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

[azurelunatic]

I suspect that if we're this far into 2025 and we already have at least half the total of the 2024 new users, it's going to be another large growth year.

The stat to look at over time is probably the active in the last 30 days one. That gives a better picture of people who are actually using their journals, rather than people who sign up, post one entry, and never come back.

[cellio]

Interesting graph -- thanks for sharing!

I'm curious about activity. Like many others (it would seem), I created my account in 2009 but treated it as a mirror for some years until the LJ fiasco (that's the spike in 2017). A plot of when people made, say, their fifth native DW posts could have a different shape. (I'm picking fifth semi-arbitrarily -- basically skipping the first couple "is this thing on?" posts that newcomers sometimes make.)

[fred_mouse]

Oh, I was wondering what happened in 2017! I moved across in 2009, and pretty much never went back to LJ. I'd say that those spikes are not representative of ongoing users, because I know each time LJ did something, more of my friends would move over, and many of those friends who had been active LJ users are ghost accounts. I reckon I've been acquiring new friends here at a steady rate, and whether or not they are active isn't strongly correlated with when they got their account (some of my long term friends have gone either dormant or almost entirely to private journalling)

[florianschild]

2025 isn't on this graph and I double checked the data and it looks like we're only at 6% of the users that we gained in 2024. Which is actually right on track to match 2024 as we're 6% into the year. I wouldn't be surprised if we DO see a surge though, given the dislike everyone's feeling for some of the larger social media platforms right now.

I would definitely love to chart the active users in the past 30 days stat! Unfortunately, that one is only given for the current day. Maybe the site owners have the ability to write a query for it though, if there were enough interest.

[florianschild]

Oh that's interesting! I thought the spike in 2017 was the Tumblr NSFW crackdown.

But yeah, new accounts vs active accounts is a VERY different metric. I would love it if I could have access to that kind of data over a long timeframe.

Edit: I just looked it up and the tumblr drama was in 2018/19 so yeah that must have been LJ. Makes sense actually, given the similarity of the platforms (DW and LJ) vs how foreign a tumblr user would feel coming here.

[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]

LJ secretly moved its servers to Moscow late in 2016 -- I think it was in the week between Christmas and New Year's, when fewer people would probably be around to notice, though correlation != causation so who knows if that's why -- but the big debacle there with "here are new terms of service, in Russian, which you must accept to proceed" was a few months later, in the spring of 2017. A few of my friends moved to DW when it opened up in 2009, a few more moved after the server thing, and a lot more moved when those new TOS hit. Anecdotes are not data, but I suspect this was a broader pattern.

What I saw in my small circle is that the people who came here in 2009 "staked territory", so to speak -- grabbed the user name to establish presence and start finding each other on DW -- but people were mirroring LJ to here for a while, still treating LJ as primary because that's where most of the people still were. Migrations are hard; people want to be where their friends are, but groups don't move all at once.

[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.

[florianschild]

I didn't know about that! I pretty much stopped using LJ around 2010 when my life got busy and distracting. By the time I was interested in coming back Dreamwidth seemed like a much better fit anyway.

I don't know the history behind livejournal's ownership honestly, but I know there are a lot of strict rules/sanctions about how Russian companies can do business with international users. I've seen other software that has been forced to ban users with Russian forms of payment, so perhaps they were forced to move if their former hosting company was unable to continue to provide services.

[silveradept]

I think usage statistics would be more interesting than new users as well, because denise has repeatedly said in news posts and other places that Dreamwidth isn't chasing growth. To get more users on the platform and "scale up" toward the users of places like Tumblr, Dreamwidth would have to do things more like those platforms.

First would be widespread unlimited media hosting. That would spike storage and media costs immediately, to the point where staying online would require regular infusions of venture capital, angel investors, or advertising revenue. At which point Dreamwidth loses control of itself.

A second complaint about Dreamwidth is that it's difficult to find other users on the platform. No suggestion algorithms, no easy repost options, no starter packs, nothing like that. No content being pushed to your reading page but the stuff you specifically want. "Growth," especially VC or ad-funded growth, demands engagement, and the algorithms that prioritize engagement are often specifically about pouring people you are diametrically opposed to into your feeds, no matter how many blocks and filters you put up to keep them out. And eventually, the advertisers start demanding that certain content should be disallowed on the perform, lest their ads be put next to content that people will complain to the advertiser about. Which usually causes purges and people moving platforms. Dreamwidth doesn't want that. denise mentions that the user base of Dreamwidth has a percentage of paid users that blows every other service out of the water, into fantasy territory for many of them. Trading the user base for an advertiser base is a foolish proposition and ends up with nobody loving you.

Finally, while it's entirely possible for Dreamwidth to be used as a microblogging or shitposting platform, it's garnered a reputation as a long-form blog space, with profundity required, and it doesn't give much in the way of hand-holding about how to post or anything else. So there's effort required there, as well as for finding people to read and comment on. You have to work to use Dreamwidth, and any attempt at growing the platform at any scale would have to reduce the friction of interaction and of posting. There's a delicate balance between being attractive enough for people to put on the effort and having enough friction in place so as to prevent the place from being overrun by robots and spam.

As it is currently set up, Dreamwidth discourages the kind of things that other platforms chasing scale routinely adopt. The people who are here like it in sufficient numbers to keep the lights on and the posts flowing through their support. And Dreamwidth works reasonably well as that backstop of "the place that's still there and that's unlikely to purge your content," so every time some other platform chooses the ads over the users (as they have to), Dreamwidth gets a few more people and a few more people putting in the investment of making the platform work for them and finding other people to interact with.

It doesn't mean it's a perfect platform, but the way that it's being run seems to be sustainable and effective without having to chase things that would be anathema to the user base or a death knell to the platform. In that sense, Dreamwidth has already been a runaway success and continues to be.

[yourlibrarian]

While I agree with others that the active in 30 days stat is the most relevant, it's interesting to see the yearly numbers like this! I find it fascinating that there was more growth in 2011 than 2017, since it was in 2017 that I remember seeing a real change in former LJ users actually using their accounts here. Unfortunately few continued to do so more than a few years.

[azurelunatic]

Alas, I misread it.

[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.

[fred_mouse]

Oh, I vaguely recall that bit of kerfuffle. It might have been the point that I deleted my LJ, although it is also possible I'd done that some time before, because the acquisition by ?Six Apart made me quite concerned. And yes, having also been here since 2009, I watched a lot of people mirror, and then very slowly either shift, or drift away.

But also, a lot of people had left LJ by the time that DW became an option. Many of us were experimenting with InsaneJournal and, hmm, whatever the other LJ clones were called (I'm pretty sure that DW was my third attempt to move away from the LJ ecosystem). Which isn't so much talking about the pattern with DW, but agreeing with what you've said upthread, about the fragmentation of the communities.