In my eyes, such metric is pretty good for mods or developers, but at the same time may scare away regular and especially new users. People may think that from 833 subscribers of c/lemmy, only 77 users visit this community per month.
It is a usual thing for any social network, that minority - content creators and majority - passive consumers. So, such metric may lead to wrong perception, instead of showing a liveliness of a community it just shows share of content creators, ignoring passive consumers.
So, that’s why I propose:
to hide “users/month” parameter from list of communities for everyone, just display it on a community page;
to add a new parameter “last activity” (that shows when the last post or comment was made) instead.
Last activity is a much worse indicator of liveliness. It’d be trivial for single people to necrobump dead communities with no users to make them seem lively by having recent activity.
instead of showing a liveliness of a community it just shows share of content creators, ignoring passive consumers.
Its not just posts, but comments too. Passive viewers don’t make a community feel alive, only people who make some contribution do.
But in my perception “user/month” still may look like only 77 users from 833 subscribers visited community at least once per month. And such metric may make a feeling for users, that our already not that a huge instance consists of ghosts - inactive users and is even smaller than it is in reality.
Reddit is huge, but I have never seen that they demonstrate amount of “active users among subscribers”.
To check my point, you can simply ask someone outside a dev team and active contributers: “What does user per month in communities list mean?”.
Of course it is just a friendly suggestion.
In my eyes, such metric is pretty good for mods or developers, but at the same time may scare away regular and especially new users. People may think that from 833 subscribers of c/lemmy, only 77 users visit this community per month. It is a usual thing for any social network, that minority - content creators and majority - passive consumers. So, such metric may lead to wrong perception, instead of showing a liveliness of a community it just shows share of content creators, ignoring passive consumers.
So, that’s why I propose:
Last activity is a much worse indicator of liveliness. It’d be trivial for single people to necrobump dead communities with no users to make them seem lively by having recent activity.
Its not just posts, but comments too. Passive viewers don’t make a community feel alive, only people who make some contribution do.
I see your point.
But in my perception “user/month” still may look like only 77 users from 833 subscribers visited community at least once per month. And such metric may make a feeling for users, that our already not that a huge instance consists of ghosts - inactive users and is even smaller than it is in reality. Reddit is huge, but I have never seen that they demonstrate amount of “active users among subscribers”.
To check my point, you can simply ask someone outside a dev team and active contributers: “What does user per month in communities list mean?”. Of course it is just a friendly suggestion.