Honestly a lot of it is probably people getting comfortable lurking again, Lemmy only counts post and comments as active users

You should have seen Lemmy before June 2023. All posts were from the same five people. For now the community seems to be alive and healthy.

I exclusively surf “top 6 hours” and I’ve actually noticed an uptick in niche community content, lately. Different kind of growth, maybe a sort of settling into itself, finally.

Let’s look at some numbers and do some napkin math:

Currently, the top post of Lemmy can usually get a little more than 2K upvotes, which puts Lemmy at about late 2010 to early 2011 reddit level of activity, which is right before reddit hits its explosive growth phase in 2012 with SOPA, Kony, and the Obama AMA. While active user count has been going down, the amount of post and comments have both been steadily going up.

You also have to realize that in more than a decade, there was never a reddit alternative that has EVER hit this level of activity. (unless you count 9gag or the_donald for some reason.)

How can we grow lemmy? I would honestly interact here a lot more if we had an active ML community like reddit or twitter.

But since it is a small community, maybe we can do interactive things more often?

We need more idiots who can comment “this” on everything

It’s very simple, most of the posts here are circle jerks (Linux, FOSS, boy howdy aren’t we better than Reddit, communism) or rage bait.

I only come here when I’m having a good day and I want to reel myself in a bit

As someone who posts a ton, I’ve noticed that a lot of people seem to check the top posts once a day or so. Posts can be slow to get engagement and traction, but the ones that become super active still seem to hit similar peaks as before (1-2k upvotes, hundreds of comments).

But yeah, people aren’t as actively engaged and commenting on everything all day like they used to on reddit. The framework is here, and I think if there were another big exodus, Lemmy is set up to be a great landing point.

Personnaly, I’m really enjoying it. You can interact without the Reddit toxicity. I miss a few specialized communities but I can live without it.

Less content, that is spread across multiple instances that can have duplicate communities.

You just can’t keep doomscrolling here, the “active” search repeats all the time and the “best of the day” is like two pages.

And then there’s specific communities that just… Stayed on Reddit.

lemmy still isnt nearly as good as reddit was by a long shot. niche communities suck, porn sucks, c/all content isnt bad but if you scroll once youll just repeat everything on refresh.

but god damn the reddit app is terrible now and the content sucks there now too it literally feels like its trying to be a tik tok clone.

Lemmy is neither popular nor heavily advertised, so people join at a slow rate

On the other hand, the amount political discussions, Hexbear, and lack of content result in disinterested people leaving Lemmy and joining Reddit

So the user count is decreasing because Reddit refugees are leaving faster than new people are joining

All the people constantly complaining about “tankies” and “commies”: You are the problem. Normal people are repulsed by that shit. The only reason you don’t see more pushback against it is because nobody wants to get inundated with pedo-nazis trying to draw them into a debate where they’re either forced to side with literal nazis or the worst strawmen of socialism that they can think up, where if they back down or stand up for their values at any point, they get targeted for harassment. I deal with that shit regularly because I’m built for it. Most people aren’t.