I think the premise is flawed. Most of us have been brought up in a world that preaches "if you're not growing, you're dying." That mindset is harmful in a whole host of ways. I have no idea if lemmy is growing or not, but it's quite possible, perhaps even preferable, for a service/site/mom-and-pop shop to be sustainable without unending growth.
this post was submitted on 19 Jan 2025
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Asklemmy
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To add, a lot of sites that βFade into obscurityβ still have active communities, theyβre just not mainstream anymore.
I would prefer if it grew because so many communities are dead. It seems that only political and shitposting instances have constant activity.
For me itβs still not a real Reddit alternative. Which sucks because Iβm permabanned from Reddit.
Lemmy is slowly accumulating mass - Iβd really love it if we gained a number of strong niche communities, but didnβt turn into a reddit due to mass influx.
I think the best thing of reddit is them having so many actually active niche subreddits. Many people saying Lemmy doesn't need to grow don't seem to care much about that which surprises me a bit.
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Correct. We don't have need to be growing. 40k mau are nothing to scoff at and is bigger than most other online forums who can feel very busy even with 1000. So long as we're getting as many users as we're losing, we're good. And the continuous enshittification of reddit will ensure there's always people looking for a new home.
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This is exactly on the nose. It reminds of articles I've read about the oldest continuously operating businesses in the world. Here's an example: https://www.theceomagazine.com/business/management-leadership/japan-oldest-businesses/
Note that one thing in common between many of these businesses, some of which have been around for nearly 1,500 years(!), is that they are family owned and operated. In other words, they prioritized stability over rapid growth. I feel that there's a huge lesson in this.
Cancer grows continuously. Obviously we should model everything on that.
for a service/site/mom-and-pop shop to be sustainable without unending growth.
I've been on somewhat niche sites which have lasted decades, with waves of people coming in whenever related sites screw up and trickles of people leaving when an alternative community becomes more popular. It's a comfy, slow existence, which works for some communities, but not for ones like this which thrive on diversity and chattiness, rather than really well thought-out replies days apart from each other. On reddit-like sites, time penalizes how high a post goes (unlike a forum where years-long threads are very normal to see on a front page) so there is an inherent benefit in having consistent activity. That doesn't imply boundless growth, but at least sustaining a decent level of activity. We're not chasing ad revenue, growth for growth's sake is not what we want or need.
But with that said, a community with no new visitors can only lose them. That can be a slow process, but it's inevitable. Been there, done that. Again, doesn't imply that pointless growth is a good thing.
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From the perspective of someone who has been on Lemmy for a few years now, I'll say that the amount of content here has become large enough for me to use Lemmy as a "daily driver" account. I don't miss out on important news or updates by using Lemmy instead of Reddit...in fact it often feels quite the opposite
Yeah I moved during the rexit well before the major one, but when It come around. I don't use anything else.
When I have run out of content on lemmy I touch grass haha
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According to fedidb.org, Lemmy has plateaued at around 43k active users over the past year.
If you ask me, though, it doesn't matter. The Lemmy ecosystem is active and healthy.
I was about to agree with you and then add that people like me who more lurk and upvote may count as inactive because we don't comment or post much. I just noticed that the chart only shows up to November of last year. I suspect several new people such as myself have finally found Lemmy given all that is going on and we'll see that in the charts in a couple months.
I am also more of a lurker, but try to comment occasionally to get into the statistics. (Done for this week!)
Lurkers unite!
At the back of the community.
Where we watch and only occasionally post the odd comment... When we feel like it. Maybe tomorrow.
I believe that the newest Lemmy versions count up/down voting as 'active'
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Wow... there wasn't more posters during the election, people just posted more?
Total post doesn't really tell us much. Of course there's going to be more posts over time. Hell there are Bots that post things. That number is going to go up as long as the servers exist. There could be no human users on here and those are going to go up.
Hexbear? Really?
This is just absolute number total posts and they're a shitposting heaven that existed for 4 years before the big reddit exodus. In monthly posts they're still in the top 10 iirc but not 2nd
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It's very active, but also a lot older than many other instances.
sh.it.heads: "We're number 5! We're number 5!"
(me. I'm probably the only one chanting at this fact)
I find it kinda concerning how the number of instances is shrinking and number of users per instance is going up. IMO it should be part of the fediverse design to incentivize decentralization to avoid a gmail situation.
Also worrying is that the number of Active Users is trending constant or slightly down, but the number of posts over time is climbing dramatically. To me, this could be a sign of inauthentic behaviour on the rise.
Lack of growth does not mean death. That's a capitalistic mindset. It's entirely possible for a community to be sustainable based on the people it has and have no need to grow. Lemmy's not trying to sell a product; there's no need for it to grow. People can join if they want to, and people can leave if they want to.
In terms of actual future prospects, Lemmy seems fairly large to me, and regardless of whether its userbase is growing or shrinking, it would have to shrink by quite a lot to become "dead". Especially as Reddit continues to enshittify, I imagine its userbase will only grow. Hard to find social medias of this nature otherwise; almost all other social media is based around following people, not communities, and also obviously most social media is much more commercialised, less anonymous, much less text-friendly, etc, so link aggregator/Reddit style social medias fill in a niche people want and people who want a social media in this niche will gravitate towards the one they see as the best social media for whatever reason. Maybe Reddit because it's the biggest, maybe Lemmy because Reddit is shit and Lemmy is federated and open-source, maybe their niche alternative because they're part of a specific niche community that uses different software, who knows.
