The catarrhine who invented a perpetual motion machine, by dreaming at night and devouring its own dreams through the day.

  • 5 Posts
  • 1.88K Comments
Joined 10 months ago
cake
Cake day: January 12th, 2024

help-circle


  • The drop is slowing down considerably:

    Month Users Change from previous month in %
    Mar 53687 N/A N/A
    Apr 51298 -2389 -4.5%
    May 48832 -2466 -4.8%
    Jun 48472 -360 -0.74%
    Jul 47297 -1175 -2.4%
    Aug 47876 +579 +1.2%
    Sep 47227 -649 -1.4%
    Oct 45037 -2190 -4.6%
    Nov 44837 -200 -0.44%

    And given that March was a peak, I’m tempted to interpret it as newbies not sticking around. I think that it’ll plateau around 40k users, then provided that the conditions remain the same it won’t increase or decrease.

    That’s why I say that it’s stable - the core userbase will likely stick around.

    That said, these numbers may particularly be bad, e.g. if anyone left Lemmy and went to Mbin and/or PieFed, then I think they would not be counted in those charts?

    They wouldn’t be counted but I don’t think that this introduces a lot of inaccuracy. Mbin has 1.7k MAUs, and PieFed has 104.

    The number of instances dropping is far more concerning IMO. It means that smaller instances have a hard time becoming sustainable.







  • In this context “politics” clearly conveys “things directly related to governments, such as wars, elections, or socio-economical ideologies”. It is only a subset of the definition of politics that you’re probably using, something like “things direct or indirectly related to human groups and their conflicts of interest”.

    We got a whole Lemmy to talk about Israel vs. Hamas, late stage capitalism, elections etc. We could - and should - have at least one community to chill and talk about other stuff, and without that rule we won’t have it. For example without that rule 99.99999% of the content as of late 2024 would be about Trump, as if Americans didn’t have multiple communities to talk about it already.



  • I agree that Reddit will become irrelevant to internet power users. However, I disagree that it takes a massive fuckup to lose the critical mass of users.

    A simple way to explain this is to imagine that everyone has an individual “I’m pissed and I leave” threshold; if a platform displeases a user more than that threshold, they leave.

    For power users, this threshold is really low, so they ditch platforms like Reddit faster. However, that does not mean that the others aren’t getting displeased - they do; it might not be enough to convince them to leave, but it quickly piles up with other things displeasing them.

    As such, even a large platform can lose that critical mass of users over time, even without a massive fuckup. It’s just about small things piling up.

    Another thing to consider is that power users are more important to a platform than the rest of the userbase, because the power users interact with the platform more. And they’re typically the ones doing janny crap, or finding and sharing content, or that actually have anything meaningful to add instead of “lol lmao”. So once the power users leave, the platform becomes less desirable for the others too, and that’s recursive - as the power users leave, the almost-power users leave too, then the ones after them, so goes on. And there the critical mass goes down the drain.






  • I don’t think that handedness plays a huge role. I think that in some cases it’s simply random, and in other cases it’s “we write in this direction because that’s how we learned it”.

    Inkwriting exists since at least the 2500 BCE, it was already used with hieroglyphs, and yet you see those being written left to right, right to left, boustrophedon, it’s a mess. Even with the Greek alphabet, people only stopped using boustrophedon so much around 300 BCE or so.

    Plus if it played a role we’d see the opposite of what we see today - since the Arabic abjad clearly evolved among people who wrote with ink, that’s why it’s so cursive. In the meantime the favourite customary writing medium for Latin was wax tablets, where smudging ink is no issue: