Lemmy world was growing at a decent pace leading up to July 1st, then had a big influx following the API deadline. However the last week in particular has seen a decline.
Engagement still appears to be the same, although a little lower than the start of the month. A few of the other instances i have been checking follow a similar pattern.
Do you think we will continue growing at a steady pace, or do we need another big trigger to get users to migrate? For Mastodon, it seems there’s a big trigger every other week to drive users away from Twitter, but with Reddit, the revolt seems to have quietened down considerably.
Actually I like having a “smaller” space. Reddit was already way too big, with an anonymous giant blob of users. I wouldn’t even have bothered writing an answer like I do now, since it would have been buried under 100s of other posts and comments within seconds. Sometimes smaller and slower are positive features, at least to me.
The only issue with the smaller space is the niche instances. One of the things I loved about reddit was finding communities for hobbies and interests. With something small you are sometimes lucky to have 20 people in an instance and then even less posting or engaging with content.
There is a sweet spot for platform size.
Too small? Only a few communities and you can’t find your hobbies.
Too big? The place is overrun by normies who treat the platform like Facebook (posting unironic old people memes) or Instagram (running scams and OnlyFans ads). It also might become too difficult to moderate or the admins could get greedy and their own and advertisers’ profits before user experience (enshittification). All of these are happening to Reddit BTW.
However, we are too far from the “too large” problems and Lemmy instances’ size is generally kept in check by popular recommendations (join-lemmy.org, awesome-lemmy-instances) favoring <1k communities. So I think pointing average Reddit users to Lemmy is more helpful than hurtful, and I designed and helped build this banner at r/place despite having otherwise left Reddit.
Can confirm, am sitting at around users for c/daria.
Yup, I can be late for hours to comment on a post and can still get replies. If you’re late by an hour on a popular sub on reddit, you might as well not comment at all.