Post #134642

2026-01-14 18:38 UTC

Following https://tarte.nuage-libre.fr/c/fediverse/p/194717/we-need-more-users I decided to explore data a little bit more. I’m not the biggest fan of growth-as-as-target so I wanted to see how much the people were participating in the discussion. The data I took the data from the API explorer in https://api.fediverse.observer/ with this query: query { monthlystats { date_checked softwarename total_posts total_users total_comments } } Then parsed the json with this https://jqlang.org/ filter: jq '.data.monthlystats | map(select(.total_users > 0 and (.softwarename == "lemmy" or .softwarename == "mbin" or .softwarename == "kbin" or .softwarename == "piefed"))) | group_by(.date_checked) | map( {date_checked: .[0].date_checked, total_users: ([.[] | .total_users] | add), total_posts: ([.[] | .total_posts] | add), total_comments: ([.[] | .total_comments] | add)}) | map({date_checked, posts: .total_posts/.total_users, comments: .total_comments/.total_users}) | sort_by(.date_checked) | map([.date_checked, (.posts | tostring), (.comments | tostring)]) | .[] | @csv' (As you see I filtered for the threadiverse. I also did the same with all software, I’ll put the graph for that in comments) Then did a good old’ chart What to think of it I don’t know. Users’ activity is on the rise and I find it nice

Replies (32)

@rako@tarte.nuage-libre.fr 2026-01-14 18:40

We can see a globally slowly downward trend, probably not good but I’m definitely not equipped to analyze that

Open ##1903720
@InternetCitizen2@lemmy.world 2026-01-14 18:44

Maybe its a question of organization. Perhaps we shouldn’t have generic instances just instances around topics. That way niches can form without being too fractured and if said topic goes away it does not take several other coms with it.

Open ##1903721
@IcedRaktajino@startrek.website 2026-01-14 18:48

Just my two cents, but there’s just no reason for people to come here when it’s 80+% political shit and rage bait and virtue signaling. Hell, I’ve got 80% of the content here filtered out as it is, and I want to be here. Find your nearest non-political hobby community and start posting things people actually want to see and maybe we might see some growth or people sticking around. My current hobby is Meshtastic, so I’ve been pretty active there lately.

Open ##1903722
@Skavau@piefed.social 2026-01-14 18:49

Yes. Do we want Reddit amounts of users? No. But there’s a lot of growth between here and there.

Open ##1903723
@cron@feddit.org 2026-01-14 18:57

One thing that annoys me about each statistic about posts is that I don’t know how many of these posts are actually interesting and engaged with. For example, there is a specific instance that just mirrors reddit content and has barely any engagement. The bot posts mulitple posts per hour, mostly without any comments or upvotes. It seems rather irrelevant to compare these posts to actually interesting posts with a nice discussion and a couple of upvotes. My suggestion would be to count and plot the number of posts that have at least a few interactions.

Open ##1903727
@Voyajer@lemmy.world 2026-01-14 19:29

Is this accounting for bots that are essentially RSS feeds?

Open ##1903735
@BurgerBaron@piefed.social 2026-01-14 19:53

Need to gain slighty more than we lose every year to stay healthy.

Open ##1903745
@Stupendous@lemmy.world 2026-01-14 19:54

Edit: One thing I notice that is annoying are whatever conflicts between moderators and instances and seeing communities close with a message saying to join some new community on another instance. We’re too small to be restarting communities because of whatever arguments mods have with instance admins. Most people do not care what instance they are on. I’ll see people stereotype others based on what instance their account is based on and I’m at a loss that some people have already tribalized themselves based on fediverse instance they made their account on The best stuff on social media is random hobbies. That needs to grow a lot. We want the people that are really into random stuff. Like maybe they’re just really into fallen tree branches and for some reason there’s a community out in the world all about fallen tree branches, we should want that. Over on reddit I enjoy the treelaw community. Get to learn about peculiarities of trees and property As a start, fediverse would be nerdy. Going to be tech and privacy nerds. Gamers. Great, grow that. Be active. Get the food communities growing. Get the gardening communities growing. Bird watching. Whale watching. Train watching. I remember earlier reddit. Like 2007-2010 for me. Back then it was nerdy as hell with a growing gaming and professional sports watching communities. A lot more comedy that wasn’t global politics centric. Lots of science, tech papers got big discussion and were the foundation for the community to grow. They had hobbies. They watched sports. Played video games. Gardening. Cooking. They’d talk about that too. Fun/educational communities We have to be a lot more than just politics and grouches. If I just went by the grouches opinions TikTok would just be propaganda and then I see friend’s on it and it’s mostly cooking and comedy skits. Lots of anime memes. – Growing the anime/manga community would be pretty big for the fediverse. Anime/manga fandoms are hyperactive posters

Open ##1903746
@Zedstrian@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2026-01-14 20:22

Is there a way to analyze the same data with bot users excluded? That would be a more useful indicator of actual activity.

