How is the size of Lemmy's userbase changing? Is it growing or shrinking? How diverse is it? What do the current trendlines look like as we approach a year since Rexxit?

I feel like I used to see graphs on this sub fairly regularly, but haven't seen one recently. There was also some ambiguity in the numbers as commenting and voting were added to the active user totals. Now that most (all?) instances have switched to 0.19, do we have a better idea of where things stand?

Aside from sticking around and posting, commenting, and voting, is there anything users should be doing to help grow the platform? (!lemmygrow would be a good name for a sublemmy, if anyone wanted to organize something)

In any case, thanks to everyone who has helped grow Lemmy to its current size!

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[–] admin@lemmy.tellyou.social 89 points 7 months ago (4 children)

Have a look here https://lemmy.fediverse.observer/stats

[–] filister@lemmy.world 46 points 7 months ago (1 children)

I didn't know there were almost as many Germans as Americans, the majority of Reddit users were Americans which has created Americocentric perspective on a lot of topics which from a European perspective was quite annoying.

[–] waldek@lemmy.86thumbs.net 33 points 7 months ago (1 children)

I did not verify my thoughts but I think this could be because ovh has big datacenters in Germany and quite a lot of Europeans use ovh.

[–] maegul@lemmy.ml 45 points 7 months ago (2 children)

fediverse had a strong european presence before the reddit migration too. The Mastodon lead-dev/founder, for instance, is German. And European governments have been far more interested in running their own instances on the fediverse than any other country AFAICT (to the point that I've seen it confuse North-American admins).

[–] narp@feddit.de 23 points 7 months ago (1 children)

I think one of the Lemmy devs is German too

[–] nutomic@lemmy.ml 25 points 7 months ago (1 children)

Yes that's me :)

[–] hanrahan@slrpnk.net 3 points 7 months ago

Thank you for your work.

[–] SubArcticTundra@lemmy.ml 15 points 7 months ago (1 children)

Yeah open source seems to be a big thing in Germany specifically for some reason

[–] Danterious@lemmy.dbzer0.com 13 points 7 months ago (2 children)

Why do the graphs look so weird?

[–] jeffw@lemmy.world 44 points 7 months ago (1 children)

Fuck me, pie charts with 50 segments??? Maybe they look weird because pie charts suck if you have more than 2-3 things to show

And the rest on the page don’t display well on mobile

[–] admin@lemmy.tellyou.social 15 points 7 months ago (1 children)

Youre right - feel free to make and share a better Version. I think the community appreciates forks and contributions :)

[–] jeffw@lemmy.world 34 points 7 months ago (1 children)

No, I’m just here to sit in my armchair and judge other people’s design choices.

But on a serious note, I wouldn’t even know how. I barely played around in R but the only semi-legit data viz stuff I ever did was in Tableau. And that was only with static data

[–] lechatron@lemmy.today 8 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago) (2 children)

Not super tricky, they're using ChartJS and with some very minimal tweaks to the config (aka changing "pie" to "bar") the data would look like this!

edit: does look a bit awkward due to the huge difference in values. A logarithmic scale would look better, but is much more confusing.

[–] jeffw@lemmy.world 5 points 7 months ago

Still look less awkward than pie charts. And yeah, I wouldn’t use a log scale for a viz unless it’s going into a professional publication

[–] Rutty@sh.itjust.works 1 points 7 months ago

OMG, Pareto analysis… so sexy.

[–] sin_free_for_00_days@sopuli.xyz 9 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago) (2 children)

It just gives current stats, not historical trends. I don't think it is any answer to OPs question.

EDIT: I was wrong, it was an issue on my side.

[–] Danterious@lemmy.dbzer0.com 20 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago) (3 children)

If you scroll down it does give historical trends on comments, posts, monthly active users, etc.

What I meant is why do the graphs look so janky.

For example:

What happened in October 2023 that made so many users join?

and

What happened in February 2024 that made so many people stop posting?

Edit: March -> February

[–] seaQueue@lemmy.world 18 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago)

Sept/Oct '23 was the Boost lemmy mobile client release. A lot of people signed up and many of them bounced off shortly after.

[–] chiisana@lemmy.chiisana.net 9 points 7 months ago

0.19 counts active users differently; prior to 0.19, the count is only if the user posted, after 0.19, all interactions results in the user being counted as an active user. This inflated the active users hugely as all lurkers are counted.

The active users is dwindling. You can see the steep drop off prior to the change and a slow but continued decline after the update.

I do not know the reason for the number of posts falling off, but that doesn’t look healthy either to be honest.

[–] sin_free_for_00_days@sopuli.xyz 4 points 7 months ago (1 children)

Thanks for the post. Something on my browser only shows the pie charts and doesn't let me scroll down.

[–] dave@feddit.uk 4 points 7 months ago

The graphs are all interactive (touch to show labels, etc.). That can interfere with scrolling—try dragging at the edge or one of the pie chart titles. Fwiw, it scrolls ok on mobile safari…

[–] admin@lemmy.tellyou.social 2 points 7 months ago

I mean there is a a graph about active users over the last months, so I would argue it does regarding user activity?

[–] darakan@lemm.ee 9 points 7 months ago

So basically, had a massive spike during the reddit blackout in July last year. Dropped down to half by November and has since shown fairly steady (if measured) growth. I think that's a good sign.

[–] ulterno@lemmy.kde.social 6 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago) (1 children)

What just happened to the number of servers? Did the admins just decide they want to go with quality over quantity? Or does it have something to do with political conditions?

[–] SorteKanin@feddit.dk 21 points 7 months ago

Probably lots of people trying to start another general instance that didn't draw any users and then deciding to shut it down. FWIW I think we have instances enough (from a users point of view, I don't think it matters much whether there are 100 or 1000 instances). We could be spread over the instances more evenly though.