We’re seeing an increase from 53k active users at the beginning of July to 72k active users at the time of this post.
According to Lemmy’s documentation, an active user is "someone who has posted or commented on our instance or community within the last given time frame.” Lurkers aren’t considered active users, so basically these are content creators on Lemmy.
Sources:
It feels like a threshold has been crossed. Reddit related content is there but not so dominating as before. People are memeing other things, news and politics discussion is popping up, particularly popular posts from more niche communities as well, it feels like a much more healthy mix of content now compared to the beginning of July and especially compared to when I joined during the reddit blackout.
I think this has been the first week when I didn’t have to like put Lemmy down cause I was just seeing posts I had already seen. It’s nice to have a good feed to scroll again, and not feel like I have to deep dive posts and read every comment just to see something new. Feelsgoodman.
So much this. Exploring this place at first felt a bit empty so to say. Not that much stuff to see or read. Now there’s tons of comments, posts and upvote activity that makes this place feel fresh and alive now. FeelsGoodMan indeed, and we’re the oned giving it life.
I feel good reading about what you said about feeling good. You inspired me to say my first fediwords, and I wanted them to be about feeling good.
We have hit the critical mass; and that is a cause for celebration. A month ago when I joined, I thought that people would come, post a bit. See the limited content and leave. And I will admit it was painful to use Lemmy back then since a solid 90 percent of posts where about the site or were rips from Reddit. Fingers crossed for the future of Lemmy
It was also painful to use Lemmy back then because any time there was a new post it would push all the old ones down the screen and you’d often literally have to chase the links that you wanted to click. That on top of how generally slow and unreliable the platform was back in June. The technical improvements to Lemmy over the last few weeks have been absolutely amazing.
Oh I remember that!
I agree overall, though I’m not convinced the threshold has been passed or reached just yet. If this level of growth can be sustained though, it just might.
I wonder if this will be used as a case study for critical mass of social networks in the future. We have Tildes, Squabbles and Lemmy all competing for scraps off Reddits table and so maybe what we’ll end up with is a fairly clear ballpark for what kind of active user count is needed to reach the snowballing point.
Is Tildes really ‘competing’? The invite-based signup obviously invites the most dedicated and ‘quality’ individuals, but I don’t see how that’s gonna help with critical mass.
As for Squabbles, I’m suspicious of yet another centralized platform. Honestly, I’m just sorta ‘done’ trusting wannabe billionaires.
All three are quite different, which actually makes following their respective growth more interesting to me.
I suppose it’s fair that Tildes is not truly “competing” since they’re invite-only. I don’t have an account there but I’ve heard they want to focus on long-form high effort posts, so it’s never going to be real competition on terms of size, though it will be interesting to see whether a site with that profile can grow enough to thrive.
I’m not a fan of Squabbles personally but some people obviously are since they’re at 30k users soon. It’s run by a single person, and I am a little worried about whether that persons individual preferences influence development too much and in general the way development is heading. I don’t like the layout and I think the logo and name are a hindrance in terms of mass adoption.
On a larger scale though, Squabbles doesn’t allow any NSFW, and that is the benchmark I’m most interested in. Can a site of this nature reach critical mass without it?
Honestly, now that you say it…that does sound like quite the case study.
Hopefully we’ve not just crossed the activity threshold for people to stick around and shitpost but also for people to figure it’s worth posting some quality stuff here
Depending on what type of quality content you’re after, they might be more related than you think. Shitposting keeps the attention of the larger crowd, and the presence of a large audience makes certain high quality stuff feel more worth it to post.
I would imagine this applies for stuff like AMAs and posting OC artwork etc in particular but I’m sure more things than those.