We’re seeing an increase from 53k active users at the beginning of July to 72k active users at the time of this post.
According to Lemmy’s documentation, an active user is "someone who has posted or commented on our instance or community within the last given time frame.” Lurkers aren’t considered active users, so basically these are content creators on Lemmy.
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I agree overall, though I’m not convinced the threshold has been passed or reached just yet. If this level of growth can be sustained though, it just might.
I wonder if this will be used as a case study for critical mass of social networks in the future. We have Tildes, Squabbles and Lemmy all competing for scraps off Reddits table and so maybe what we’ll end up with is a fairly clear ballpark for what kind of active user count is needed to reach the snowballing point.
Is Tildes really ‘competing’? The invite-based signup obviously invites the most dedicated and ‘quality’ individuals, but I don’t see how that’s gonna help with critical mass.
As for Squabbles, I’m suspicious of yet another centralized platform. Honestly, I’m just sorta ‘done’ trusting wannabe billionaires.
All three are quite different, which actually makes following their respective growth more interesting to me.
I suppose it’s fair that Tildes is not truly “competing” since they’re invite-only. I don’t have an account there but I’ve heard they want to focus on long-form high effort posts, so it’s never going to be real competition on terms of size, though it will be interesting to see whether a site with that profile can grow enough to thrive.
I’m not a fan of Squabbles personally but some people obviously are since they’re at 30k users soon. It’s run by a single person, and I am a little worried about whether that persons individual preferences influence development too much and in general the way development is heading. I don’t like the layout and I think the logo and name are a hindrance in terms of mass adoption.
On a larger scale though, Squabbles doesn’t allow any NSFW, and that is the benchmark I’m most interested in. Can a site of this nature reach critical mass without it?
Honestly, now that you say it…that does sound like quite the case study.
Yeah, I’m glad I’m not really the only one who feels this way. I mean the most important part of a “social” media network is to have people on it. Also I can’t really see anything that tildes has that Lemmy doesn’t. I might be missing something, but it seems pretty inferior. But as for the centrallised platforms; yeah I’m pretty done too.