Fediverse

This here is a better source: https://lemmy.fediverse.observer/dailystats&days=1000

That's all of lemmy over the last 1000 days.

Most important takeaways:

• Active users tend to only grow during special events (usually "Reddit pulls some new shit") and then declines slowly as people fade back out.
• When instances close, users tend to just disappear (as when Lemmy.ee closed down). The Lemmy.ee users seem to have just disappeared instead of migrated to another instance.
• Number of active servers is in a strict decline. Apart from the initial rush, smaller instances seem to go down and don't get replaced. Most users seem to prefer to use big instances.
• Comments again shows the total number of comments available, not new comments coming in. As you can see, the angle of the curve gets slightly flatter over time, meaning that activity drops. It also shows well that when instances get closed down lots of content just disappears.
• Posts also shows a similar decline, though even stronger than comments.

Here's all of fediverse: https://lemmy.fediverse.observer/dailystats&days=1000

Also remember, though it says 'daily' in the title, that only refers to that the stats are grouped by day. They are still total numbers (e.g. total number of posts that are available on that day, not number of new posts created that day).

Lemmy has the big issue that each instance needs to cache the whole content of each community any user of that instance ever subscribed to. Since Reddit-style platforms only make sense if there are huge communities that means that the biggest communities have most of the traffic while being subscribed to by most instances. That means that most instances have copies of most content.

Same goes with moderation. Since every instance holds a copy of the content, each instance's operator is liable for illegal content stored on their server, and most instance operators also want their moderation guidelines enforced across the whole instance, even for content coming from other instances, so each instance needs to moderate all content. Content moderation on one instance is not propagated to other instances (unless the moderation happens on the host instance of the community), so you end up with moderators of dozens of instances each having to individually e.g. delete the same post.

This is already such a strain that e.g. Lemmy.ee got shut down because it was just so much work and money doing all of that, and that's with a miniscule amount of ~40k monthly active users across all of Lemmy. Compare that to the 1.2 billion monthly active users on Reddit. If we only got a tenth of a percent of all Reddit users over to Lemmy, the whole system would come crashing down.