Because the only ones that are left post the same shit over, and over again. When people leave because the feed gets repetitive, they also leave the niche that they might have been interested in.

Then you get an echo chamber.

Good idea!

https://lemmy.world/modlog?userId=12629556

You can't ignore PieFed at this point anymore. I think the statistic is skewed without it.

which part, I can't see Piefed in the data

https://piefed.fediverse.observer/stats

Piefied is at about 5k monthly users and rising, so that does help a bit. With that factored in the monthly users is probably about level over the last 2 years and comments are going up, although that could be the influence of bots as well.

Based on what I've seen, much of this could be from instances with redundant accounts shutting down.

In other words, a lot of folks can't sustain the burden of hosting an instance long term. That's fine, and expected.

Redundant accounts wouldn't count as active accounts, so if an account was dormant for a year prior to lemm.ee shutting down, it wouldn't register as an "active user" on a monthly check just because lemm.ee was still active.

This doesn't seem to be hoping for unlimited growth but rather that is has stagnated and is even falling. That can kill a community especially when it is as small as it is

Sure.

You'd probably end up seeing very few posts, though. Rather than filtering the timeline it might work best as a "notify me when posts with these keywords appear" function.

Well depends on the keywords. If one was to make a feed for Trump it would come up a lot. But the idea would be you could combine multiple keywords, so you might have a dozen or so.

Small communities can be nice but also it can get stuffy. And it can have some interesting consequences. Someone started freaking out about me stalking them because I replied to two (or three?) of their comments. I don't think they knew how small of a place this is lol

I checked mine. I just got banned on .ml. Huh.

I don't think a community large enough to support lots of niche ones is possible without enshittification taking over.

Normalize labeling all axes.

Well it's just that politics/news are the two main things that most people can talk about. So that's what trends. Many other topics have general interest barriers that naturally have lower ceiling of interests from the roughly 40k active users.

• point people to one instance you like instead of a general website
• on Piefed, when people register, they can either join indeed the instance they're on, or have a look at other options: https://piefed.zip/auth/instance_chooser

Tell your friends about fediverse if you haven't done it yet.

And if you still have accounts on other non-fediverse platform consider to post something about the fediverse.

No, its the fact that the same couple of people post across all communitys and drown everything else. I wouldn't be opposed to a daily limit of posts, just to bring the noise down. The only reason i still come here is for the rare, once a week, quality post.

Everyone who compares growth here (here being very relative considering how it works) vs. the idealized Reddit is forgetting something. Age. You don't get peak Reddit by looking at its first years, and yet you're looking at the literal first years for Lemmy and company and saying it's not comparable. No, it's not.

Doesn't mean there shouldn't be constant discussion on improving and growing communities for better discussion, but the whole "oh no, the numbers are low" is ridiculous. Aside from being a aggregated discussion format, this is like comparing apples and cars. Reddit shouldn't be a goal or benchmark, discussion flow here should be. I'll be more worried about stagnation when feed numbers for myself drop back to the first few months, where there was concern about if federation would even work well. (and improving federation/defederation is also a great topic to talk about, it isn't perfect, but it's far better than it was)