Hi all, for those unaware, we do a census each year to get a feel for LemmyNZ users, but this year I posted the link in this community to see if we could get a view of the wider threadiverse. No questions were mandatory, so different questions will have different numbers of responses, but overall we got 78 responses, with 52 of those being LemmyNZ participants (they have a LemmyNZ account OR participate on LemmyNZ communities).

For this post I will only assess the 26 other responses (indicating they do not participate on LemmyNZ or it’s communities), and you can see the LemmyNZ specific post here, which also has more info. Some people loathe pie charts so where there are pie charts I have a bar chart hidden in spoilers.

Section 1: Where is everyone from?

Where do you live?

The USA is our biggest group of answerers. Note that although LemmyNZ users have been removed, we still have users from New Zealand in this group, who have indicated they do not lurk on Lemmy.nz, do not have an account on Lemmy.nz, and do not participate in communities on Lemmy.nz, so they are included here.

What size does your community fall under?

The vast majority of people live in urban or suburban areas. We had one user indicate they live rurally, in the USA. The user indicating “other” stated they live in a rural villiage, and were from New Zealand.

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What is the speed of your main internet connection?

We had quite a range of speeds here. One user from Australia indicated they have 500Gbps speed. I included this as 500Mbps as I’m reasonably sure that was a typo.

Down:

Up:

How many people live in your household?

A pretty nice bell curve here, with 2 being the most common answer.

Section 2: Who are you?

What age range do you fall into?

We have quite a range of ages here, from 20s to 60s.

What is your ethnicity?

We have such a range here that there isn’t much to graph, so I’ll list the answers given:

• NZ European/Pākehā x 3
• European x 2
• USA
• Non-European American
• Japanese
• Australian
• German
• Swedish
• White
• East Asian (Japanese)/Mexican
• Human
• Caucasian
• Basic white 'Murican
• Indian

What sexuality do you identify with?

Our “Other” response didn’t specify further.

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What gender do you identify with?

I have to admit I was expecting a lot more than 58% men. Maybe this is representative of who chose to complete the survey, who subscribes to this community, or who chooses to comment on Lemmy; or maybe it’s my bias.

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Are you someone with trans experience (meaning your gender identity does not align with your sex assigned at birth)?

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Do you consider yourself to have a disability?

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What conditions do you have?

nearly 70% of respondents indicated some condition. Here the conditions are per respondent.

Here, each condition is listed with the proportion of respondents, so one responent can be counted more than one time and the total can be more than 100%.

What is your employment status?

Two thirds of respondents indicated full time employment, with a further 20% indicated self-employment.

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If employed, what field of work do you work in?

We had a range of IT workers, from software engineers to a data architect and a game developer. All in all, half of respondents work in IT, which around the same as for LemmyNZ, and is likely a good estimate for Lemmy users as a whole. We also had someone working in glass production, and someone working in event planning.

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Are you currently studying?

Our “Other” studiers include someone studying to be a marriage celebrant, someone in leadership training, and someone describing themselves as autodidactic.

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Section 3: Instance usage

Some of these questions haven’t directly worked for non-LemmyNZ users so I have taken out some that don’t make sense, which is why you may see more questions in this section in the LemmyNZ specific response post.

What would get you to be more active on Lemmy.nz? Do you want to be more active?

The general consensus here is that people would be active in LemmyNZ communities if they were of interest, particularly niche communties.

One interesting response was “If links you publish went to the actual site you take the screenshot from rather than to your site”, and this appears to be due to how Lemmy posts show on Mastodon. I’m not really sure if there is anything we can do to fix this?

How do you access Lemmy most often?

By far the most common method is mobile. Very few respondents picked Desktop as their main method of access.

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On average, how much time do you spend on Lemmy each day

Over 96% of respondents use Lemmy less than 2 hours per day.

On desktop, what interfaces do you use?

Desktop users overwhelmingly use the default Lemmy-UI website, with 87.5% of respondents indicating this.

On mobile, how do you access Lemmy?

Boost takes the prize for most used app. On LemmyNZ, Voyager has always been the clear favourite for as long as we’ve done the study (3 years), so it’s interesting seeing this non-LemmyNZ cohort having Boost as the favourite. One of the “Other” respondents said they used the PWA, so could possibly be counted as website users. The other did not specify further.

If you primarily access Lemmy.nz through a different Lemmy/Mbin/Piefed instance, please list it below.

We don’t have many doubleups here.

sh.itjust.works x 2 Lemmy.today feddit.org feddit.nu Lemmy.ca discuss.tchncs.de Sh.itjust.works pawb.social Quokka.au Aussie.zone Piefed.blahaj.zone

How does your main instance’s speed compare to other websites you use?

