this post was submitted on 26 Sep 2021
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Lemmy

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Everything about Lemmy; bugs, gripes, praises, and advocacy.

For discussion about the lemmy.ml instance, go to [email protected].

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Is Lemmy gaining or losing active users over time? (lemmy.ml)
submitted 3 years ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
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I'm new here, so I'd like to know if this project is growing steadily or not really catching on. It has a lot of potentioal imho, but I understand how hard it is to make people use "alternative" websites.

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[–] [email protected] 47 points 3 years ago (4 children)

See here. The graph for six month active users is a little glitchy (I think because lemmy.ml was listed twice under two different URL).

There does seem to be very small growth in 6 month active users, not as fast as a few other fediverse platforms (such as friendica and writefreely) . but i got my fingers crossed that third party lemmy tools will create some really compelling features and help push the adoption of lemmy (I think addons can enhance open source software, like how firefox addons helped firefox adoptions).

[–] ThunderQuack 20 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I know the existence of Memmy on iOS really helped me to jump on as a casual user. I think awareness of apps and easy hop on points is what’s going to be the biggest boon for general growth of the user base

[–] m3enzo 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I just noticed this post is from 2 yrs ago. This is also an issue.

[–] ThunderQuack 2 points 1 year ago

Good catch I totally missed that

[–] [email protected] 9 points 3 years ago (2 children)

Why must addons be created for free software instead of merging it in? for firefox seems good but for lm I don't see the need, why was LES not just added to master?

[–] [email protected] 19 points 3 years ago (1 children)

generally speaking adding code to the main code base requires a maintenance overhead maintainers might not be willing to accept, Also there could be disagreements about important design decisions and lemmy devs might not want certain features, it's really hard to know in advance what works best so third party extensions can help a project switch from a mode of "intelligent design" to "evolution", people just try stuff and the best stuff stays and become popular.

Also advanced features might clutter the UX , but power users could be the ones driving the popularity of the platform so that's one way to attract them.

[–] [email protected] 14 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Also performance. Add-ons tend to be opt in, so they don't cause things to slow down for people that don't use them.

[–] [email protected] 12 points 1 year ago (2 children)

If you don't mind me asking, how did you get to this comment? it's over then two years old (and seems like your not the only one because someone upvoted you).

[–] PotjiePig 19 points 1 year ago (5 children)

I too have been sent here. It's at the top of hot right now.

Seems to be a Lemmy zombie post glitch that needs to be addressed.

[–] [email protected] 12 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I didn't even realise I was looking at a 2y old post

[–] Ivyy_LemmyW 3 points 1 year ago

Same lol

[–] ewe 6 points 1 year ago

Samesies. Very random. Also on hot are things that I would consider new.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago

I don't see it, maybe you should open a bug or post on "lemmy support".

[–] Dick_Justice 2 points 1 year ago

Party

[–] Limitedeffort 1 points 1 year ago

Zombie or not this is still relevant and useful

[–] zahel 8 points 1 year ago

It’s definitely odd, there’s also a 4 year old post in my current feed

[–] Shepy 3 points 1 year ago

Your need is not the same as my need. Personally I do a lot of graphics work so a pixel ruler and a colour picker are absolutely necessary for my day to day use of a browser. Are you happy for your browser to be larger and slower to have these, even if you'll never use them? Having extensions allows things to be modular and customised to fit the needs of the end user without unnecessary code hogging memory for others.

[–] bappity 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I'm hoping mod tools are developed soon, automod is a must

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

These already exist at least to a certain degree, see awesome-lemmy.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 3 years ago

Thanks for sharing, exactly what I was looking for. Like other commenters here, I also think that Lemmy doesn't have to be very popular. But I think reaching ~10k active monthly users would be an essential requirements to have an engaging website.

As for addons, I'm already working on one, called LES (Lemmy Enhancement Suite, similar to RES for Reddit). I'll make it open source in a week I think. Hopefully others can contribute, as I believe one very customizable addon like RES is better than multiple ones.