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!
I imagine a lot more of those users would’ve stuck around d after that peak, but DDOS attacks and scaling challenges made many major instances super unusable for many hours during the day. A lot of folks bailed because Lemmy just wasn’t working.
Also, many of the 3rd party clients were pretty incomplete. So it was web app or bust, unless you were downloading beta builds outside of the various app stores.
Yeah, it’s a lot better now on so many fronts.
With regard to uptime and scaling (and I say this fully ironically knowing that I cross posted this to lemmy.world): the smaller instances really weathered it better. lemmy.ca had zero issues with downtime, but has like 3% of the user count compared to lemmy.world so it isn’t really fair to compare the server loads. But from a user perspective, a better experience can sometimes be had on smaller instances when the big instances grind to a halt. If we do get hit with a million reddit users looking for homes, we’ll face this again. Sending users to smaller instances to distribute the load will be important during any future surge until server capacity can be added to the larger instances.
A lot of interest communities also just didn’t make it over, so people were faced with abandoning those entirely, or having feet in each pond. And if you’re keeping a Reddit tab open for those, it’s going to end up back at more general subreddits, too.
The simple fact of the matter is that many people, even if they wanted to leave Reddit, Inc, weren’t actually prepared to leave Reddit. And so after the dust and excitement settled here, they just went back.
This is a normal adoption pattern for these things, though.
That too. Some of the ones I liked tried to do discord, and eventually caved and went back.
Yeah, I saw a few try Discord. I’m still scratching my head over that one.