Hey fellow Lemmings,

I’ve been thinking about how we measure the liveliness of our communities, and I believe we’re missing the mark with Monthly Active Users (MAU). Here’s why I think Posts + Comments per Month (PCM) would be a superior metric:

Why PCM is Better Than MAU

  1. Quality over Quantity: MAU counts lurkers equally with active participants. PCM focuses on actual engagement.

  2. Spam Resistance: Creating multiple accounts to inflate MAU is easy. Generating meaningful posts and comments is harder.

  3. True Reflection of Activity: A community with 1000 MAU but only 10 posts/comments is less vibrant than one with 100 MAU and 500 posts/comments.

  4. Encourages Participation: Displaying PCM could motivate users to contribute more actively.

  5. Easier to Track: No need for complex user tracking. Just count posts and comments.

Implementation Ideas

  • Show PCM in the community list alongside subscriber count
  • Display PCM in each community’s sidebar
  • Use PCM for sorting “hot” communities

What do you think? Should we petition the Lemmy devs to consider implementing this? Let’s discuss!

  • CoderSupreme@programming.devOP
    1·
    7 days ago

    I agree, but that might complicate things. Instead of votes we could also use time spent reading posts as the engagement metric.

    How about something like this?

    Quality Engagement Score (QES)

    QES = (PCM * AVU) / MAU, where:

    • PCM = Posts + Comments per Month
    • AVU = Average Votes per User (total monthly upvotes / MAU)
    • MAU = Monthly Active Users

    PCM measures raw activity, while AVU factors in community approval.