The growth in 2025 has been staggering, ngl. And this is the kind of thing which converts from a trickle to a tsunami very quickly. It never happens with one shock. But a consistent amount of enshittification shocks. Reddit’s desperate struggle for profitability practically ensures those will keep happening, so this is all inevitable at this point. The only thing that is uncertain is whether digg can recapture the fleeing masses who are not cognizant of the dangers of corporate vc-backed enshittification yet, like bluesky did to Twitter.
But a consistent amount of enshittification shocks
I think the proper term is enshittification sharts
Lel
The user growth we’re seeomg could result in an overwhelming flood of users at anytime. Which is why people should consider supporting the lemmy devs and instance admins either financially or through contributions so that the lemmy software and infrastructure is ready to handle the growth.
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The difference is the way it is run. You got it. And if one day Midwest.social starts doing things you hate and treating it’s users like crap, then come on over to lemmy.world or lemmy.ca, or one if the other thousands instances.
People hosting the database are not the owners of the platform unlike Reddit. They get to tell us how we can use it just because they host the database.
I’ve already moved at least once and have been very happy it was as easy as it is.
I’ve never moved, but I assume you just create a new account and start over. Or is there more you can do?
it’s possible to migrate your subs on lemmy
it’s possible to both migrate your subs and make a redirect on mastodon for followers, but the redirect requires the old server to remain in service.
You bring up some good points and I do believe that the model that Lemmy use can insulate it from a lot of those issues.
People posting whatever they want wherever they want and having very little understanding of nuance in language I dont think this would be a huge problem, mods can remove unwanted content and instances can decide what type of users they want to accept. As for misusing downvotes I think that issue never has ever mattered and the difference between reddit and lemmy is we have a open source algorithm to decide how content is served. If anyone can think of a better way to server content they’re free to put that in.
moderators becoming more power hungry This is an issue on every platform but Lemmy is more insulated against it than reddit for two reasons. First is that we can have the same community name shared across servers. On reddit once someone gets the catchy community name they can camp it forever. On Lemmy you can just make the community somewhere else with the same name. Second, each instance can decide how it wants to moderate its communities on Lemmy ML they are OK with power hungry mods but on other instances its frowned upon. On reddit its ignored completely.
One thing that makes Lemmy better is that its made by the users for the users. We have the code, we have the protocol its built on. This means we can have Lemmy tailored to however we want. We are not at the whim of a massive company that only cares about profit. If I have an idea for a feature i can goto the github and suggest it, better yet if I could program it I could help build that feature. If I dont like a change that is made by the lemmy devs I can fork the project and remove the change and still interact with the rest of lemmy.
This seems unrealistic in my opinion. Normal people really don’t like to donate, unfortunately. I think that Lemmy needs to make it so anyone can easily self host an instance without too much fuss. Something like docker on an old laptop. I know they have docker containers for Lemmy already, but in my opinion, they aren’t simple enough to set up. And there should be an option to bundle it with a wireguard VPN tunnel, so that they really don’t need to fuff about with reverse proxy to browse on your phone. This way, the cost is distributed across all users. It should be that setting up a domain and port forwarding should be the largest hurdle.
Normal people really don’t like to donate,
I’m on a medium-small instance; if %5 of users donate a dollar a month, the hardware would likely be paid for.
If lemmy.world had %0.01 of users paying, they could probably cover their hardware, storage and network fees.
If you’re not paying the admin’s mortgage, it not that hard to chip in. Unlike the other “options”, no one is getting ad revenue or selling your data, if that’s not worth a cup of cheap coffee a month for 1:20 people they have their priorities in the wrong places. .
Its not unrealistic. I don’t think anyone expects 50% or 100% of users to donate. Also sites sustained off ads get less than a few cents per user. Donating literally anything puts you ahead of an ad supporting user. If Every lemmy user donated a dollar a year there would be 500k in rev to support the development. When the culture shifts from everything must be free to everyone giving a little to the services they use we can easily fund the costs of these platforms.
You can host an instance very easily on low spec hardware but its a lot harder than giving a small donation.
In the sims modding community people pay $5 for a dress and modders make over 100k a year. This is because sims players are happy to pay for things they find valuable.
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Yeah. Reddit is currently enshitifying in overdrive. They used to just do dumb features nobody wants, but now they are actively harming the base. The entire Luigi over-moderation this is just bad, and it feels like they want the formerly leftist site to go full maga now. and even if I do have to use it, the website often tends to not function properly these days, with the site constantly reloading, or voting functions to be broken. This is the year of lemmy.
