It may seem kinda stupid to consider that an accomplishment, but I feel quite genuinely proud of myself for actually succeeding at this instead of just throwing in the towel…
Way to go. I’ve been at this a decent while and do some pretty esoteric stuff at work and at home… but this loop of feeling stupid, doing the work, and feeling good about a success has been a constant throughout. I spent a week struggling to port some advanced container setups to podman a month or so ago, same feeling of pride when I got them humming.
It’s not stupid to be proud of an accomplishment even if it’s a fundamental one that’s early in a bigger learning curve. Soak it in, then on to the next high. Good luck.
I dunno how to hotlink, but if you scroll to the active users graph at https://fedidb.org/software/lemmy you can see there’s been like a 25% dropoff in active users since the peak in July. Lemmy has still grown 50x since May, and it’s much MUCH more active than it was then. But we’ve definitely crested a peak and not everyone who gave Lemmy a shot then is sticking around in a monthly basis.
This isn’t necessarily bad. Lemmy is still young and has many rough edges, it wasn’t realistic to win all the users that tried it on ease-of-use in a head to head with reddit. And Mastodon has had multiple growth waves interspersed with periods of declining usage, but with the spikes has grown ie remained stable overall. Early-stage commercial social media have big ups and downs in engagement and growth as well, and just like lemmy those ups and downs are often externally driven… when competitors mess up, when a big global news story hits, when a major sporting event happens… these can all be catalysts for one-time growth. It’s not a straight line.
Time will tell what user level we stabilize at in the short-term and what events spur new growth, but it’s normal to have a big expansion be followed by some degree of contraction.