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!

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[–] [email protected] 2 points 10 months ago

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.