Lemmy instances are hosted by volunteers, often on the cheapest hardware they can get away with. They are also constantly bombarded with AI scrapers. So it’s encouraging to see that the vast majority of users don’t see issues with website speed (any more than other websites).

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What other decentralized / federated platforms do you use?

Lots of microbloggers here. We also see lots of video enthusiasts with Peertube and Loops.

Have you donated?

A large proportion of users have donated, far higher than the usual 1-2% that fund most projects.

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Do you use centralised versions of this platform (e.g. Reddit, Hacker News)

The vast majority of respondents are not actively using centralised platforms.

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Have you encountered any accessibility related challenges while using Lemmy?

One user mentioned images only work 50% of the time. This user didn’t mention their instance, but they did say they use Voyager. In my experience, Voyager can fail to load an image and doesn’t have a way to retry, which might be part of the problem. Personally I see the vast majority of images load, though I still see some failures.

One person mentioned not many people on Lemmy add alt text, compared to Mastodon where most do. I have seen conversations around this, and Mastodon makes this a lot easier and visible compared to Lemmy which has the option but it’s not as obvious. I think there are improvements to be made in the software to improve this.

Would you like to share your results as an anonymised data set?

The vast majority have said yes. The “Other” answer said they think since it’s anonymous no permission is needed. I disagree, firstly just because sharing without asking doesn’t seem right, but secondly there is enough information in this survey that for someone with data to match against there is a risk someone could be identified. I wouldn’t feel comfortable sharing without asking.

If you are interested in the data set, please let me know and I can send it to you. The whole AI scraper thing puts me off posting it publicaly.

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Do you have any feedback about Lemmy.nz, this survey, or anything else?

Some people just saying thanks. Some saying it’s very Lemmy.nz centric, yeah sorry it could have been tweaked to better fit the wider audience.

One person mentioned it was annoying on mobile as it kept opening the keyboard when checking a checkbox. Hopefully Limesurvey can fix this.

There was also one comment asking for popular New Zealand communities. There are not many, really it’s just the main New Zealand and the NZ Politics communities that get any decent traffic, but there it a page here with more communities if you’re interested: https://threadiverse.nz/lemmynz/communities.html

What is your favourite movie of all time?

This includes all respondents, LemmyNZ and non-LemmyNZ.

Movies with more than one response are:

• 4 The Matrix (1999)
• 3 The Lord of the Rings
• 2 Blade Runner
• 2 Primer (2004)
• 2 Alien
• 2 Scent of a Woman

The remaining responses were:

• The fellowship of the ring (probably should have been included with LOTR above)
• Lock, stock and two smoking barrels
• The Castle
• Terminator 2
• robocop
• Ghost in the shell (1995)
• Bio Dome
• Hot Fuzz
• Momento
• Kung Pow: Enter The Fist
• Project Hail Mary
• School of Rock
• The Prestige
• Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon
• Tampopo
• Star Trek (2009)
• Cable Guy
• Disney’s Hercules
• The Princess Bride
• Super Mario Bros 1993
• The Usual Suspects
• Hunt for the Wilderpeople
• High Fidelity
• The Road Home
• Seven psychopaths
• Harry Potter
• Cars 2
• Un Coeur en Hiver
• 2001 a Space Oddesy
• Howl’s Moving Castle
• The Adventures Of Milo And Otis
• Eyes Without A Face (1960)
• Cars
• Bridge on the River Kwai
• One Battle After Another
• African Queen
• Pretty Woman
• Brazil
• The Wind Rises
• Pulp Fiction
• Young David
• Wendy and Lucy
• Donnie darko
• The big lebowski
• Interstellar
• Annihilation
• Kung Fu Panda
• Airplane

I tried to put them into genres, many of these have super specific crossover genres so I’ve gone wider so they don’t all end up with their own genre. But I am sure I’ll offend someone with my groupings.

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Final comments

Thanks to everyone for filling in the survey, and bearing with me as I wrote up the results. Apologies that it was as bit to LemmyNZ specific for the general audience, but I hope we learnt some things.

The analysis I’ve done is pretty surface-level. If anyone has ideas for further analysis, such as comparing answers across questions, leave a comment!

Final thanks

Thanks to @[email protected] whose colour scheme I used again this year, scripts as well but they are now quite heavily modified.

Also thanks to @[email protected] and the other lemmy.ca crew who have fed into this a lot over the years, and who also serve as the source of inspiration for doing it to start with.

And thanks to everyone who filled in the survey!