Not sure if this is the right place to post, but when the reddit protests were happening, I used Lemmy for a bit then decided to detox from "social media" for a while till now. Am I misinterpreting the activity here?

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[–] lvxferre@mander.xyz 4 points 1 week ago (1 children)

The drop is slowing down considerably:

Month	Users	Change from previous month	in %
Mar	53687	N/A	N/A
Apr	51298	-2389	-4.5%
May	48832	-2466	-4.8%
Jun	48472	-360	-0.74%
Jul	47297	-1175	-2.4%
Aug	47876	+579	+1.2%
Sep	47227	-649	-1.4%
Oct	45037	-2190	-4.6%
Nov	44837	-200	-0.44%

And given that March was a peak, I'm tempted to interpret it as newbies not sticking around. I think that it'll plateau around 40k users, then provided that the conditions remain the same it won't increase or decrease.

That's why I say that it's stable - the core userbase will likely stick around.

That said, these numbers may particularly be bad, e.g. if anyone left Lemmy and went to Mbin and/or PieFed, then I think they would not be counted in those charts?

They wouldn't be counted but I don't think that this introduces a lot of inaccuracy. Mbin has 1.7k MAUs, and PieFed has 104.

The number of instances dropping is far more concerning IMO. It means that smaller instances have a hard time becoming sustainable.

[–] OpenStars@discuss.online 1 points 1 week ago

For people that enjoy using ~~Arch btw~~ Linux, we're good yeah. Although occasionally some of us will die or whatever, and we need to have some level of growth or else accept that we will pretty much just shrink from now onwards. i.e., people talk as if we will go mainstream, or rather as if content will spring up magically from nowhere. If we want the small niches like Reddit has, we would need the userbase first. And to get that, we'd have to ditch our toxicity issues, make the UI more functional, and above all else make better moderation tools. Which I am doubtful will happen as the Lemmy devs seem happy with their current pacing and direction of changes - that's 99% fine with me btw, as it's theirs to do with whatever they please; though I am all the more happy to now see the likes of PieFed grow much quicker, even though it started out so very much further behind.

Fair point about PieFed being extremely tiny, and there are only 3 of them that are open to the public to join (https://join.piefed.social/try/) - though I am somewhat surprised to see the number of users for Mbin being so low. Yeah, I suppose they must be going back to Reddit, or perhaps Bluesky, or something else.

I am not sure how much to worry about the number of instances - on the one hand the long-anticipated 0.19.6 software release came out just today, which should fix the federation issues with Lemmy.World for many of them. On the other hand, smaller instances weren't likely to want to pull down the entirety of the Fediverse to begin with, as an actual multi-user one (even if on the small side, like Discuss.Online or Aussie.Zone) would, plus once gone, wouldn't we expect them to never come back, i.e. regardless of the software release today? So whatever turned them away... it would have been interesting to have known (though introverts would be the last to have offered such:-).