Peak Lemmy users happened, it was in the later part of last year as a result of the reddit API controversy. No one expected that to stay, and users slowly waned after this as expected.
I’d say we’re in a maintenance phase at the moment. Active users is somewhat steady, posts and comments are somewhat steady. There are around 45k active users, but note that Lemmy counts this different than other sites. For later Lemmy versions, you need to comment, post, or vote to be considered. Lurkers that don’t vote (whether logged in or not) are not counted at all (for earlier Lemmy versions, voters are also not counted).
Growing more will probably happen after some other event to dive people away from reddit.
Other than reddit going for subscription or complete outage over some time I am not sure any event will cause another influx. A lot of people didn’t care about the whole API drama, since they either never knew about 3rd party apps or just went back the official app. The official app might slowly get worse and worse but if it happens slow enough, these kind of users won’t care.
There probably will be something. We may not be able to predict it. But reddit will pull a Digg or a Twitter at some point and people will be looking for alternatives. Then we get another surge of users.
Alternatively, one of the federated Lemmy alternatives (Sublinks, Mbin, Piefed) might hit the right audience and push up the platform userbase.
Peak Lemmy users happened, it was in the later part of last year as a result of the reddit API controversy. No one expected that to stay, and users slowly waned after this as expected.
I’d say we’re in a maintenance phase at the moment. Active users is somewhat steady, posts and comments are somewhat steady. There are around 45k active users, but note that Lemmy counts this different than other sites. For later Lemmy versions, you need to comment, post, or vote to be considered. Lurkers that don’t vote (whether logged in or not) are not counted at all (for earlier Lemmy versions, voters are also not counted).
Growing more will probably happen after some other event to dive people away from reddit.
Other than reddit going for subscription or complete outage over some time I am not sure any event will cause another influx. A lot of people didn’t care about the whole API drama, since they either never knew about 3rd party apps or just went back the official app. The official app might slowly get worse and worse but if it happens slow enough, these kind of users won’t care.
There probably will be something. We may not be able to predict it. But reddit will pull a Digg or a Twitter at some point and people will be looking for alternatives. Then we get another surge of users.
Alternatively, one of the federated Lemmy alternatives (Sublinks, Mbin, Piefed) might hit the right audience and push up the platform userbase.