I wouldn’t call an 8% drop “downfall”. I think it will shrink and grow over time, but I expect the growth pattern will be in waves - migrations of people coming in response to changes in Reddit or other causes, followed by periods of retraction as some people lose interest or decide it’s not for them.

From my feeling, it seems pretty steady at the moment. I wouldn’t mind if it got bigger, especially to make some more niche communities possible. But I’m not worried about it.

I don’t think decline, rather normalizing.

Some people on reddit hate the community here

Thank fucking god, these people are awful, and there’s already far too many of them on here. I wonder how many people from Reddit’s most active city migrated on here.

If you don’t like it you’re free to leave, you don’t even have to announce your departure. Meanwhile guess who you have to thank for this place. Not these asshats, that’s for sure.

I don’t think software releases tell the story. From a non-mod perspective, Lemmy is an okay Reddit replacement.

But, abroad, there seems to be fewer non-bot posts. The communities I follow have a handful of active users. It feels like it’s stagnant at best.

Lemmy 0.19.4 is in active development. I haven’t felt any decline personally.

I personally started seeing some of my posts on other platforms get more comments and upvotes.

Which are those? Discuit?

Lemmy is fine, definitely room for improvement, but communities are starting to build.

Be wary about Reddit threads. People there are still on Reddit, they are usually very critic of any alternative

I think it is fair to say that the hype surrounding last year’s Reddit exodus has come to an end. But, Lemmy existed for several years before then, and will continue to exist for the foreseeable future. It’s not going to grow infinitely, but there will likely be more waves in the future that see spikes of activity followed by declines, but each one will bring in new users that will build up the community slowly.

Lemmy is also part of the fediverse which does seem to be growing at a healthy rate, especially mastodon. It’s entirely possible that future software updates there will make Lemmy more visible to mastodon users and allow both communities higher levels of interaction.

Some people on reddit hate the community here.

Reading that post, they’re clearly judging Lemmy as a whole based on .ml and/or grad. Which, to be fair, they have a point. I really feel .ml as the “flagship” instance (official or just de-facto) is doing more harm to the overall “Reddit-like” corner of the fediverse than good.

The active user tracker is quite inaccurate as it’s not fully indexing all servers. Plus you never know if a decline is not merely a sign that the anti-spambot measures are taking hold.

New releases have always been slow since there are more fundamental changes being done for the time being. Once everything works well under the hood, I’m sure the releases will be pouring in faster when it’s only cosmetically things that are being addressed, where not much testing is needed.

As far as hating the community goes - please name one social media platform that’s universally loved.

Lemmy isn’t perfect, but it’s not as toxic and bot infected as reddit nowadays. There are 3 major toxic instances (lemmygrad.org, lemmy.ml, hexbear.net), blocking those will improve your experience on the platform massively. (Unfortunately .ml still has some of the large communities without decently sized alternatives elsewhere, so maybe you’re better off blocking individual communities rather than the whole instance).

As far as receiving comments and upvotes is concerned - are you sure it’s actual people and not bots?

Per that Reddit thread, I agree with the initial advice: block lemmygrad and hexbear and you’ll probably have a better experience. I take it a step further and try to generally avoid lemmy.ml communities.

There’s a lot of great stuff here, though I will say it leans a bit further left than Reddit, especially if you don’t block those instances. I just ignore the worst of it and generally have a good experience.

As for statistics, I wouldn’t look too closely at it. I think they adjusted how they count things recently. What you should be interested in is whether you’re enjoying your stay here. If you are, stick around, and if not, go where you are happiest.

I personally think Lemmy is fine, but my standard is “not Reddit,” and Lemmy delivers on that. I don’t want social media, I want antisocial media, where people discuss news anonymously.