What is going on with the number of active users? (lemmy.world)

submitted 1 year ago by weeahnn@lemmy.world to c/fediverse@lemmy.world

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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?

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[-] sj_zero@lotide.fbxl.net 66 points 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.

[-] andrewrgross@slrpnk.net 22 points 1 year ago* (last edited 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 4 points 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 4 points 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.

[-] o_oli@lemmy.world 20 points 1 year ago

I think the general consensus seems to be bot and/or spam accounts being removed but I haven't seen evidence of it. Anecdotally I have seen many people say it feels more busy around Lemmy lately but I haven't been here long enough to know myself. It is a curious one though.

If it is genuine then I suppose it could be a typical cycle for platforms that get raided by another, in this case an exodus from reddit to Lemmy - then after the dust settles some people decide they don't like it after all and go back or elsewhere.

I don't think that is a bad sign though that is a natural cycle and as long as some people remain then it shows overall growth.

[-] simple@lemm.ee 15 points 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.

[-] Contramuffin@lemmy.world 13 points 1 year ago

When looking at graphs, it's extremely important to consider all possible aspects that the data isn't capturing. A lot of the time, it's easy to take the "easy" interpretation of the data and get the wrong conclusion (for instance, think about survivor bias and how it almost led the British military to the wrong conclusion about where to reinforce their warplanes)

Here, it's important to remember several things: what exactly is the data counting? And what happened that might change our interpretation of the data?

For the first, it's unclear what the statistic is, but I think the general interpretation is that "active users" only counts people who have posted or made comments. For the second, ofc the Reddit Migration just happened a month ago. The fact that it happened almost exactly a month ago likely isn't a coincidence.

Here's my interpretation: people from Reddit jumped on board to Lemmy during the Reddit Migration. They posted or commented a lot to test out the waters on Lemmy. Then, once they settled in, they started lurking (after all, the vast majority of people lurk). As the month continued, these new users are no longer considered active users, since they're only lurking. So the "active last month" count is dipping almost exactly 1 month after the Reddit Migration. Of course, part of the dip can be explained by people moving back to Reddit. But based on my understanding of how "active users" is counted, I think this is the leading explanation, especially since Lemmy feels more active now than during the Migration.

Now, what can we conclude about the dip? Honestly, if my interpretation is correct, this seems pretty normal. I wouldn't think too deeply about it. As Reddit enshittification continues, we might expect more waves of migrants, and I generally expect that we'll see this pattern every time (a sudden increase in userbase, followed by a shallow dip after 1 month, and then the number starts to stabilize)

[-] ekky43@lemmy.dbzer0.com 12 points 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.

[-] miega@lemmy.world 5 points 1 year ago

yep, am one of those, I ended up using both Lemmy and Reddit by now, because some communities are just not present here

[-] Emperor@feddit.uk 4 points 1 year ago

I mean, just look at the drop-off in the active users on Threads - makes that slight dip for Lemmy seem rather good in comparison.

[-] morgan_423@lemmy.world 12 points 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.