Following https://tarte.nuage-libre.fr/c/fediverse/p/194717/we-need-more-users I decided to explore data a little bit more. I’m not the biggest fan of growth-as-as-target so I wanted to see how much the people were participating in the discussion.
The data
I took the data from the API explorer in https://api.fediverse.observer/ with this query:
query {
monthlystats {
date_checked
softwarename
total_posts
total_users
total_comments
}
}
Then parsed the json with this https://jqlang.org/ filter:
jq '.data.monthlystats | map(select(.total_users > 0 and (.softwarename == "lemmy" or .softwarename == "mbin" or .softwarename == "kbin" or .softwarename == "piefed"))) | group_by(.date_checked) | map( {date_checked: .[0].date_checked, total_users: ([.[] | .total_users] | add), total_posts: ([.[] | .total_posts] | add), total_comments: ([.[] | .total_comments] | add)}) | map({date_checked, posts: .total_posts/.total_users, comments: .total_comments/.total_users}) | sort_by(.date_checked) | map([.date_checked, (.posts | tostring), (.comments | tostring)]) | .[] | @csv'
(As you see I filtered for the threadiverse. I also did the same with all software, I’ll put the graph for that in comments)
Then did a good old’ chart
What to think of it
I don’t know. Users’ activity is on the rise and I find it nice
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Yes.
Do we want Reddit amounts of users? No.
But there’s a lot of growth between here and there.
100% agreed. A Reddit clone with Reddit amounts of users will end up almost as bad as Reddit. The thing that makes Reddit worse in that situation is that they are a public company.
This platform would have to evolve a lot before it can deal with so many users. There has to be some significant innovation and improvement in moderation and administration, or more users would inevitably lead to endemic misinformation and power tripping and all of that shit you see on Reddit.
I mean the intent here is for moderating capacity and tools to increase with user increases. Reddit grew but grew before its own moderator capacity allowed for it. Now I would argue its overall activity levels are inflated by AI, trolls and spammers. I’m on Piefed and in terms of the discussion about growth, I think about new instance admin tools can mitigate and prevent bad behaviour, trolling, AI and spamming from (usually) new accounts that otherwise would cement themselves on as regular spammers and trolls.
It’s one thing to grow, but you need to grow the ability to deal with the problems that can derive from that.
One of the benefits of our “own” system is like you said, we can build the tools as they come.
Reddit and other platforms, we were always beholden to what they gave us.
With the fedi, you want something better? Build it! Or support those who are doing so. Its much more productive than just complaining all the time.
IMHO the internet isn’t for everyone. that might make me sound like an elitarian asshole but i think the internet’s only for people who enjoy going through information and are able to think without being swayed by group-think (tribalism) because otherwise it simply ends up in a bubble of rage bait and propaganda.
Essentially i think that maybe the internet of the future will be much smaller overall (think like 3% of its current user count) but it will probably be better that way.
Niche hobbies and small communities (that are active) is what is needed
For that we need a LOT more users. It’s kind of a chicken and egg situation.
Hopefully we can capitalise on the next Rexit.
In the past lots of people moved over but left because of the terrible UX. I think PieFed has solved most of the UX issues.
Reddit had the additional benefit of being found through google… that’s how i learned about the site.
you cant google your way into this place - and that’s a huge limitation, when it comes to expanding the user base with random normal people.
If you Google for “beans no pooping challenge” https://lemmy.eco.br/post/113558?scrollToComments=true at least appears on the first page of results - that’s progress, baby!
This is it exactly. I made a hard cut with Reddit, but I’ll admit to missing the sysadmin subreddit. The place was full of very smart, helpful people and also cranky. The PowerShell subreddit was another great resource. I haven’t been willing to go back, but those sorts of communities only exist when you hit a certain mass of people on a platform.
Comes with numbers. Not before.
Unfortunately yes
Yes! We need more esp32 users to come up with bonkers ideas.
Efi System Partition 32 bit?
i remember writing code for the ESP boot system
I’m not sure what it stands for, but it’s essentially a very powerful Arduino with wireless networking capabilities. I think the “e” is for espresif who manufactures it. I could be wrong though. Irregardless, look into it! Very cool little chip!
This is the number one thing I would bring up tk the question “do we need more users”. We need more users if we want more niche communities, and I want more niche communities without having to post.
One thing that annoys me about each statistic about posts is that I don’t know how many of these posts are actually interesting and engaged with.
For example, there is a specific instance that just mirrors reddit content and has barely any engagement. The bot posts mulitple posts per hour, mostly without any comments or upvotes.
