This is a pretty standard curve for a recently discovered thing. Everyone is curious what it is, tries it out then a percentage decides it isn’t for them and goes elsewhere.
I had to be pretty stubborn to get into Lemmy, never received the verification email (likely due to sudden server load) and no way to retrigger it, so had to wait until the new version came out. Apparently that removed the login block. Not to mention the filter on my account defaulting to showing no posts (needed to set language filter to include undetermined and my language), so it was kind of a rough entry.
But this number isn’t total accounts, it’s active accounts. So that means people who have logged in at least once during the last month. The accounts still exist from when people came to check it out, but if they decided it wasn’t for them or ran into issues like I did and didn’t return then they’d fall off the active user list.
New products face this curve all the time. Steady growth, discovery spike then retained user drop back to steady, hopefully accelerated, growth with a higher baseline than before.
I am also under the impression that active only counts users who commented or posted. So there is also a very significant possibility that people are just settling in and starting to lurk. It’s really the 90-9-1 principle (in a stable community, 90% lurk, 9% are occasionally active, 1% are consistently active). It would really be weirder if we didn’t see some lurkers after such a massive influx of people
This is a pretty standard curve for a recently discovered thing. Everyone is curious what it is, tries it out then a percentage decides it isn’t for them and goes elsewhere.
I had to be pretty stubborn to get into Lemmy, never received the verification email (likely due to sudden server load) and no way to retrigger it, so had to wait until the new version came out. Apparently that removed the login block. Not to mention the filter on my account defaulting to showing no posts (needed to set language filter to include undetermined and my language), so it was kind of a rough entry.
But this number isn’t total accounts, it’s active accounts. So that means people who have logged in at least once during the last month. The accounts still exist from when people came to check it out, but if they decided it wasn’t for them or ran into issues like I did and didn’t return then they’d fall off the active user list.
New products face this curve all the time. Steady growth, discovery spike then retained user drop back to steady, hopefully accelerated, growth with a higher baseline than before.
I am also under the impression that active only counts users who commented or posted. So there is also a very significant possibility that people are just settling in and starting to lurk. It’s really the 90-9-1 principle (in a stable community, 90% lurk, 9% are occasionally active, 1% are consistently active). It would really be weirder if we didn’t see some lurkers after such a massive influx of people
Maybe it should also count users that vote?