Kind of crazy how time flies. I joined with the api exodus. Since then lemmy has become my primary social media platform. I engage here daily more than I ever did with anything else.
We did it. We finally have a platform that isnt just a dig suceesor. I feel Lemmy is the biggest achievement in open source federated technology since web 1.0 BBS.
I am happy to help contribute to lemmy growth across 2 years, 1.4k comments, and 100 post.
I rarely use reddit anymore for viewing post and never comment on anything by comparison. I run my own versions of the communities that kept me there. I encourage my communities to be a more positive and engaging space and so far its really payed off. I create art and engage in my hobby for Lemmy posting content.
Been good few years here and I’m glad to have this chance to be interacting with all of you. Its nice that were small enough to recognize psudonyms and socially network. Its amazing how being a little friendly and recongizing people across interactions can lead to good vibes all around.
Engagement is way up in normal forums like politics etc. compared to 2 years ago.
Oddly, since the community is so small I get some news articles way faster than if you were on Reddit. By a few hours in most cases unless it’s some crazy event.
But the niche ones are still struggling. The initial boom from the api exodus was good, but momentum quickly faded after ~2 months.
This stuff will grow eventually. There was a metric on Reddit ages ago that listed the top 1% of contributors were responsible for 99% of the content. Most were lurkers or non account holders.
The 90-9-1 rule holds for most stuff like this, and while the early adopter crowd like the current Lemmy population might conceivably skew the numbers slightly, I wouldn’t expect it to be by much.
57k MAU is still small potatoes in the grand scheme of things. Niche subs still rely on single users doing almost 100% of the posting and will remain that way until probably way over 100k MAU. Maybe 200k?