this post was submitted on 21 Oct 2024
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Rethinking Community Vitality: Why Posts + Comments per Month Trumps MAU (programming.dev)
submitted 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) by CoderSupreme@programming.dev to c/fediverse@lemmy.ml
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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!

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[–] otter@lemmy.ca 3 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago)

Taking a look at the current sidebar, it might be nice to reorganize the stats section completely

What I'm thinking is:

By default it will only show some stats, where users can select what stats they want displayed in the settings. This way I can hide the stuff I don't care about, instead of having to look through the already busy list.

**Statistics:**                       [✏️edit]

- Monthly Active Users: 4,000
- Total Subscribers: 30,000

[ v see all v ]

Then expanding the box will give the full list of stats:

[ ^ collapse ^ ]


**Statistics:**

Active Users: 

- By day: 800
- By week: 1,200
- By month: 4,000
- By year: 24,100

Subscribers:

- Total: 30,000
- Local: 12,000

Comments: 
- Total: 81,000
- Today: 510
- This week: 1,315

[... etc]

It opens up the possibility of including more items in that list. We could also replace the expand option with a link to a full statistics dashboard page.