cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ca/post/12971023
Hi folks, out of pure curiosity, I was poking some graphs.
It's been about half a year since the big API protest, so I was curious to see what Lemmy's crtitical mass looks like, what the staying power is, etc. Screenshots taken from https://the-federation.info/platform/73 on 2024-01-09. I'm posting screenshots because they're a snapshot in time, and because that stats server is very slow.
Because I'm posting on lemmy.ca, I'll post quite a few related to this instance, but it's probably more widely applicable and you can get graphs from your instance too. I'll also post some lemmy.world and lemmy.ml graphs, since they make interesting points of comparison -- biggest server, and original server.
First, lemmy-wide total users count, where this is a rolling one month window. If a user was online within the month, they count here.
First observation -- there's some jagged edges in the graph due to things popping in and out of the federation. So it's probably more useful to look at single servers. Lemmy.world came online pretty much coincidentally with the API protest and had open registration, so it makes a good data point. You can see the surge of users, then the plateau of the people who stuck around:
Lemmy.ml below has a similar curve, plus some sort of data artefact.
As does lemmy.ca, below:
I suspect the data artifact is related to the transition from 0.18 to 0.19 and something changed in the way active users was counted in between. Lemmy.world is still running 0.18.5.
Notes: The difference between the peak and the plateau is higher on lemmy.world and lemmy.ml -- I suspect this is because they were more popular places to sign up during the protest. Whereas lemmy.ca has retained more users, as a percentage. Still, the total number of active users on each server is quite low.
In the same order (total, lemmy.world, lemmy.ml, lemmy.ca), total posts. The slope of this line represents post rate. Steeper line is better. Flat line means dead instance.
And comments. I wish there was a comments to posts ratio, which would be some indication of engagement levels. But you can sort of work it out.
Anyway, looks like post rate has decreased slightly since the initial bump, but are still looking good. But the comment rate hasn't flattened as much. So the users that were retained seem to be more engaged than the users from the initial bump. I think this is a good thing for the health of lemmy. Likewise, the growth in supported apps, improvements to the software (Scaled sort in 0.19 is night-and-day better than anything prior!), and others will allow lemmy to not only survive, but be ready for whatever influx happens next.
I want to send a special shout out to all the admins, particularly on my home instance of lemmy.ca, and the coders who keep improving things. Thanks for giving us all a home!
I'm here because of the API stuff, I was a reddit sync user so when sync made their Lemmy app I joined.
Honestly Lemmy feels much more confusing than Reddit used to, I don't fully understand the federation stuff and different worlds or whatever, I imagine there's a lot of people confused about it like me.
I'm happy to stay and contribute but I think I need to figure out how to use this on my desktop because I only check Lemmy because of the sync android app.
Any tips on how to get started migrating my experience to desktop? Like I literally don't know what URL I would go to.
The most intuitive analogy to federation to me is email. You may have an account with one provider (gmail.com in the example of email, or lemmy.world in the example of Lemmy) but you can send emails to other providers (email example) or post messages to other instances (Lemmy).
Just like with email providers, a Lemmy instance may decide not to allow communication with another instance - this is "defederation." Instances that allow communication are "federated."
Just like email, you don't normally need to worry much about whether you are on the same instance as a particular community or user - it just works.
This is a simplification, but for me is a good working model.
Thanks
The url for you would simply be lemmy.world. Just login with your account from the app and start scrolling, no need to migrate anything.
Federation in principle is actually really simple. Basically there are multiple servers (aka instances) run by different people and with their own urls, and they just send each other messages to stay in sync. E g. if you post something on LW, that server also sends it to all the others (all it is federated with), so they can show it to their users too. If someone upvotes the post then their server sends that info to all the other servers as well, so everyone can update their vote counter for that post. That's it, that's the magic.
The result is that all instances have the same content, and users can message each other no matter what instance they are on. That means it doesn't really matter which one you sign up on, and no content is lost if one of them goes down.
Thanks
You could just go to lemmy.world. That's your home instance, it works kinda like an email provider. And if you (for example) use gmail you can access your mail at the Gmail website and the same is true for Lemmy.
But just like you could download an email client you can get yourself an Lemy client and use that*. That client will make API requests to your home instance to get the posts it presents to you. Your home instance in turn will communicate with other instances in order to show their posts to you.**
clients/websites you could try
Here is one list and here is another. Also note that some clients are actually webapps.
* you probably know this considering you use the Lemmy client sync
** Disclaimer: the last part about how Lemmy works is just how I think it works based on what I have read. I could be completely wrong.