I figured the planned paywalling of content was going to be the last straw for me, but then they gave me a fucking warning for upvoting. I made a Lemmy account the same day. Fuck them.
The paywall shit is still planned for this year afaik so be prepared to see more of Reddit heading this way.
I got a warning for a comment. Ive been on reddit for almost 13 years and have never been warned before. It’s crazy. My beliefs and writing style haven’t changed. Reddit has.
want the formerly leftist site to go full maga now.
Reddit and X, sitting in a tree.
Worth noting is that what counts as an “active user” has changed between now and then. During the Reddit API exodus, an “active user” was a user who had posted or commented in the past month. Now, it includes users who have voted. If the 54k MAU record was set using the first algorithm, it is likely that the MAU using the new algorithm (which includes voting) would have been much higher.
Huzzah, us lurkers now count towards the global stats!
Good point
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I think that change was done way back when. Do you have a reference for the algorithm change? I tried a quick search and came out empty.
The change was merged in Dec 2023 (see here). The Reddit Exodus was in summer 2023.
Probably in the 0.19.3 changelog. There was a bump when LW changed, and I don’t think they’ve updated since
Woo! That’s awesome. I am seeing quite a few more people.
We are already successful, I’m seeing stories, news articles, and videos that normally would never get pushed to the top. We can actually talk about things without overwhelming censorship, strange algorithms, or ads.
We can actually talk about things without overwhelming censorship, strange algorithms, or ads.
Maybe just maybe a link aggregator and discussion platform doesn’t need to make money. Maybe it can just be good and make the users happy.
It’s so nice to see the servers are not crashing anymore this time around like how Lemmy.world did for me a few times back when I first joined in 2023 and I remember when the only app that was available on ios was just Wefwef before Memmy and Mlem came out of testflight. Today the apps are much more developed as we now have: 6 ios apps, 10 android apps, advanced search, moderator tools, user tags, in-app video playback, baby account indicator, advanced markdown editors, crossposting, watch support, expanded customizations, content filters, fediseer integration, side by side posts, alternate sources menu, song service integration, direct messages in app, gallery view, local sub count on communities, troll buster, user theme directory, open web post in app, gestures, media bias check, alt check and personal contribution stats.
Yes I remember the lemmy.world servers being DDOS’ed every couple of days and having to switch between 3 clients and the webinterface because all of the apps were missing some features. The alternative frontends like photon and tesseract have really improved and imo should be the new defaults.
Slow and steady wins the race. Also helps to not be shit. looking at reddit.
Also helps to not be shit.
Yeah, we also turn a lot of people away by having boring UI and no Algorhythm, but I consider those to be more of a personality filter.
Honestly the Tankie presence on lemmy is kind of a shit experience. But its shit that doesn’t sell your data so I’m cool with it.
They’re being diluted though! It was so much worse last year
Makes me happy to see it, a future for a platform that is not locked by a single large player. Instead, I can have my own profile that I actually own and do not “lend”.
Yep! We come from all over.
To anyone new wondering about phone apps for Lemmy, I use “Thunder” and it works great.
Also, feel free to say Luigi without getting banned.
Voyager also work good.
Or if you like it simple I can only recommend Jerboa
Yup that’s what I’ve been using. The only downside is it’s hard to know who responds to whom.
You can just browse lemmy in a mobile browser like waterfox just fine…
Why would anybody want to install unnecessary third party apps? That sounds awful.
Because 3rd party apps provide a native app experience to the mobile. Its far nicer to browser with all kinds of gestures than be limited to a 3rd party web browser
I havent used many instances but I’ve never used one which didn’t have a mobile site.
“Hello, HR!”
I’ve just looked at my instance on both my app (Voyager) and my mobile browser (DDG)
The difference in presentation is stark.
Just stay on the right side of pineapple on pizza.
/s
Insta-ban!
I’ll just say, the more I hang around Lemmy, the more I enjoy the genuine conversations. It feels like less snark, less joke replies, and just a generally more community-type feeling. Reminds me of when I first tried Reddit after leaving Digg way back when.
Hopefully, us exiles can leave the Reddit back at Reddit.
I find a bunch of snark here, but it absolutely feels more genuine. With reddit it felt like half the comments I saw were from bots. More than half, maybe.
I hate everyone on lemmy but at least I’m hating people
Aw. We hate you too.
I feel the exact same, and I’ve been hanging around here for almost two years (the great 3rd party app exodus of ‘23).
This place feels more like a community filled with people versus a firehose of internet wrapped in layers of corporate and right wing BS.