Open ##1903752
@transscribe7891@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2026-01-14 20:25

we need more variety

Open ##1903755
@Goodlucksil@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2026-01-14 20:28

I did that and it was evenly split between news, memes, reposted Tumblr and X posts and comics.

Open ##1903758
@karashta@piefed.social 2026-01-14 20:32

Do you use Arch btw

Open ##1903763
@Nioxic@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2026-01-14 21:02

Niche hobbies and small communities (that are active) is what is needed

Open ##1903769
@supersquirrel@sopuli.xyz 2026-01-14 21:13

Ok, what content stream in what medium when viewed in a bulk popularity view like that isn’t 90% memes or equivalent?

Open ##1903771
@rimu@piefed.social 2026-01-15 00:55

All will always be a dumpster fire. PieFed has Popular, which is similar except curated to have less memes https://piefed.social/home/top/popular

Open ##1903782
@solidheron@sh.itjust.works 2026-01-15 02:31

I had the idea to revive dead c/ by reposting from reddit. It’s controversial to use a bot

Open ##1903783
@zerozaku@lemmy.world 2026-01-15 04:14

The post the other day about lemmy needing more users and engagement gave a little nudge to me commenting more. I guess same thing happened with many users and you can see the spike in the graph.

Open ##1903791
@comfy@lemmy.ml 2026-01-15 06:24

As for the title question: Do we need more users ? We don’t need more users. It might be nice, there are benefits, but we don’t need it. I agree with you on not caring much about growth-as-a-target, “growth for the sake of growth is the ideology of a cancer cell”. I was here years before the first big reddit exodus with the third-party API changes and I was having a good time back then too.

Open ##1903795
@pHr34kY@lemmy.world 2026-01-15 06:37

A “per user” graph is not indiciative of the number of users, or any change in that metric. You cannot use this graph to determine any effect of the total user count.

Open ##1903797
@meldrik@lemmy.wtf 2026-01-15 06:51

I do feel we need more users, but not just users. It’s “niche” users we need. There’s a lot of techies on the threadiverse (Lemmy, PieFed, Mbin), but not enough people who care about other stuff. So communities outside that, struggle to thrive.

Open ##1903798
@1984@lemmy.today 2026-01-15 07:45

I dont think more users is very important. Its not going to make Lemmy change from mostly memes anyway. The mentality of the largest Lemmy instances is still to moderate away opinions they dont agree with, so this place is never going to be good for any discussions where people disagree strongly. Most users downvote what they dont agree with. Its a circle jerk echo chamber where we all agree or get downvoted. But we can all enjoy memes together. :) Its kind of nice. Lemmy is chill and easy. Even kid friendly.

Open ##1903799
@frog_brawler@lemmy.world 2026-01-15 11:32

Grow organically or die

Open ##1903807
@asudox@lemmy.asudox.dev 2026-01-15 12:16

We need active users, not just users that post something once then disappear. The MAU is more important than the user count.

Open ##1903809
@dreadbeef@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2026-01-15 14:32

reddit used to be an internet place you looked at in class or uni when you had a break. I dont know how people get introd to it, but appealing to high schoolers is what reddit did. I made my reddit account when I was like 17, and lurked before that

Open ##1903814
@Kolanaki@pawb.social 2026-01-15 14:47

Let’s keep it just under critical mass for Eternal September to not happen.

Open ##1903816
@baconmonsta@piefed.social 2026-01-15 15:14

The amount of furry / anime content on the front page might be putting off some new users

Open ##1903822
@MoogleMaestro@lemmy.zip 2026-01-16 09:44

Needing more users is fine. Sure, we could always use more friends (or enemies, I guess) But, ultimately, just having people come here *first* and then whatever hellhole corpo-media *second* is at least a step in the right direction. I feel like user activity increasing is a good sign that there's a lot of people out there investing time in the fediverse instead of the corporate hell-loop social media.

Open ##2761598
@ZombieMantis@lemmy.world 2026-01-16 10:36

Yes.

Open ##2761599
@Greenbeard@lemmy.zip 2026-01-16 16:19

I think more isers would be good, though I like how the fediverse is right now. It's small, but it has enough content to have me coming back, but not so much that I'll spend the entire day browsing.

Open ##2761601
@Kekzkrieger@feddit.org 2026-01-16 08:15

Quality over quantity

Open ##2761602
@RumorsOfLove@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2026-01-18 16:58

Facebook bad. This is not a satirical post, Facebook is really bad. It is getting people so unbased

Open ##2761603
@Damage@feddit.it 2026-01-16 12:33

Linux is too mainstream nowadays, I'm moving to FreeBSD

Open ##2761616