The Threadiverse (Lemmy & kbin) had less than 10k active users before June. Now there's more than 126k active users. It doesn't mean that they all left Reddit, but at least that they are active here since Reddit fucked things up.
this post was submitted on 05 Jul 2023
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That’s good to see. I know the first few days that I used Lemmy my feeds were pretty sparse. Now I can endlessly scroll though new content. I hope the growth continues.
And now that there is enough to infinite-scroll, that's enough to satisfy any one user. Of course, it's true that having more content will allow for a larger number of high quality posts and the ability to serve more niche communities, but at least there is a viable alternative for that Reddit itch now. It's so much easier to uninstall Reddit apps than it was a month ago.
Infinite scrolling requires jerboa to not randomly freeze up...(at least for us mobile app folk)
Yeah with lemmy i haven’t even thought about checking Reddit out. I can’t wait for the comment sections here to grow, a lot of posts only have handfuls of comments. I still don’t have the heart to delete Apollo yet, and I’ve caught myself opening the app out of habit. It might be about to time to fill that spot with lemmy.
What sucks is that’s barely a dent in their numbers.
Bigger than you think.
Most people who moved over are more likely to be contributors.
Only like 1% of redditors ever interact with the platform.
Instead of looking at ‘how much they lost’ think about ‘how much we gained’. This effect has started the network effect for Lemmy.
Most people who moved over are more likely to be contributors.
That's the key - a relatively small number of people provided the bulk of the content and they are also the kind of power users who would have been hit hard by the API changes, so are most likely to leave.
Quality over quantity and exactly the kind of people you want to help build a new place like this.
On yeah, teenagers getting smart phones is a big piece of it. We used to joke about summer Reddit being terrible with the influx of teenagers and then summer Reddit just became the normal
Absolutely a good idea to focus on Lemmy's gains. A viable competitor is up and running now, so Reddit will have to compete or perish.
Reddit is among the most popular social media worldwide, with an estimated 55.79 million daily active users and 1.660 billion monthly active users in 2023.
Yeah, a drop in the bucket. Even considering lurkers and bots.
But that's okay. The goal is to have a nice, active enough community outside of reddit. Reddit can keep on existing. I would argue not having everyone move here, or somewhere else, is good to keep the interaction healthy. Let alone the software and servers that couldn't handle it.
Heck, a few weeks ago people thought Lemmy as a whole wouldn’t take off due to tankies. Seems like everyone has defederated that bunch and has grown a lot.
Reddit is stupid but do we really want to be as big as Reddit? The quality has tanked in the past several years in large part because of how big it is. I think we’re on a good trajectory. Looking at it as a zero sum game where Reddit has to fail for this to be successful will only leave you disappointed. Reddit doesn’t need to fail for Lemmy to be good.
I don't think the size of Reddit was, itself, responsible for the deterioration, but it did attract bad actors and those not acting in good faith – the bots, reposters, karma whores, etc. It's an unfortunate side effect that's hard to guard against when these actors see a huge platform and an opportunity to take advantage and manipulate it.
Outside of those issues, which does make it worse, the massive amount of users and karma system creates perverse incentives that make any real discussion impossible. Anyone trying to actually engage in discussion is drowned out and the top comments are just people trying to input the right combination of words to make the internet points come out. And if you dare go slightly against the hive mind, your dog piled with people trying to virtue signal harder than everyone else to collect the points. I generally agree with the hive mind and I still find it completely insufferable and uninteresting.
It’s not even just a political thing, go to the guitar subreddit and try to suggest wood makes a difference in tone and see how indignantly you get attacked.
Sure you can find niche communities that are better if you really dig but in my experience, they tend to just fizzle out or get big and succumb to the site wide problems.
Reddit was way better 10 years ago and this place is already starting to kinda feel like that. I would be very happy if we could stay that way.
The quality has tanked in the past several years in large part because of how big it is.
What I think happened in the past several years was the rise of the mobile user.
It's somewhat hard to write well on a touchscreen and the 13+ demographic expanding as younger teens had less tech-hesitant parents means that low-effort submissions really took off. They don't write well at all, and they don't care about paragraphs, punctuation, or using any capital letters.
Oh yeah, teenagers getting smart phones is a big piece of it. We used to joke about summer Reddit when all the kids were off school and everything got dumb and horny. And then that became the normal.
A good chunk of those could've made accounts but not stayed long. And how do they get those numbers? Because there were many people who did accounts in more than one instance.
Those are active users. The numbers are from fedidb, updated hourly. They are counting posts and comments as activity.
It is unlikely that even reddit themselves are able to conclusively answer this, as the protests made many people leave and many other people come or come back.
The userbase "churned" a great deal, which serves to obscure the specifics.
To add to this, if I were spez, and I was bleeding users rapidly, I would be willing to employ bots to inflate my numbers. I sincerely doubt spez is more ethical than I am, and it takes no genius to come up with this idea.
Makes sense. Spez will do whatever it takes to make everything seem fine. I want to see the site implode, but I think it’s too big to fail.
Everything's fine at Reddit HQ.
Yup. And there is no war in Ba Sing Se.
Reddit has been full of bits for at least a year
It most definitely has. Bots too. (sorry, couldn't help myself...)