Reddit was almost exclusively read-only for me. Here, I am commenting all the time.
hey! fuck you! i resent your sentiment somehow and also want you to feel bad!
but seriously I agree.
I like a lot of things here better than Reddit. For one thing, I don’t see the stupid buzzwords like literally or cringe in 98% of all posts. There’s no hivemind here…yet. And hopefully there won’t be.
Also not the same 5 memes repeated for 15 years.
So by my math and some googling, that’s about 0.00005% of Reddit’s MAU.
On the one hand, cool, growth is growth.
On the other hand maybe it’s… healthy to stop looking at Lemmy as an “alternative” to anything and start thinking about it as this small forum you like to use sometimes. Worked for me in the 90s, works for me now.
You’re off by some orders of magnitude.
It’s 0.005%
But that’s based off of the 1.1 billion number I saw. Somehow I very much doubt there’s 1.1 billion people with accounts who login and browse at least once a month.
Yeah, 1 bill with all the bots and alt accounts maybe.
In spez’s wildest jizz wet dreams there are 1 billion Reddit users.
Also never underestimate how many bots there are. And how many users have 10+ accounts. Seeing less evidence of that on Lemmy so far, though who knows honestly.
Reddit is calculating its MAU differently. They seem to be counting even not-logged-in users coming from search engines - without that numbers like “1 billion monthly active users” really don’t make any sense and even that is a crazy metric, if you think about it. There is no way that 1/8 of humanity is browsing on Reddit in a month. Lemmy seems to count only users who are doing something (submitting, commenting, upvoting)
If they’re doing that, it means they’re counting unique IPs, which is a ridiculous metric. Even lemmy would have easily 10x the MAU with it.
Again, doesn’t matter. There’s data on logged in users and it’s also many orders of magnitude larger than Fedi.
By most independent metrics Reddit has more visits than Netflix. Than Pornhub, while we’re at it. It’s one of the top ten most visited sites on the Internet, and by most accounts it’s actually grown since the “exodus”.
I don’t use it and I do like it here, but the idea that Lemmy is somehow encroaching on it is absurd. And self-defeating, too. Lemmy and its satellites are very worthwhile for what they are… a gnat in the wind as a Reddit alternative. Better to measure them on their own merits.
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reddit has the advantage that you need it to make google useful these days
Agreed, but the proportion of users that contributed and made it a positive experience there was significantly smaller.
Quality over quantity.
It doesn’t really matter. For one thing, MAU and unique users are different metrics and they’re both valid, so if Lemmy is counting verified uniques they can just call it that.
For another, I looked at the data for logged in users and Fedi’s MAU is 0.125% of their daily logged in users, so the point stands regardless.
Totally, we don’t want numbers for the sake of numbers. We need passionate people who are ready to ditch other mainstream ones for federated alternatives. Then only we can grow.
I super agree, would rather have one decent regular than a thousand average redditors who don’t fit the vibe around here
Like Haskell’s (unofficial) motto, “Avoid success at all costs”. Depending on circumstance, that should be read as “(Avoid success) at all costs” or “Avoid (success at all costs)”. We’re mostly in the latter condition I think, with only a couple of things (such as DMs) being shoddy enough that success should be avoided.
Reddit is inflating its numbers by a wide margin.
A sub like https://old.reddit.com/r/BuyFromEU/ has 150k subscribers, but the activity definitely doesn’t reflect that compared to [email protected] and the 9k weekly active users
It may or may not be.
It is definitely not inflating its numbers by the orders of magnitude it’d take to make a dent on this particular takeaway.
The problem with (very) low user count is the more nieche things will not have activity.
Yep. Which ends up being why old forums were such tight-knit communities. You ended up hanging out with a handful of people. I’m mostly fine with that. If anything, it requires starting something yourself for your niche interests and being fine with it being dormant most of the time.
I think this is where lemmy/fediverse shines compared to reddit: you can have instances for niche things, yet be able to communicate with other instances. And each instance is free to have their own rules and (de)federate with others. Also the improved tools for searching/posting/modding of lemmy compared with old forums.
Sure. I mean, having a single log-in for all of that is definitely useful, as is being able to chat with others. Defederation as a moderation tool is… overrated, but it is there.
Why do you think defederation is overrated? Genuine curiosity.
Well, for one thing it only works asymmetrically. It’s fine if you have a very specific source of issues that you can isolate and cut off, but it’s not really useful if what you have is hostile users across the network. And it only protects the larger space. For smaller instances it’s a choice between functioning as social media or not existing at all.
