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
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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.
Yep, it’s email but with a nice interface and open ‘threads’ which we can post on.
When can we get an emacs client for lemmy?
I think there is a CLI client that supports Lemmy
I thought the world just agreed to let Emacs die in peace…
This is probably my favorite analogy for it so far, at least as a high level overview. I kind of made the same connection myself and that’s when it clicked for me.
This is a great way to think about it! Thank you. I’ll be using this to help explain it to my friends
The email analogy has got to be the best way to describe the fediverse that I’ve seen so far.
This is a great way to think about it! Thank you. I’ll be using this to help explain it to my friends
This is a great way to think about it! Thank you. I’ll be using this to help explain it to my friends
This is a great way to think about it! Thank you. I’ll be using this to help explain it to my friends
This is a great way to think about it! Thank you. I’ll be using this to help explain it to my friends
Yeah, this scared me off for weeks because I didn’t want the hassle. Turns out it’s way easier than those dorks were making it seem!
Exactly. People last week were adamant about needing to spread out new users across different instances. I understand the rationale, but let’s be honest, casual newcomers don’t really pay much attention to that. They just want to see a website a lot of content before signing up.
Did we not learn from mastodon? The federation concept should be introduced a bit later after they’re comfortable.
yeah the people running this show need to understand that normies dont care about server hosting. they just want a feed with cat pics
Everyone wants a feed with cat pics.
Yeah, there should be simple “how and where do I sign up and find my favourite communities”. I feel like there is lots of tech talk here because lots of tech stuff needs to happen before these sites are ready for the full moderation suit and for supporting the most basic aspects of Reddit communities (like flairs)…
There are a few ways. The easiest, albeit least efficient, is to just set your feed to show “all” and join any communities that seem interesting as you’re scrolling.
The second is to hit the “communities” tab at the top of the page, and choose “all”. This will show you a list of every community in lemmy and from there you can join whatever you want to.
Thirdly, you can use this website which is a bit more comprehensive than just using the communities tab. Some people may prefer it, others may not, it’s totally up to you.
Yeah I think it might be better to explain it like if anyone could boot up their own reddit and link to other people’s reddits. Some are popular, some aren’t, some don’t want to be huge because they want to be niche like some subreddits did. We may have subreddits with the same name but it’s ok because people can tell based on which Reddit it’s on. Also they’re called instances not reddits and communities not subreddits.
The thing that’s weird to me is that say I like football (soccer). I’m sure there are dozens of “instances” have a soccer community, but which one should I follow? It seems like this architecture fragments the user base too much.
Agreed. I feel like the apps in development are trying to make the signup process a bit easier though, so we’ll see how that goes.
Which apps? In many of them I didn’t even see a way to register.
I’m currently using the beta for Memmy on iOS. I think it’s prepping for an App Store release today. It’s a good foundation and has promise.
Is it available for download?
Here it is on TestFlight for the beta - https://testflight.apple.com/join/6jaRU6rD
I do believe I got an alert today that it’s prepping for an App Store release later in the day.
Question; cuz I’ve been using Memmy too, and I haven’t had a chance to read into it much. I don’t have the ability to upvote/downvote/reply to individual comments in the app. I’m not sure if it’s a bug on my end or if he just hasn’t had a chance to implement those features yet. Do you have that same issue with it?
I had that issue occasionally. Killing the app and restarting fixed it.
Are you using the gestures? Swipe left on a comment to reply. I’m using the app right now to reply to you
if you’re in iphone, go to wefwef.app with safari and save it as an app, it’s infinitely better than default
I second this. Memmy is the most stable and well developed app so far, apart from wefwef, although wefwef is only a web app currently
Memmy for iOS has an onboarding screen starting with ‘do you know how fediverse works’
Most of the devs that worked on 3rd party reddit apps are remodeling to support lemmy. So we are about to get some really good quality apps in the next 4 to 6 weeks.
Is there a list or overview of these hopefully coming apps? I am using Liftoff right now but it’s en beta and lacks a lot compared to Apollo. Would like to test these out when they are coming. Until then I’ll just use Liftoff and suggest features for them to add.
Yep there is a list: https://lemmy.world/post/465785
I keep seeing people say this but honestly registering is really easy. It took me 5 minutes to figure out how to create an account after leaving reddit
Well, sure, anyone posting here at the moment figured it out. But I’d bet there’s tons of people interested but intimidated.
You literally click the sign up button, fill out the form, get an email saying your application was accepted and then log in. What is complicated about that?
Genuine question.
The complication comes from things aside from the sign-up process. It’s understanding instances and navigation. People don’t know how it works. I.e. what is the equivalent of a subreddit? Who hosts it? Is it someone’s personal server? What if it goes down suddenly? Etc.
But that’s not an issue with the sign up process, so why are people complaining that it is difficult and complicated to sign up?
I agree there definitely should be somewhere that shows an infographic of how the fediverse works. I’ve seen this one that can be handy for people to understand.
This is great. This is what should be on page to choose an instance . A no nonsense guide that people can just read and get the concepts. I think content such as this is the way to go. People don’t know or care why it is better in most cases but this gives them the gist in a minute.
You literally click the sign up button, fill out the form, get an email saying your application was accepted and then log in. What is complicated about that?
Coming from https://join-lemmy.org/, you need two clicks before you even see a signup button. That is two clicks on pages filled with technical talk about servers and other mostly irrelevant details. In total, you need to visit three pages with different looks, and find one specific button on each.
We don’t need to agree wether it is complicated or not. We should note it’s a perception many newcomers have. If we want to make life easier for newcomers, this is one area to work on.
