cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/53263015

Given that the MAU count is still on a slow decline, with over 90% of Lemmy.world users being inactive, I think it's more of an indicator that MAU counts should be made more prominent in frontends rather than total users.

Lemmy.World is going to learn about asymptotic curves

There’s like 16 people here. Chill out

Tell those 200k people to quit lurking and get to posting!

They ain’t lurking. They’re not even logging in.

They switched to a different instance

As soon as they defederated from .ml its be even more.

They’re never going to defederate from .ml. That’s the main Lemmy instance and the one the developers of Lemmy itself run.

And that’s why people are bailing on .world. Having a lot of accounts isn’t the same thing as creating a lot of content. .world is emptying. And this is part of the reason.

.ml only has 600 users per day. It’s a non issue.

World is emptying because 95% of users don’t actually interact in the first place. No platform will succeed when you only have a few users actually creating content.

.world is emptying because people are leaving for instances that don’t openly support .ml and that have them blocked.

I see these people all the time saying as much.

.world doesn’t openly support .ml. They’ve defederated from the other big tankie instances.

But they’re literally the creators and active developers of Lemmy. Remaining federated allows them to have updates on time. It’s extremely easy to block entire instances too. Just go to your settings and block .ml.

They absolutely do. They helped advertise to get people to donate money to .ml

And I have that shithole blocked. But that’s not the point here. The point is that people are bailing on an instance that is too chickenshit to defederate from a known psyop propaganda spreading instance.

Remaining federated allows them to have updates on time.

I too federate with .ml, but you don't need to be to get timely updates. That would be a terrible distribution architecture.

I hope the upcoming 1.0 release will attract some new active users.

Called Reddit.

Like where? I looked at the top instances, and all except lemmy.zip show a similar drop in MAU. And lemmy.zip hasn't blocked lemmy.ml.

I’m talking about people that are actually leaving and stating why. .world’s inability to grow a pair and defederate from that shithole is hurting them, not helping them. But then again, many of the communities welcome propaganda with open arms.

I'd upvote but it's perfectly at 16 now

What counts as an MAU?

Monthly active users

Or to piefed.

Unless that update comes with a promotional push and/or another major transgression by the big platforms, I wouldn’t expect a software update to change things.

I’m getting ready to start one of the communities I miss from Reddit and will hopefully get some converts to join me, but I don’t have a lot of time coming up, so going will be slow.

I know what the acronym means but what does it represent? What qualifies as an active user?

For Mastodon it's the number of users that have logged in within the past month, so I presume Lemmy also tracks it with logins.

Sorry I misread

Awesome result well done mods

I think it requires at least one post, comment or vote to be considered active.

If went past 16, so I had to do my part and downvote

You said:

people are leaving for instances that don’t openly support .ml and that have them blocked.

What instance actually blocks ML? Even if not as an instance defederation and rather as a user-level instance block applied by default (which PieFed offers the capability to do). I am aware of no major instances that do so at this time, but if one existed then I would love to know that!?

By blocking, I meant defederating.

Okay, so what major instance, like with a stable history and multiple people on the admin team, actually defederates from Lemmy.ml?

I'm not a tankie arguing with you.

There are many.

Name just one. I've looked, hard, and I cannot find a single one. To clarify I'm talking like a top 20 instances thing here, or even top 50.

Maybe there's a language barrier here, but I cannot seem to understand the precise details of what you are saying, which obscures my reception of your overall point.

Why do they have to be top 20? There are many instances that defederate from that shithole. It’s just that the top 20 are too chickenshit to tell the chodes in that dump to go fuck themselves. And now, their lack of spine is causing propaganda to flood all over your beloved top 20.

The vast majority have simply left. Last I checked, Lemmy has 29K MAUs, while PieFed iirc had something like 7K. The difference between that vs. 200K is an order of magnitude.

Oh yeah the vast majority has left, but that’s always the case, even sites like reddit have an order of magnitude or two more accounts than active users.

But people are acting like MAU has significantly declined over the past two years which it hasn’t really.

We’ve been hovering around 40k MAU in the threadi for 2 good years now.

We’ve been hovering around 40k MAU in the threadi for 2 good years now.

We did have 40-45K for a long time yes, but it's been falling recently, and just prior to the Fediverse Observer dying it reported that we finally dipped below 30K. We've been declining for a very long time - from 65K to 45K, holding steady at 40-45K, now at <30K and falling. Even if you include the 6-7K PieFed, that's ~35K which is very significantly (~10-25%) below the 40-45K numbers.

And if you search Reddit for what people are saying about us here, it's extremely clear why that is. e.g.:

1. https://www.reddit.com/r/fossdroid/comments/1uiywal/should_we_switch_to_lemmy/
2. https://www.reddit.com/r/MorpheApp/comments/1wdbscs/we_should_switch_to_something_else/
3. https://www.reddit.com/r/oldreddit/comments/1vvylak/thoughts_on_lemmy/

We here, who have the early adopter mindset, are willing to put in the time and effort to learn how and what to block. But e.g. the most popular 3rd-party app Voyager does not - by default - show the instance name of each user account, so a new joiner won’t be able to easily distinguish when e.g. someone from the tankie triad is trolling them vs. someone attempting to converse in good faith. Wish and hope as we might - without putting in any actual efforts to change anything mind you - we simply cannot get away from the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_tolerance principle.

We are a tankie / troll bar, and the vast majority of mainstream non-technical normal folks tell other people that they very much do not enjoy visiting here as a result.

I tried switching to Lemmy a long time ago, but that place is toxic and full of weird people.

There are big pockets of radical tankie communities on Lemmy that like trolling and being toxic

There are a lot more reasons than this but having spent the last 3 years on the fediverse alternatives, and just seen the shit that happens over there, I feel very confident in saying it will not ever serve as a serious Reddit alternative. It will serve as something, but not Reddit

Lemmy is shit. So is reddit but Lemmy is shittier

Any conversation about fleeing Reddit enshittification is DOA when Lemmy is mentioned - not because people have not heard of us, nor bc it is too complicated to make an account, but bc many of them have already been here, reportedly remaining for several years, and finally went back, giving up any hope that things would ever improve here.

Our reputation precedes us.

Interesting thanks, my 45-35k is basically the same shorthand in my head might have been a bit optimistic.

Obviously people have been saying this for ages, but I think it’s worth recommending instances that don’t federate with the triad. Personally I prefer to make my own federation choices hence being on an instance that federates with basically everyone. But I remember my first lemmy account being on ML and it being an absolute horror as a new user. I wish someone had sent me to lemmy.cafe or something at first haha.

And Lemmy might have caught a bad name, so perhaps I guess we might have better success recommending piefed.

PieFed.zip does not add one of its default user-level instance blocks for the triad for new users does it? I thought it did for two of them but not Lemmy.ml. No major instance does afaict.

Lemmy.cafe is a tiny instance with only tens of users and had enormous technical problems a year or so ago that lasted for months. So I've never seen people recommend it since then.

PieFed.zip is about the best instance to recommend for general purposes - Lemmy.zip and programming.dev and discuss.online etc. are also quite nice. But no major ones block ML.

Have you thought about petitioning them to do so? I'm not pushing you to, just curious what your thoughts are there.

I think there should be instances that block ML. But personally I prefer using the piefed instance block feature.

It’s weird that there’s no instance that has a default block of the triad with good uptime. lemmy.cafe worked great back when I had an account there maybe 1.5-2 years ago. Didn’t know it’s had major issues since.