In the last weeks Lemmy has seen a lot of growth, with thousands of new users. To welcome them we are holding this AMA to answer questions from the community. You can ask about the beginnings of Lemmy, how we see the future of Lemmy, our long-term goals, what makes Lemmy different from Reddit, about internet and social media in general, as well as personal questions.
We’d also like to hear your overall feedback on Lemmy: What are its greatest strengths and weaknesses? How would you improve it? What’s something you wish it had? What can our community do to ensure that we keep pulling users away from US tech companies, and into the fediverse?
Lemmy and Reddit may look similar at first glance, but there is a major difference. While Reddit is a corporation with thousands of employees and billionaire investors, Lemmy is nothing but an open source project run by volunteers. It was started in 2019 by @dessalines and @nutomic, turning into a fulltime job since 2020. For our income we are dependent on your donations, so please contribute if you can. We’d like to be able to add more full-time contributors to our co-op.
We will start answering questions from tomorrow (Wednesday). Besides @dessalines and @nutomic, other Lemmy contributors may also chime in to answer questions:
Here are our previous AMAs for those interested.
We are seeing an influx of new users, but what’s happening to older users? Are they still active? What’s the average lifetime of Lemmy users nowadays? I’m kinda curious about the user retention in general
I’ve been here for almost two years and don’t think I can go back to anything else. I like the freedom of information that this idea brought to us.
The best data we have on that is probably https://lemmy.fediverse.observer/dailystats
Not sure how to get the user retention from that, though
There are certainly names still around who I remember from my first year on the site. Like Blaze said, I’m also not sure how to get some concrete numbers.
I believe they are still active. User numbers have been stable for a long time, and there are some names that I recognize from the very early days 5 years ago.
Every server and community has monthly active users stats. Best way to see them would be a tool like this that keeps track of history: https://lemmy.fediverse.observer/stats
We don’t do any tracking of user retention, but overall lemmy has been fairly steady at ~50k users for a year now.