From 2,997 active users across all lemmy instances at the beginning of June, the number increased to 52,797 by June 30th. Source.
An active user on Lemmy is "someone who has posted or commented on our instance or community within the last given time frame.” Source. That means lurkers are not counted as active users. There are currently almost 200k total users spread across the top 10 non-bot lemmy instances.
We’re really building something here!
EDIT: Looking for a lemmy app? Here’s a whole list: https://lemmy.world/post/465785
Registration and discovery needs to be simplified tremendously for long term viability. But it’s a good start.
From the outside looking in, the whole model seemed needlessly complicated. So it’s like there’s a LOT of reddit.coms over here? But they’re all the same? But also different? What’s the difference? Which one do I sign up on?
But then I get here and realized it doesn’t really matter that much, since you can more or less use all of them regardless of which one you sign up for.
Something about the way users try to communicate what Lemmy/Fediverse IS, is the complicated part. It’s like everyone wants to jump straight to the more technical details behind how the model works; which probably scares off a lot of the people who just want a place to pop in and talk about their hobbies.
I just told my fairly tech-unsavvy partner the email analogy:
You sign up on Google, I sign up on yahoo, my bro-in-law runs his own from a server in his house. We can all email each other and the email looks mostly the same no matter who reads it, but yahoo isn’t Google isn’t my bro-in-law. Lemmy = email in general, yahoo = lemmy.ml, Google = lemmy.world, etc.
She immediately got it and has an account on some instance and has subscribed to a bunch of places.
This is a great way to think about it! Thank you. I’ll be using this to help explain it to my friends
I keep seeing this said about lemmy but kbin was identical to any other site. So I looked up what the process is for lemmy and, aside from like 2 glitches to look out for it was exactly the same.
Please tell me what is difficult.
You have to consider that your technical proficiency is not the same as everyone else’s.
I think you’re right insofar as onboarding is concerned. Once you’ve registered, though, Lemmy is relatively straightforward to use. Changing your user settings to display posts from ALL federated Lemmy instances on your front page helps with discoverability. That should be the default setting, but it isn’t. That setting is associated with the “Type” parameter (found just below “Theme”). It isn’t terribly obvious.
Before that setting becomes default, the “Hot” algorithm needs to get a major overhaul. It keeps spamming the top of my front page with posts that have zero comments and around ~1-10 upvotes as the results from federated instances start trickling in.
Image Transcription: Line Graph
[A line graph is shown depicting the number of users on Lemmy over one month’s time. The horizontal axis lists the date of each reading, with an interval shown for every day. The earliest date begins at ‘2023-05-28’ and the most recent date is given as ‘2023-06-26’. The vertical axis measures the number of users, with intervals marked at every 5,000 users, with an upper limit of 50,000 users. There is a green trend like and a blue trend line graphed from plot points at every horizontal interval. The green line is labelled ‘Active users monthly’ shows increase over time. The line remains flat at approximately 1,000 users from the ‘05-28’ date mark to the ‘05-31’ mark, then begins to gradually increase to approximately 10,000 users, starting to show a trend similar to the beginning of an exponential growth curve. At the ‘06-11’ date mark, the line begins increasing at a relatively steady rate, with the last marked date showing just over 45,000 users. There are two points in which the line shows an apparent indication of levelling off in user count, before then showing a sudden increase in users again, with neither of these points significantly impacting the overall upward trend. These points are at the dates ‘06-16’ and ‘06-21’. The second graphed line, the blue line, is labelled ‘Active Users Half year’ and starts at approximately 3,000 users, but follows an almost identical trend shape as the green line as it increases approximately parallel to it. The blue line ends at around 48,000 users at the final graphed point.]
^I’m a human volunteer transcribing posts in a format compatible with screen readers, for blind and visually impaired users!^
Good human
good human
Very cool! Thanks for doing this!
Posting to become a statistic! Yay for being a number!!
Here’s to the next 50k!
Really enjoying my time here
Hopefully a viable Reddit replacement here
I’m optimistic. Seems to be catching on quicker than I’d expected.
just created an account. looks familiar but janky
This is a blast from the past. It takes me back to 13 or so years ago when all of us Digg users made the migration over to Reddit.
That’s not a bad thing, though, as this place has promise! Hopefully increasing numbers of Reddit users take the plunge as the site continues its death spiral.
It’s funny yeah I remember the redditor panic when all you guys showed up, who’d have thought we’d all end up being refugees together
I kinda love the jankiness it’s reminiscent of how the internet used to be.
I’m hungry, man. Can you come to me?
Speaking of janky, voting doesn’t seem to actually work for me?
Might just be performance related? Are posts and comment threads loading slowly for you, by chance?
Adding my voice! Exploring this whole new world. It’s all quite exciting.
That will be interesting to see how this graph behaves after 1st july
Thank you for welcoming us to the Fediverse. I hope we can bring more good than bad. People are so fragile and flawed, but we can try to not be assholes or own at least own up to it if we do.
❤️ Free hugs! ❤️
First day, checking in. So far, so good.
Leaving my first comment to be added to the count
Gotta be part of the statistics!
Let’s see how many % it grows in July when shit really hits the fan.
Curious to see the July numbers… :o
Aye
Getting users to come and try is great, but the real challenge is to keep them on the platform and get them to contribute. Fingers crossed!