spike during summer time. On reddit it was known as summer reddit. Basically all of the kids are out of school and have nothing better to do but shitpost online. Now they’re going back to school. It could be the lack of different users you’re noticing. Not sure why it dipped in July though, should have dipped in August.
Wasn’t July 1st when lemm.ee shut down?
Ah, good point. Forgot about that. That’s probably it.
The slight dip so far this month could be the beginning of the end of the summer Lemmy. Schools just started this week near me, and green is 30 day users so it should take 30 days for that to fully drop.
Fediverse Observer says Piefed MAU were 352 in May, 1068 in June and 1615 in July. So thats a rise of ~1300 people in two months.
Yeah, agreed. Between lemm.ee closing leading to people moving over to Piefed in droves and Summer Lemmy coming to an end I don’t see anything concerning in the data I think.
Also keep an eye on: https://piefed.fediverse.observer/stats A couple thousand people (and several communities) moved there after lemm.ee died, but we interact with lemmy.
As for why it subjectively seems to be declining… maybe you know what you’re gonna see in New, and so you engage less with posts? Maybe it’s time to be more of a poster!
I noticed on the redditalternatives subreddit whenever someone mentions Lemmy and someone else is like “I didnt like it because of XYZ” someone else will often say “you should look into Piefed its much better”
Which is funny to me but at least it’s working!
And if they don’t like PieFed then tell them to try Mbin next lol
I don’t think so. For ages (maybe two years) I’ll sometimes sit in bed in the morning and browse New until I hit the stuff I saw previously. That used to take me well over an hour - maybe two - but now it takes less than thirty minutes.
Yeah, OP. Ten million posts a month isn’t good enough for you?!?
Ten million and one would be better
It’s not 10 millions created during a month, it’s 10 millions existing posts at a certain month, whatever their creation date.
The actual number of posts per month would be the different between the total number of posts between two months.
I would call that flat, not linear. Linear implies a non exponential increase. This looks flat.
I specifically said linear and not flat because it is a non-exponential increase.
You could say the rate of posts is flat, but the data series is posts, not rate of posts.
I don’t see much of an increase in those charts.
A couple million posts isn’t much?
Looking at the more detailed breakdowns, it looks like there are a couple of servers (Lemmit.online, alien.top among others) with huge numbers of posts/comments that appear to be entirely bots. Are those counted in the stats? Could those be messing with the overall graphs? If Lemmit’s quarter of a million posts a month are counted, its going to make the monthly posts stat useless when even .world only has about 15k posts a month.
Edit: Comparing the graphs to the server list, it looks like Lemmit is counted, so the main graph is likely misleading. I did look through some of the bigger servers, and their rate of posting seemed fairly linear, but there isn’t a good way to check overall.
If i’m not mistaken, the very last graph showing posts by month shows a significant decreasing over the summer, or at least specifically july (since august is not over yet). It says June is around 12M posts and July around 9M. August seems already over 9M and we’re only 2/3 in, so maybe there was some drop around July for some reason, which could explain OP’s feeling.
As for the reason, i’m not sure, maybe a combination of factors like some server blocking access from UK with the latest privacy bullshit, some server having signficant downtime (i think slrpnk.net had a problem with servers locking themselves up while tech admin was abroad), and maybe non-Lemmy factors like holidays (though they don’t seem to impact previous years stats).