I had heard about it for a week, but finally signed up when a mod I trusted on a reddit sub I used posted a sign-up link to lemmy.world. I’m somewhat tech proficient, but that extra step of figuring out a good instance to join was enough to stop me for a while. I didn’t want to join a dud and have yet another dead login somewhere. YMMV, of course!
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.
My issue was I didn’t know where to go to sign up. It took me a little time to understand the fediverse, then I had to figure out what instance I should sign up for. After that I started hearing some instances weren’t accepting new accounts but didn’t know if that was a thing everywhere or only one instance. I consider myself above average compared to the general public when it comes to my capabilities with the Internet and computer tech in general, it’s never taken me days to understand stand how to sign up for a website like this before.
It does seem simple now that I’m here and understand things better. It’s just a learning curve; this is unique to any website\forum\whatever I’ve played with before.
Same! Then you are here and switch your feed to all, and see all the posts from other instances, and its like a mind blowing experience… it didnt matter what instance you signed up for!
Its like hotmail vs netzero mail vs gmail or something.
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.
Agreed. The difficulty is in the initial discovery step. Early lemmy adopters will often refuse to recommend a specific instance to newcomers. But that confuses people. I know it confused the hell out of me.
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.
And sadly, the software seems to be little better than proof of concept quality. It seems poorly architected for functionality, usability and scalability.
UX is on par or better than reddit back when I joined. Mobile apps are certainly better.
Similar experience to reddit and apps, albeit slightly clunky.
Don’t get me wrong - I think it is a good start, but there are some significant concerns:
- My biggest UX complaint is that the method for connecting to a federated community is just…wrong. Do something completely unintuitive (paste a glyph / URL in search), get an error (not found), wait a while and hopefully it will start working. I can’t fathom who thought this was a good idea, and I’m shocked that apparently Mastadon does it the same way. We’re losing a lot of interested users at this step.
- UX issue #2 - which may be fixed in .8, can’t say - is that there is basically no error handling. Any server error or user error results in the spinning wheel of death. Sometimes refreshing fixes it, sometimes it doesn’t. For example, did you know there is a 10k post limit? If your post exceeds 10k - you guessed it - spinning wheel of death. Try to sign up with a user ID that’s already taken? Spinning wheel of death. Log in without verifying your e-mail? Spinning wheel of death. You get the idea.
- I’m not an admin, but apparently that the software isn’t really designed for cluster scaling. I think the assumption is that more instances solve scaling. It doesn’t.
- Functionality wise, there is very little control for mods. Pin, delete, ban. Edit the sidebar. That’s it.
These are problems that can be solved, but the next step will be to see where development leadership steers the platform. It is how these problems are solved that will decide whether Lemmy or Kbin becomes the leading platform.
Please make it verbose. What are you missing, what should be improved, what are your ideas and wishes?
See my response to the other comment here - I go into some detail there.
I disagree. At first I was frustrated that people were having so much difficulty with such a simple process, but after a while I adopted the mindset that if they’re too stupid to figure out something so mundane then I don’t want them here anyway. 🤷♂️
Eh. This is kind of a weak attitude.
Yeah. I don’t want just tech savvy people here. I want people with non-tech hobbies like gardening and home improvement to join too.
Without diversity we are just a bunch of assholes yelling at each other about things we all already know.
This is the important part. I’m part of the big homebrewing (beer) community on Reddit, as well as some local subs for my home area. I don’t think a ton of those users can figure it out as easily as someone like myself.
I think it’ll take some time for the smaller niche communities to build up, but I want them now!
It doesn’t really require tech savvy, just a few minutes of reading. Anyone smart enough to have something interesting to add to a conversation can figure it out easily enough.
People can be smart in very different ways. I can navigate unknown and complicated webpages just fine, but am totally lost when it comes to crafts or many other areas of expertise I might not even be aware of. It all boils down to what you’re used to.
So do I! I tried to help a bunch of people join and they just got frustrated and threw up their arms and said it was too hard to figure out. Like…wtf was hard about it?
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!^
The most wonderful part of this, for the unfortunately uncoordinated like me:
scrolling and accidently clicking a random card is now always a random post and not an ad launching a browser window I immediately close and curse.
It’s amazing how bad it got for awhile out there.
Joined today! Let’s go!! See ya, Reddit!
Insane Growth
I’m not sure it was all warm blooded. Active, warm blooded users are probably the real metric.
Using ‘Active Users’ as the metric of growth is much more reliable than the total user count since there have been rashes of instances started up just for spam accounts.
It even mentions this as a note on the fedidb site:
https://fedidb.org/current-events/threadiverse
I’m actually really impressed with how similar an experience using Lemmy is to actual Reddit. We don’t have the established communities just yet, but the platform itself seems like a really good replacement
Glad to be here! Lots of similarities to Reddit but without all the fluff. Almost like how Reddit used to be. Loving it here so far!
I can’t wait for this place to blow up. Definitely missing some of my niche subs but hopefully they will appear at some point!!
Reddit refugees flooding the border
I’m in that graph, and wow my curves look good.
I’m in this photo and I like it.
I’m in this picture and I do like it
I’m in there twice! (One NSFW account and this - on Reddit I used multireddits to keep the two somewhat separated.)
That will be interesting to see how this graph behaves after 1st july
The biggest issue with this website is the lack of basic explanation of how it works. Imo, the moment someone visits this website for the first time, a pop-up should appear explaining what this is, and how it works in maybe one simple paragraph at most.
Just signed up for lemmy and this already feels better than reddit. Hope it gains more traction ahead.
Just came over last night after RIF shut down. Might as well make my first comment here for the stats. Here’s to Lemmy’s continued growth.
Lets see where this goes
