For one thing, Lemmy used to have 65K at its peak, so yes we definitely have dropped since then.
I don’t think that’s a fair comparison. That wasn’t natural growth turning into natural decline, that was a giant influx of users that, even at the time, people were expecting only 10-20% of those would stay. It’s kind of impressive we are still at half the peak.
Like lemm.ee used to be one of the largest instances - so where did that traffic “go”? Moreover, is it still being counted now, e.g. as part of the 65K total, or with the entire instance having shut down, are its counts now removed from both the numerator and denominator?
I specifically use MAU as the measurement so that we don’t have to worry about that. When an instance shuts down like that, you will see the total users drop a lot. But with MAU, after a month you’re back with reasonably accurate figures, because users cannot be active on a shut down instance.
Total accounts is pretty useless. Early on after the big reddit influx, most instance had open registrations. You could see the millions upon millions of new accounts being added, but most of those turned out to be spam.
e.g. I know that I personally make up at least 2 of those MAUs
Many people have multiple accounts, but if there is nothing causing people to create more accounts, if the proportion of people with multiple accounts stays the same, then that shouldn’t affect the assessment of whether or not the platform is growing.
For example, read the comments
Whether on not we are only retaining 10% of users doesn’t really affect whether we are growing. If more people are joining than leaving, then we still grow. I remember being on Digg all those years ago, and I didn’t really “get” reddit until I was forced to. What does it mean when reddit users come and see all these posts about beans? It’s an inside joke that would make new users not feel like they belong, but also “getting” it is something that helps retain people.
not only do they not FEEL welcomed here, but… in truth… they AREN’T ⁉️
Like one of those comments says, Lemmy probably will never be reddit. It’s nature is that there are fringe groups that would shock people. When I go to Fediverse.observer, it recommends I join Hilarious Chaos because it’s hosted near to me, but that would be a huge turnoff for most people.
On the other hand, the flagship instance of Piefed is more centralist, more aggressive with removing detracting users, and piefed in general has better onboarding and more tools with finding and dealing with problematic users. But it also makes it more reddit like, more censorship friendly. I think this means Piefed is likely to grow into a more reddit friendly platform. Currently Lemmy’s new users seem to be a lot of people banned from reddit (rightly or wrongly), and I think we need the people not banned from reddit if we want a more welcoming experience.
But I also think we should feel comfortable being our own thing and not trying to grow into a huge reddit monstrosity. Many people like that they don’t spend as long on Lemmy as they did on reddit, due to the lack of addictive algorithms and I’ll argue, the lack of content to keep you busy 24/7.
I’ve said this before, I am happy with what appears to be slow natural growth. I don’t think we need or should target massive growth. Our shareholders aren’t all that interested in growth.
You make a lot of good points, and I think I agree with your overarching theme - we don’t really know.
Piefed does a lot better job of not recommending the weird instances, and I do hope it overtakes Lemmy because ultimately Lemmy is built by a fringe group so they aren’t going to stop recommending fringe groups.
I think that people are unlikely to keep using both Lemmy and Piefed long term. Piefed is new and exciting, in another year we should see people settling into an account and hopefully we’ll have a better idea at whether the threadiverse is growing or shrinking.