I’ve been one of the people saying “we don’t need more users. we need quality over quantity” and i was wrong.
the way it’s going, lemmy needs active users who post content sothat the network stays relevant. networks like the fediverse benefit from network effects and that means that if we have more users, that improves the value and quality of the fediverse overall.
So please, everyone, when you can, make advertisement for the fediverse in your personal area. Go talk to friends, make attractive stickers and put them everywhere, stuff like that. We would all benefit from it.
edit: source for the graph
What is that spike in activity in December, I wonder? I see a similar increase in December of 2024 as well, although there it remained sustained instead of dropping.
I hate that it’s true but the people on the Threadiverse are toxic as fuck. I have almost universally always regretted making posts here, so I primarily stick to comments.
This in turn is due to the fact that the moderation tools suck ass - I hope PieFed will offer some strong hope for that, but as it is only a small percentage of the Threadiverse uses it.
PieFed also offers some hopes in other ways too - e.g. highly contentious users (who let’s say receive 10x more downvotes than upvotes) have labels attached to their username. It doesn’t block any content, but it helps new users from other platforms realize what they are getting into, if e.g. they engage with a known sea-lion.
And PieFed helps in so many other ways besides - e.g. a recent addition will automatically convert URLs pointing to other instances into one that will work on your home instance, where you are currently logged in and so can vote, reply, bookmark, or whatever. Lemmy will probably never add all the various features that PieFed even already offers - like post and user flairs, polls, combining comments across all cross-posts, and things like that that even Reddit does not offer. I don’t mean to be annoying about all this but I said it to help illustrate: look at all that PieFed offers, and yet how many people remain on Lemmy? Now you understand a tiny bit better why someone remains on Reddit.
Plus Reddit is where the content is, and the user base too, so why would content creators want to post their stuff here, only to get trolled in the comment section? The Left always eats its own - and it rejects even more all the centrists and even ring-wingers, i.e. mainstream non-technical normie users i.e. the vast majority of content creators, who don’t like to visit a Nazi bar (even a leftist tankie flavored one) and be told how they didn’t vote properly or hard enough.
You said it yourself: you were one of those very people who did not want others to come. What could you possibly have said to your past self to have changed your mind earlier?
banning purges from reddit? i notice the dip and spikes coincides with purges from reddit, and election/controversial news elsewhere. because when something big happens its usually on multiple posts on the front page on reddit, and it takes a while to reach lemmy with the same news.
That makes sense. Btw r/all is in the process of being killed off, affecting some but not all users yet. So maybe hearing that news is what helped some people check us out. It did not seem to quite “take” though, given how the spike went right back down to the normal levels.
That is perhaps the most troubling take-away message from this graph: it is not simply people who do not give us a try who do not like us, it is most especially those who do bother to go through all the steps to make an account and do at least one action (even if that is simply a vote), but then who leave after a single month?
If so that would have devastating implications for the future of the Threadiverse - though fortunately it is far too soon to tell, since it is at least possible that some of that could be due to holiday travel.