It seems rather irrelevant to compare these posts to actually interesting posts with a nice discussion and a couple of upvotes.
My suggestion would be to count and plot the number of posts that have at least a few interactions.
Out of curiosity, which instance?
The instance is called lemmit.online, and the most upvoted post on the whole instance is “This bot is bad for lemmy”.
the question is whether the upvotes of that post makes over half of the total upvotes on all posts on that instance, and that i seriously doubt
No? Did I claim this?
The most upvoted post has ~20 upvotes, but there are a lot of posts with 1-5 upvotes.
PieFed labels bots and bot-like accounts, allowing you to choose options like blur or show the content semi-transparently.
I‘m not worried about myself. It’s easy enough to block stuff I don’t like. All I wanted to say is that counting daily posts without excluding bots doesn’t make much sense to me.
The issue does get murky - especially when people use the same account both for their bot posting and also for their human interactions, rather than separating the two.
I do feel we need more users, but not just users. It’s “niche” users we need. There’s a lot of techies on the threadiverse (Lemmy, PieFed, Mbin), but not enough people who care about other stuff.
So communities outside that, struggle to thrive.
But we are not going to get “niche” users if we don’t get large numbers of users. Niche interests will only come up here when the population is so large that even the long tail ends up with critical masses.
Those defending “quality over quantity” miss this exact point.
My point about “niche” is that from the current perspective, the niche communities is the more regular ones, because at the moment, the majority of users here is technical. We need more ordinary users, not just more users.
We scare normal, non-techie people away. The Threadiverse in general and Lemmy in particular is very lacking in moderation capabilities, especially by not federating mod reports across instances (PieFed does that, but Lemmy does not).
We need active users, not just users that post something once then disappear. The MAU is more important than the user count.
Maybe its a question of organization. Perhaps we shouldn’t have generic instances just instances around topics. That way niches can form without being too fractured and if said topic goes away it does not take several other coms with it.
I’d rather see better discovery tools and better community/account migration tools. Id be worried about topic-specific instances potentially backfiring by concentrating too much influence for a given set of subjects on the “preferred” instances
Good discovery tools are essential on a federated platform. An important part of twitter, facebook, and reddit success is/was that that they were the place for their particular style of content. You had a pretty good chance of being able to discover your old high school friends, because they were on the one platform. Then the (early) algorithm started discovering for you all the obscure content similar to your history.
Discovery has to work differently in a federated system. You can search for communities on Lemmy, but if your instance doesn’t already have someone subscribed to a community, then you’re not going to find it.
better discovery tools
i think communities should have links to “related communities” in their sidebar sothat people can find similar communities more easily.
There could even be a “recommended” posts listing, besides the “subscribed”/“local”/“all” as it is today. it would show you posts from linked communities from communities that you already subscribed to too.
This defeats the purpose of the platform being distributed. For example if all political threads are on one instance it would be a ripe target for the authoritarian regimes popping up right now. I know there are dominant instances, but at least if one drops, people can migrate.
One issue is I think Lemmy’s UX means there’s less friction with local communities than remote communities (not sure why) which is why usually the lemmy.world version of communities typically wins without a lot of effort to steer people
Moderation reports are currently not federated (well they are in PieFed, but not in Lemmy) - at some point that will be added, but for all this time after the Rexodus this has been true. This lack of federation has hindered the growth of the Threadiverse.
Lemmy v1.0 has suffered too much scope creep, this update is way late while PieFed runs circles around Lemmy
Worse, I find that Lemmy typically (vastly) under-delivers what was promised even. Like for many years people were promised the capability to do personal “instance blocking”, and for a long time after the Rexodus there were calls to avoid defederating places like lemmy.ml or lemmygrad.ml or even hexbear.net, because that feature was “coming soon™”.
Then when that change did finally come, it only muted communities on that instance yet still left users to be able to reply in other communities, plus they could still vote on and thereby influence your content (hexbear is KNOWN for its brigading tactics). And then a subsequent bugfix opened it up still further to allow such “blocked” users the capability to send you a private DM, even pinging you with notifications - which on Lemmy (highly unlike PieFed) there is no way to stop that, even for WEEKs and WEEKs after you stop engaging… your consent to selectively stop such incoming pings does not matter, realistically (technically you could block every single person from an instance, one-by-one… but even there, you would have to bot that or do it the extremely tedious manual way, as the software provides no tools to aid with that). PieFed has offered the ability to block all users from an instance for over a year now.