As one of those, I can't even really answer it.
I used to spend hours a day on the site, mostly on my phone. Now I'm blocked from accessing it on my phone at all. I've stopped doom scrolling reddit altogether.
But I still get linked to Reddit often, from both friends and google searches. And there are one or two specific threads that I'm sure to check.
I've basically cut down from 15+ hours a week of Reddit to less than one. So have I quit Reddit or not?
I’m similar to you, and would say I’ve quit. It’s the same with Facebook and Twitter. Occasionally someone will send me something from there or there’ll be something I can’t find anywhere else, but I don’t stick around to browse afterwards.
There's also people like me who are no longer active but didn't nuke their accounts. It'd be pretty hard to track.
Since the protests began, one of the subreddits I used to frequent now has an abnormally high number of comments; this might explain why.
Lemmy posts used to get like 30 upvotes max. I remember a few years ago one of the Lemmy devs made a post talking about the future of Lemmy and it got 120 upvotes over the course of a month.
Seeing posts of beans get 1/10th the upvotes as the front page of /r/All without the bots makes me wonder if Lemmy actually took a bite sized chunk out of Reddit, and they did it with chump change servers too
Well there's no question more people were on the threadiverse on the 1st July onwards. My little corner of the threadiverse was getting around 3x or more the normal server to server messages. The bigger instances of lemmy and kbin were struggling under the pressure.
And since then it's been busy compared to before (I think at least). But that doesn't mean people aren't doing both.
plus all the dope apps being built. Lemmy feels a lot bigger than reddit too.
Also ur username brought back some memories, hah.
This isn’t easy to answer for a lot of reasons. People “leave Reddit” in a lot of ways. Some deleted their account. Some nuked all their comments but left the account up. Some just deleted the app. Some stopped using Reddit but will eventually return. Some JOINED Reddit specifically to watch the exodus drama. Some made bot accounts to fuck with the numbers for fun. And of course, some users joined without ever being aware there was drama at all. Looking at the change in the number of users alone won’t yield the answers.
Other useful metrics would be number of posts/comments contributed, and daily active user statistics. But again, engagement may have actually been driven upwards recently because drama is fun to be a part of and redditors are notorious keyboard warriors.
Growth of lemmy and other similar platforms is another metric to use, but that number is affected by the converse of all of the reasons I listed above as well: A lemmy account doesn’t mean they deleted Reddit. It doesn’t mean they’ll stay off it. Not to mention lemmy’s growth is likely inflated by people signing up for multiple instances due to slowdown.
tl;dr: No one is gonna have a good answer to this yet. If they say they do, it’s likely gonna be a pretty inaccurate estimate.
Most reasoned answer.
I think the interesting thing to see will be how many people, like me, who used to post OC (mostly projects I've worked on, discussion topics, and what I thought were interesting articles) have stopped. I used to go into posts asking for help in areas I was knowledgeable, and provide assistance to newbies in the various hobby subreddits I subscribed to. None of that is happening anymore. I'm getting my memery from Lemmy and my discussion from Tildes now. Absolutely no reason to go to or interact with reddit at all.
Probably monthly active uses would be the best gauge. It's somewhat over 50k for Lemmy compared to around a half billion for reddit. That would be .01% or one ten thousandth. So even if all those were the result of people leaving Reddit, a graph on paper would not have high enough resolution to register a difference.
In any case it only matters that Lemmy has a big enough user base to make it worthwhile. I'd be more concerned about it getting too big than being too small.
Think about the quality of user reddit lost as well.
The growth here is all that really matters. Anything else is irrelevant. People should focus more on the success of this community rather than the failure of another.
No people left reddit, only us bots.
Kinda been feeling lately (since even before the recent events, to be honest) like that sentence should read "no people left on Reddit, only us bots."
There are dozens of us.
Dozens.
That seems high. Definitely tens of us.
Maybe 1/2%
Hard to say, because I recall reading that traffic after the protest pretty much returned back to normal levels.
Even if people were unhappy, they went back. Its a tough addiction to fight I guess?
On the other hand, the protest was mostly by the moderators. Not necessarily the users. A bunch of people didnt really even realize what was going on or why? Personally, I didnt care what the moderators were doing. A bunch of those guys were always power tripping anyway. I personally was just done with reddit.
about tri-fiddy
Not sure about anyone else, but I left for good (deleted the Reddit app from my phone).
I'm not a mod, never had my own subreddit, posted/commented very infrequently and used the official Reddit app. The reason I left is because the company is ran by idiots who do things against their users' best interest. I for one am not going to be a sheep in their herd.
Even if not many people left Reddit, I believe this whole fiasco planted the seed for the future. Next time people are unhappy with Reddit there will be an active alternative that they can migrate to.
Looking at monthly stats (which is most of what you can see for free) there's no impact yet:
https://app.neilpatel.com/en/traffic_analyzer/overview?lang=en&locId=2840&domain=reddit.com
The first link requires a paid subscription to see historic data and the second link only has visitor data up to May.
When I just looked, similarweb had the data for June and they showed a drop in visits of 3.36% and a drop in rank. So something happened - but not much. And that may only reflect the temporary blackout in some subs.
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