A Graph of New Dreamwidth Users by Year

[florianschild]

I was curious about how many people actually use Dreamwidth, and I found a lovely stats page that shows how many users have joined on every day the site has existed. I love the transparency!

So I downloaded the data into Excel and made this graph:



Thoughts on the decline of new users joining? Has anyone noticed a dropoff in traffic? Are people concerned or is having a larger user base not much of a priority for those of us who like our quiet internet corners? I personally would love to see Dreamwidth have more users and be more active.

The platform has limitations of course; many users these days don't want to use HTML or have to self-host their images. And while I understand the reasoning for not having an app, it's probably a limit to drawing in new users as well. I wonder what, if anything, it would take for this site to actually grow it's user base instead of maintaining/losing users year over year. I'm also not sure if the owners actually want growth either. There's something to be said, of course, for a business model built on sustainability rather than growth. I guess I'm just putting this out there to hear if anyone else has thoughts or concerns about the number of people on the platform.

I crossposted this from my own journal. I hope that's ok.

Comments

[florianschild]

Great insights! I think the overall consensus is that "number of users =/= site activity". I'll admit I'm super curious as to why active LJ users who liked that platform didn't find roots here. My suspicion would be lack of activity, which is an unfortunate chicken and egg problem. Obviously it's hard to say for sure exactly what the reason was though!

[cellio]

I think the core problem with any migration (I've seen this elsewhere too) is that communities don't migrate, they fragment. People get fed up with the old platform at different times, not all at once. When you get fed up, you'll look at the current state of a new candidate -- if most of your friends aren't there either, then you might go looking for a third option or just find other things to fill your free time. Most people do not want to build again from scratch; they want to fit into something that's already there. I've seen this with several platforms, including LJ, Twitter, and Stack Overflow, and it can be really hard to get people to re-assemble in a new place. It's frustrating!

[florianschild]

| communities don't migrate, they fragment

So well put! And very unfortunately true. I guess the best we can do is just find a place that works well enough and hope that people make there way there (here lol) eventually.

[fred_mouse]

I think that a lot of them moved more strongly to facebook, which wasn't a pit of snakes at the time. Some of them are still doing long form blog type posts on facebook, which I find really weird.