The only counter-argument to the above is that software - especially FOSS (although Lemmy devs even get paid?!?) - takes time to develop. Which makes things like the bugs and inefficiencies that remain in Lemmy for years and years all the more disheartening. And then here comes PieFed, running around Lemmy in circles, it is almost no comparison at all.
And then I’m sure that I do not need to list out the rather LONG list of features that PieFed offers that aids community discovery - it’s quite amazing to see actually:-). PieFed is a game-changer for the Threadiverse, and might just keep it alive whereas it would otherwise have either died off or at least remained in obscurity forever known as a mere linux (& politics) forum. As things keep moving forward though, I think one day it could rival BlueSky, at least in terms of features offered, though whether a non-profit FOSS could ever overcome the strong network effect will remain to be seen… For that I think we would need a modmail, definitely notification upon content removal, perhaps better searching capability, maybe better modlog access, but not much else? (& 3rd party apps catching up to offer its features but that is not PieFed’s work anymore, now that so much has been exposed in the APIs)
Needing more users is fine. Sure, we could always use more friends (or enemies, I guess)
But, ultimately, just having people come here first and then whatever hellhole corpo-media second is at least a step in the right direction. I feel like user activity increasing is a good sign that there’s a lot of people out there investing time in the fediverse instead of the corporate hell-loop social media.
We can see a globally slowly downward trend, probably not good but I’m definitely not equipped to analyze that
Makes me wonder if it’s specific softwares that are pulling the statistics downward, or in general. Also the last 6 months seem rather stable on the graph.
Yes.
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That’s a very capitalist take. Remember how good things used to be? That’s how good the Fediverse is now. We don’t want it to grow or die. If it grows, great. If it doesn’t, great. Quality over quantity, imo.
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You’ve convinced me that we need more users given the high number of current posters who like to criticize others with insults reminiscent of a bratty 5th grader. We need to dilute that voice.
I saw it as more philosophical than capitalistic. Like when Nietzsche said “What does not kill you makes you stronger”.
The post the other day about lemmy needing more users and engagement gave a little nudge to me commenting more. I guess same thing happened with many users and you can see the spike in the graph.
Edit: One thing I notice that is annoying are whatever conflicts between moderators and instances and seeing communities close with a message saying to join some new community on another instance. We’re too small to be restarting communities because of whatever arguments mods have with instance admins. Most people do not care what instance they are on. I’ll see people stereotype others based on what instance their account is based on and I’m at a loss that some people have already tribalized themselves based on fediverse instance they made their account on
The best stuff on social media is random hobbies. That needs to grow a lot. We want the people that are really into random stuff. Like maybe they’re just really into fallen tree branches and for some reason there’s a community out in the world all about fallen tree branches, we should want that. Over on reddit I enjoy the treelaw community. Get to learn about peculiarities of trees and property
As a start, fediverse would be nerdy. Going to be tech and privacy nerds. Gamers. Great, grow that. Be active. Get the food communities growing. Get the gardening communities growing. Bird watching. Whale watching. Train watching.
I remember earlier reddit. Like 2007-2010 for me. Back then it was nerdy as hell with a growing gaming and professional sports watching communities. A lot more comedy that wasn’t global politics centric.
Lots of science, tech papers got big discussion and were the foundation for the community to grow. They had hobbies. They watched sports. Played video games. Gardening. Cooking. They’d talk about that too. Fun/educational communities
We have to be a lot more than just politics and grouches. If I just went by the grouches opinions TikTok would just be propaganda and then I see friend’s on it and it’s mostly cooking and comedy skits. Lots of anime memes. – Growing the anime/manga community would be pretty big for the fediverse. Anime/manga fandoms are hyperactive posters
There’s a list of hobbies communities pinned on !communitypromo@lemmy.ca
As for the title question:
Do we need more users ?
We don’t need more users. It might be nice, there are benefits, but we don’t need it. I agree with you on not caring much about growth-as-a-target, “growth for the sake of growth is the ideology of a cancer cell”. I was here years before the first big reddit exodus with the third-party API changes and I was having a good time back then too.
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All will always be a dumpster fire.
PieFed has Popular, which is similar except curated to have less memes https://piefed.social/home/top/popular
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I did that and it was evenly split between news, memes, reposted Tumblr and X posts and comics.
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Ok, what content stream in what medium when viewed in a bulk popularity view like that isn’t 90% memes or equivalent?
I think more isers would be good, though I like how the fediverse is right now. It’s small, but it has enough content to have me coming back, but not so much that I’ll spend the entire day browsing.
