kersploosh

1: @Skavau@piefed.social is right.

2, 7, 8: What’s the goal here? Is Reddit the gold standard we’re aiming for? I’m not convinced Lemmy needs millions of daily active users to keep a plethora of niche communities active, and to store a massive backlog for posterity. It’s fine if Lemmy is smaller and narrower in scope.

3: Reddit has duplicate/overlapping communities, too. I’m not sure how to avoid this without either (a) top-down control of community creation by admins, or (b) constant pruning of communities by admins. Neither are desirable, IMO.

4, 5, somewhat 7: Adjust expectations to reality, and appreciate what we have. Lemmy isn’t Reddit 2.0 and it never will be. There isn’t big venture capital money sloshing around. But Lemmy has come along way without it. Hundreds of instances hum along reliably, day-in and day-out. There are surprisingly good browser UI’s (look at Photon/Tesseract/Alexandrite) mobile apps. Not bad for an open-source project that runs on volunteer time and user donations!

6: The complaint about moderation tools is legit. I really want a better reports queue, among other things. But I don’t have the time and energy to contribute code, so I wait patiently.

Yep, there must be lots of uncounted lurkers. If you look at the active user charts at The Federation there was a spike in December when 0.19.0 released. I expect we’ll see more spikes as additional instances upgrade to 0.19.

https://the-federation.info/platform/73

I suspect abandoned alt accounts are a huge reason for the long, slow decline in user numbers. These graphs should be titled “active accounts,” not “active users.”

Up through Lemmy version 0.18.5, “active” meant posting or commenting within a specified timeframe (past month, past year, etc.). Starting with version 0.19.0 voting also counts as being active.

Does this work?

This is why kbin exists. It’s a Lemmy/Mastodon combo service.