Active users is the standard metric used to check how much a service is used (at least as far as i know. its what i see when i look at stuff published for investors).
hexbar is on the sixth place in term of number of active users with 1.8K , lemmy.world is 18K (enable the "active users" column and sort by it to see the full list)
It is lower from where it was in june (48.472) and the data seem to indicate a negative trajectory , also lemmy donations seem to be the lowest i remember them to be.
So i would not get too confident, the project IMO needs to focus on highly requested killer features. My impression they focusing too much on technical issues that don't seem to be really important in a way that reminds me of the infamous The CADT Model rant of Jamie Zawinski. Do we really need to do a UI rewrite?
There is a fairly active fork already . We well see what he will do. AMD saying it is not legally binding despite him signing a contract sounds like BS. Consulting the software freedom law center or some other non profit might be worth while.
Yeah it's probably not doing great, compare lemmy active user count to that of writefreely , it does a lot better, even the number of servers is increasing, the number of other projects starting that compete with lemmy (piefed, sublinks) is also not a great sign .
Not trying to belittle anyone, i just believe in the importance of negative feedback and defensive pessimism.
On a more positive note, the amount of donations lemmy receive (which i think should correlate with high quality usage of the platform) has increased moderately (see november 2 numbers when they started posting the numbers with current numbers) .
How is that not a security theater? , you just need to :
The extra cost added to override this is fairly small, i don't think it will help.
It's pitched as a open source operation system, yet the snap store is closed source and vendor locked, one of the reasons some of us use Liniux is because we prefer open source (and there are rational justifications for that).
Hate is a strong word, but there is legitimate criticism, I also think the closed source nature of snap led to the fact that it has no volunteers and that eventually caused malware to appear on the snap store multiple time, it never happened on flathub as far as i know.
Today for beginner i think opensuse and linux mint are better.
Regarding debian having old packages , i use nix but it is fairly immature, flathub should also work.
Best you can do is accuse something of being open washing, or correct people by saying that it does not fit the OSI definition which is widely accepted (it's based on debian guidelines) and the software is at best "partially open source".
Having a github page with a list of problematic projects and licenses could be useful.
The name OpenTofu may sound silly
Someone should make a open source project about how to give good names to open source projects.
Update on lemmy finances (not including cryptocurrencies)
patreon: $1,591/month
liberapay: $374.22 per week (about 1609 per month)
open collective: $2082 (29/6/2023 -> 29/7/2023)
Assuming 63K active users , the per user monetization of 0.08 dollar per user (Reddit's revenue per monthly user is roughly $1.19).
Estimated developer salary for the two main developers is about 2600$, estimated median salary for developer in the US is about 10K a month.
For comparison firefish made about 1424$ ((29/6/2023 -> 29/7/2023) with an active users count of 11868 (or 8146 if you don't count calckey, which i think is important because they added a pop up asking for donation, but i don't know if that is after the name change) so that gives a per user monetization of 0.11 dollar per user ( or 0.17 not counting calckey).
Corrections are welcomed.
See here. The graph for six month active users is a little glitchy (I think because lemmy.ml was listed twice under two different URL).
There does seem to be very small growth in 6 month active users, not as fast as a few other fediverse platforms (such as friendica and writefreely) . but i got my fingers crossed that third party lemmy tools will create some really compelling features and help push the adoption of lemmy (I think addons can enhance open source software, like how firefox addons helped firefox adoptions).
The only thing certain is death and taxes . but unlike for example omegle and it's successors you have to register so if it will be detected that it is a LLM it could be banned (eventually people will find out because LLM are not that good). Also i assume someone will have a incentive to do that so eventually it will try to get someone money or something like that and will probably get banned.
You can also say the same thing for every platform you communicate with people like lemmy . you might even wonder if a for profit company might have better resources to detect bots.