Sounds like a really useful project. do you have a link to the source code? (hopefully it is open source) , or a github/codeberg/whatever link? (so that people could easily submit issues). i can add it to awesome lemmy (or you can do it, its fairly easy).
Active users is the standard metric used to check how much a service is used (at least as far as i know. its what i see when i look at stuff published for investors).
hexbar is on the sixth place in term of number of active users with 1.8K , lemmy.world is 18K (enable the “active users” column and sort by it to see the full list)
I actually think this might be good, imagine communities that will benefit from the involvement of professionals like therapists or nutritionists (like for stopping to smoke or drink alcohol or losing weight). If it has a market a lemmy alternative for that i think is definitely on the table.
At this point i think piefed feels better with it’s ability to subscribe to posts and comments and incrementally read stuff, and also the wiki system . mbin reportedly has multireddits but i played with it and could not figure out how to enable it. but piefed still didn’t have a beta release.
It is lower from where it was in june (48.472) and the data seem to indicate a negative trajectory , also lemmy donations seem to be the lowest i remember them to be.
So i would not get too confident, the project IMO needs to focus on highly requested killer features. My impression they focusing too much on technical issues that don’t seem to be really important in a way that reminds me of the infamous The CADT Model rant of Jamie Zawinski. Do we really need to do a UI rewrite?
openhub defines it as “moderately active”.
This is another case where multireddits will be helpful, having a “positive information” feed when you feel too negative. even having a “public” multireddit people can discover and subscribe to.
Mastodon seems like a better comparison. It has more than a dozen forks and clones, and plenty of donation income.
Is mastodon a good case study?, his 6M active user count , server count, and income from patreon seems on the decline , and this isn’t a project that made a large dent in existing market share like wikipedia/firefox/blender, compared to twitter and facebook market share it is still less then 0.1 percent. and when compared to it lemmy is not as established with a income that is about enough for just one developer.
Sure it would be good to have more contributions in Lemmy, but as these projects are made by volunteers they will do what they are most interested in. Nothing we can do to change that. And if they add new features which prove useful, they can also be added to Lemmy.
Maybe, but i think the problem with lemmy is that feedback does not effect prioritization enough (that is the common criticism it seems, iirc one of the justifications for creating the new projects), peertube probably created ideas.peertube to prevent this problem, when i compare sublinks and piefed development statistics to lemmy (in term of contributions this month) it indicates they are already equivalent in term of development resources despite being much newer and not really usable. Better prioratization processes might encourage more people to contribute rather then go there own way.
I know planning and prioritizing is not a particularly appealing or enjoyable activity ,but 65% of businesses fail during the first 10 years , I imagine running a non profit competing with industry giants like meta and twitter and seasoned business men is going to be harder then managing the average business .
Look at the decline of lutris in term of revenue (around 2020), it seems to be inversely correlated with the growth of competitor like heroic game launcher and playnite.
What you mentioned is one possible scenario, but the negative one is that lemmy userbase will continue to decline and there will be less feedback/income/contributions to keep the project going, the resources spent on basic development on sublinks and piefed could be used to make lemmy even better and developing experimental addons and gathering feedback on this kind of experimentation (e.g. in the form of surveys).
I am also not sure we are at a point where starting to experiment is the best option as features that seem to have more of a consensus are not yet implemented (e.g. multireddits, the issue with the most “thumbs up” on github).
With that said lemmy did manage to overcome previous open source competitors, If i would have to estimate probabilities like in the good judgement project i would say there is a 40 percent chance lemmy would decline and a 60% chance it will maintain its resources or grow.
As you can see from the graph support for measuring monthly active users was added fairly recently, so some servers might not be reporting it and in general 6m active users is a better metric, in that case that’s somewhere around 2.5 times bigger , pixelfed is around 63K 6M MAU and is also growing , two of these projects are comparable in size of use and manage to generate growth.
Sometimes it is better to look at trends and not the current market share, because that might be the result of historical circumstances that are not related to how a project or business is managed, for example writefreely already had a strong open source competitor (wordpress) and lemmy basically got a free marketing campaign due to reddit API fiasco.
Yeah it’s probably not doing great, compare lemmy active user count to that of writefreely , it does a lot better, even the number of servers is increasing, the number of other projects starting that compete with lemmy (piefed, sublinks) is also not a great sign .
Not trying to belittle anyone, i just believe in the importance of negative feedback and defensive pessimism.
On a more positive note, the amount of donations lemmy receive (which i think should correlate with high quality usage of the platform) has increased moderately (see november 2 numbers when they started posting the numbers with current numbers) .
It’s missing a few features from RES, i opened issues about them , that should make using the platform a better experience. for example i would like to tag open source maintainers so i could prioritize helping them, or just people who contribute more to the community (that i can see i have given several upvotes to).
Also tbh some people here sound like russian or iranians propagandists or bots , if somebody writes something completely unreasonable (like making a terror group sound like the “good guys”) I would like to tag him so i could know which submissions to examine more carefully.
Also having something like a “superupvote” like in tildes.net where you can only give it once in a while (e.g. top post this hour/day/week/month/year/decade). Our information diet is very important, consuming content with great “mental nutrients” is a worthwhile goal.
As you might notice, the new comments are shown YELLOW, that’s not a bug, it’s apparently a new feature in Lemmy…
I made the feature request to add incremental reading , but the method they use seem like non of the methods i suggested (I think it highlights all comments after X minutes) and I think that is a way that is useful to no one, If the instance owners of lemmy.world think it is not good maybe they could provide feedback on the issue, or at least request an option to disable it, the owners seem like they are in a good position to collect feedback.
This shows nothing, probably some kind of glitch.
Where there is some important design decision that the project leaders don’t want to change.
Honestly i don’t think these are good enough reasons to create a new project, there are other open source reddit alternatives and non of them toke off, it’s hard to build a project like that and having NLNET funding might have made it seem easier then it is.
Forking might have been a better options, or just developing a sever addon API so you could create plugins like on wordpress or discourse.
I tend to believe competition is good but in this case it seems like it will just fragment the already limited resources of the fediverse.
I warned someone that the project he started probably won’t replace an existing popular project and eventually he seems to have abandon it, he could have spend that time improving the existing project.
I realize this is not feel good advice and i could be wrong, but i felt like i should say it.
Seems like it is already possible, after clicking “permissions” when making a post it shows:
This post will be shown only to the people in the first box, to the exception of the people mentioned in the second box. It won’t appear anywhere publicly.Start typing the name of a contact or a circle to show a filtered list. You can also mention the special circles “Followers” and “Mutuals”.
fediverse observer works well , why split the efforts? if someone wants to work on this kind of thing he might as well continue developing the-federation . there was an attempt at a rewrite that seemed to have stopped. python is perceived as a better language so that might justify splitting the effort.