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!
When the reddit API protests occurred, lemmy wasn't really ready for the influx either. Historically, when a social network dies, it's some combination of a protest and there being a pre-existing landing place that is ready to receive the influx. In the case of digg dying, that was reddit ready and waiting.
But lemmy had so many rough edges and was almost entirely unknown at the time of the reddit protest -- bugs, missing features, no apps... For most reddit users, even with the 3rd party shutdown, moving to lemmy at the time was objectively worse.
You're right though -- the next time something happens, lemmy is now established, the apps exist, many of the bugs and missing features have been dealt with, etc.
Another important detail is that Digg v4 pissed off most of the userbase, so the impact was pretty much immediate. Reddit APIcalypse pissed off only power users instead; the impact will only come off later (sadly likely past IPO).
Well, there was also the DeCSS key censorship debacle...
09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AACS_encryption_key_controversy
Good overview. But it was a huge on-site protest, where a large percentage of all comments and posts contained the above string in some form.
Totally remember the lack of apps. Initially, I just had to use Lemmy through a mobile browser. Lots of devs were working hard to publish their apps, and after a few months we had lots of options. That was just amazing how quickly it happened.
BTW shout out to Bean, my favorite Lemmy client. It’s not perfect, so in some cases I still use Voyager to fill in the gaps, so bonus points for Voyager too.