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I moved to Lemmy during the reddut exodus itsjustt become better overtime I don't miss reddit at all. Also lots of fellow Linux and free software nerds over here and I like that.
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So from what I've seen on Lemmy over the last year is that the quantity of posts and variety of topics feels like it's going up. I certainly enjoy engaging on here.
Will it stagnate? I'm not sure. It might be that the monthly user levels stabilise but thats not the same as stagnate. If people are engaged and enjoying their time then it has value.
My feeling is that Lemmy will slowly grow over time. I don't see it becoming a huge platform like Reddit anytime soon. Its feasible but it feels like for now it will remain niche.
But I also dont want to it suddenly become huge. I was on reddit for a long time and I saw it evolve from being something small and interesting to a behemoth and enshittification to make money. Small is sometimes better, and small or stable in no way means stagnation.
What we really need is for people to put up topic focused sites and promote them as their own thing, not jusy "lemmy". So many specific interests still have very active forums dedicated to them, populated by the kind of people who want to ask queations aboht and discuss the things they have interest or expertise in, but who aren't into things like Reddit.
The fediverse is perfect for places like that. Places where you can focus on your primary interest, but also look over the fence. But all anyone wants to do is put up general interest sites and whine about there being more than one "gaming" forum.
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Donβt expect perpetual growth from the fediverse for one good reason:
It would cost more money.
Lemmy is self hosted and there are people who use their own personal money to host these things and have a certain amount of activity.
Doubling the users would double the cost but it would not double the usefulness for the instance owner.
Ideally growth would come in the form of new instances.
That has its drawbacks too though, federating with many, many instances will eventually cause strain.
I do want more growth via instances, but imo itβs more like a double edge sword than the salvation of a platform.
Growth for growth/s sake means very little. Steady use is way more important and Lemmy has that.
Does it have to?
Maybe a bit would be nice, but I don't want it to grow as big as Reddit got.
I mean it always will grow a little bit over time
I would say yes, because as is the real niche communities dont have the size for larger discussions.
Mainstream communities e.g. about global news already have a decent size. And in many ways it doesn't make much of a qualitative difference if there are 500 or 10.000 predictable comments. But many smaller communities are still mostly propped up by a few power users providing the majority of content which is not ideal for many reasons.
I can be very critical of the fediverse, especially where I want it to do better, but I think stagnation isn't the right word I think 'maintaining' fits more. The fediverse isn't beholden to the grow or die model capitalist projects need and it remains a space that is unique enough to warrant people coming back here, or coming here for certain reasons or content or whatever. I think the model to hope for would be continue maintaining and being ready for when the next group of people get fed up enough to follow through and come here (fediverse in general)
It seems to be on a healthy state, there are some communities that I would like to have more content. But that's also on me to share and contribute to the communities I would like to see.
Being a bystander on reddit for so long it's a bit difficult to change that mindset, but I'm trying to share a bit more
Me too! Sometimes I forget that I can participate in the discussion and even post cool stuff I'm doing. After all, that's the whole point of this kind of community.
IRC is still around. Usenet is still around.
There's no Google management team or Zuckerberg to pull the plug.
Lemmy can keep going indefinitely.
I feel like the content is becoming more robust and the userbase is keeping up. I think it's going to be super necessary pretty soon down the road.
One thing is that kbin/mbin/piefed/etc...etc... interact with lemmy all the time. Its getting a bit hazy if "lemmy" the platform is growing or if the entirety of the fediverse is growing and others are communicating with the software. We are now seeing quite a few accounts from all over the web interacting with lemmy communities. Is that a new "user" according to the stats? Or is that person a one off from mastodon?
What I a seeing is a general increase in discussion on the platform and increase in posts from all over the fediverse. Which is awesome!
I moved here during rexit and love it, but Lemmy isn't popular in my country. That's the reason I need other communities for local news and why Lemmy is not my everyday comunity.
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The quality of discourse is better since a year a go by a lot. Some home brew drama too.
It feels lived in now. The active users engage more. Growth for social media comes in burst anyways.
Reddit needs to do something bad again. Tiktok enjoyer is not the target audience for apub protocol based social media.
I ran a BBS back in the day with like 200ish? users. Engagement was way more valuable than growth. More people makes things harder, not easier. More engagement from less people is easier to manage, and leads to better communities.
Lemmy feels the same.
Lemmy is for discourse. I'd rather see the healthy and interesting back and forth of an OP and commenter than 5K up votes.
or will it stagnate and fade into obscurity like many other similar discussion boards?
well it wouldn't really play out like that, if Lemmy gets overtaken by a replacement (like Mbin, Piefed, or Sublinks), it would be a transition not a death
a big thing we can look forwards to right now is if Pixelfed gets better support to interact with Lemmy/etc communities/groups then we can get a big boost in userbase, even if they aren't using the Lemmy software we'll still be seeing their posts and comments
I wish Mastodon would improve their compatibility with Lemmy too, but they don't seem interested
Genuine opinion: Who cares?
Who cares if what we enjoy is changing, at all. It's kinda like if you go to a bowling alley, to go bowling. Do you show up and decide to bowl if there's other people bowling or not? I'm gonna go bowling regardless, that's why I went to the bowling alley.
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