It’s extremely far from a magic bullet, it is not resilient to large scale, systemic issues and the only reason its limitations haven’t been apparent is that the AP ecosystem is too small to suffer most of the issues of larger social media.
Aaaaand it’s designed to function via the petty squabbles of FOSS developer arguments, which I hate anyway, but that’s a me thing.
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I’m calling this one the exodus of st mangione
Luigi Migratione
I like Lemmy, I like that the ratio of tankie scum to normal person is decreasing, but I really don’t like people who worship Luigi.
Have you considered reddit? I hear it’s a great platform for people without any sense of humour.
The MAU of lemmy.world is ~18,600 which is a bit greater than the combined MAU of the next 7 instances (a big help here is lemm.ee which has ~7000 MAU). This is a really healthy spread of users and it means we don’t lose lemmy if the biggest instance goes down.
Compare that to Mastodon, where mastodon.social has more MAU (~372,000) than the combined MAU of the next 30 instances at least (I gave up counting). Thats not healthy for the ecosystem. Though tbf the total MAU of mastodon is ~899,000 so without mastodon.social they will still have ~527,000 but it will be very spread out.
I don’t think it’s healthy enough but certainly better than the mastodon ecosystem
It’s mostly because people keep recommending LW instead of other instances.
I didn’t really understand this on the way in. Is there an explanation somewhere. I found a mobile browser app and it sort of stuck me on one without me being able to select.
I think I’m with lemme ee?
Got it. Is there a way for me to transfer or do you just register into a new account once I figure out the best server for me?
You have to make a new account in order to move instances. But I think you can export your subscriptions.
Awesome thanks! I will scan around for a couple weeks and then register into a new account. Being a reddifugee with the recent censorship and a big “Center for humane tech” nerd am excited to be shifting in a better direction - so will for sure be invested in server and site health.
Register for a new account, but you can also export, then import your subscription list and other settings.
Think of your instance you signed up as as your email provider. Using that email you can send messages to anyone else who has an email. You do not have to pick a specific email provider to use email, gmail, hotmail etc they can all talk to each other. Lemmy works in a similar way except it not limited to DMs, the instance you sign up for allows you to talk to people across all Lemmy instances and see posts from other instances. When you go to “All” on Lemmy you are seeing all posts across all instances. When you go to Local, you are only seeing your home instance.
I think the biggest instance, lemmy.world, not being operated by the Lemmy devs is also a good health indicator - on every other Fedi service I can think of, the server run by the devs is the biggest by far.
think the biggest instance, lemmy.world, not being operated by the Lemmy devs is also a good health indicator
Doubly so considering how the main devs manage their instance according to their highly controversial political views LMAO
the point is that it doesn’t matter, since most people are on lemmy.world anyways
It fucking matters that the lemmy main code contributors are Tankie scum. The less power they exert over the whole, the better.
I think the distribution is fine as long as we still have nodes with good capacity. Our real issue is everyone demanding to be on the same instance because they’re scared of Federation.
What I’d REALLY like to see is a Federated Resource Locator service, kinda like nameservice for a federated user.
[email protected] is 101254684, if I move to [email protected], I want all my followers to do that lookup and still be following me. It’s great to have my settings migrate with me, but it would be bangin’ to have other people linked to me to still follow me.
There are no followers on Lemmy
I flipping love Lemmy.
It is really awesome here. Like the good ol internet days.
Agreed. I hope it doesn’t become so popular that it turns to shit.
Our most precious features is you’ll never have to. If a community turns to shit, they just get defederated. If you can’t find a server that defederates them, you can host it yourself. Your groups will be smaller, and you’ll lose something in the transition, but what you have is what you’ll put up with.
Eh. to some degree, enshittification is going to happen as more people come in, because more people = more shitty people. If we want to have the good niche communities that are IMO the only excellent thing about reddit, we’ll have to put up with the fact that that also means a bunch of annoying people use the service.
At least Lemmy has far, far better tools for dealing with them.
It’s very exciting to see 48k MAU jump up to 55k in such a short time.
MAU? Mostly Anal Users? Martian Appalachian Upholstery? Mass Ass Underwear? Missing Alligator Utensils? Moldy Apple Uterus? Massive Arctic Uranus?
Monthly Average Users
as opposed to DAU (Daily) or WAU (Weekly)
For a live product, the number of average users / time is a pretty telling metric.
I wonder what the arc will look like this time.
Thanks
Monthly ACTIVE Users
Make Americans Useful.
