
Ballparking Ello's active user statistics - Leynos
https://ello.co/dredmorbius/post/gxpvKs_tp-SL10nNJ1Rlbw
======
Grue3
When you're comparing your user engagement to Google+, you know things are not
going well. They don't call G+ a ghost town for nothing.

Also, I find Ello's font pretty hard to read. I'm all for minimalism and I use
monospace fonts for coding all the time, but perhaps it's not the best choice
for long blog posts?

~~~
dredmorbius
I use both sites extensively, and have investigated activity and engagement on
both. I'm the source of a fair bit of the G+ ghost-town press coverage. That
said, there's more to a community than simple size (take HN as an example).

I also disagree with many of Ello's styling decisions (and G+'s for that
matter). My Ello CSS revise:
[http://stylebot.me/styles/9519](http://stylebot.me/styles/9519)

(That only works on logged-in sessions, unauthenticated still uses the earlier
Ello v1 style.)

------
golergka
6-10k DAU? That seems minuscule to me. Also, shows how skewed is HN viewpoint:
although by these parameters, Ello is tiny, everyone knows about it, while
other application and games that are used by thousands amount of people are
completely unknown.

~~~
dredmorbius
First: remember that TheFacebook launched at a school with a total
undergraduate enrollment of 6,700, of which its first user cohort was a
subset. Of course, that school happened to be Harvard University....

Ello's got at least that many _daily actives_ , and about 200k monthlies.
That's much larger than Facebook's founding class, though also a different
mix.

It's also worth realizing that many influential online communities were _very_
small relative to their impact. The WELL and Usenet had core userbases in the
tens of thousands of users, best I can make out.

I'd chalk Ello's exposure up to a few factors. One was the whole "David vs.
Goliath" meme that struck when Ello was first revealed. World+dog are trying
to figure out how to take on Facebook, and that's how the story was pitched.
Ello's leadership makes quite clear that's not their take on things. Another
was that, at least for a time, Ello had attracted quite the credible crowd.
Clay Shirky, Charlie Stross, Bruce Sterling Paul Mason (UK/BBC journalist),
Quinn Norton, Meredith Patterson, Tim Bray, danah boyd, Jonathan Zittrain, and
others all created accounts, some posted for a while, a few still do.

It was too early. I've posted a few long lists of features Ello desperately
needed to be viable, and lack of those, along with various bugs, were really
hampering it.

While it's still got some technical shortcomings, the team's been addressing
them quickly, doing a good job of it, and surprising me with some quite
ingenious (and not always technical) solutions to problems or ways of offering
capabilities. And they've directly addressed most of my major issues. _That_
responsiveness has been notably missing at Google.

The site also has quite the creative set present, which tends to be a good
early adopter set -- think artist colony.

But technical features and a cool vibe aren't enough. Though they're a good
start. I'm encouraged by the feature set, community, leadership, direction,
and foundations. Rather more so than by a few other systems -- G+ was already
faltering badly in its first months out of the gate, Ello's avoided those
_faux pax_ entirely.

I'm also getting some sense of the HN effect: a front-page placement seems to
be good for about 3.5k hits in 3 hours or so, based on this item.

~~~
minimaxir
> _First: remember that TheFacebook launched at a school with a total
> undergraduate enrollment of 6,700, of which its first user cohort was a
> subset. Of course, that school happened to be Harvard University...._

You can't compare user activity/behavior in 2015 with user activity/behavior
in _2004_.

~~~
cookiecaper
It's not fair to trivialize the traction that services like Ello are able to
get. It's really hard to gain any ground when something is dependent on
network effects, especially in a field as competitive as social networking.
6-10k sounds like a perfectly reasonable base to me, and with that inertia,
there's no reason to believe it won't continue to grow. All businesses start
somewhere (generally much lower than 6-10k, as Ello surely did), even the
business that will eventually outcompete Facebook.

~~~
realcheckout
Ello's DAU is down from 6 months ago. They may be trending up locally, but
most of us who gave them a shot when they launched found the site ugly,
unusable (buggy, impossible to find friends), and unneeded. I know roughly 4
dozen folks that gave Ello a shot and all of us have not been back.

~~~
dredmorbius
_Ello 's DAU is down from 6 months ago._

Do you have _any_ sources on that?

I can attest to a lot of early-user attrition. But also lots of new users.
Churn's part of the game.

------
dredmorbius
Author here. I've made something of a habit of doing various site-based
activity estimates:

[https://ello.co/dredmorbius/post/nAya9WqdemIoVuVWVOYQUQ](https://ello.co/dredmorbius/post/nAya9WqdemIoVuVWVOYQUQ)

------
dredmorbius
Another site-comparison datapoint: Metafilter, a small but significant forum,
reported about 12,000 daily actives as of a year ago.

That from a HN post, by way of comments at Ello:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7770243](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7770243)

------
filmgirlcw
Who here remembers ADN (App.net)? I think even towards the end, ADN had better
metrics than this.

I like the premise of Ello, but it's metrics and user-engagement figures are
not promising.

------
brador
Ello could be smoking hot with the right management team. It's got the
pieces/UI but missing the marketing/polish/UX chops.

~~~
wtmt
Update: I checked it out again. It's improved a tiny bit, but still isn't good
UI design at all. All those tiny icons that expand with a mouse hover -
annoying and not accessible. I still can't easily find several things I can
easily do on Facebook (despite Facebook's terrible UI and menu options). Not
usable for someone used to Facebook or Google+. ~~~~~

Actually, for the life of me, I struggle anytime I login to Ello and have to
hunt for how to logout. The half page banner (some translucent stuff to scroll
through) of whatever on top doesn't make things easier to know about either.
The whole UI is completely unintuitive, quite bland and too minimalistic to
figure things out. So I stopped checking it several months ago. The privacy
part is very nice and very welcome, because of which I had a lot of hope on
the platform. But Ello was (or probably still is) nowhere close to Facebook or
Google+ in terms of UI and usability. Try pushing a novice user from either of
the big platforms into Ello and watch the person struggle. One's social graph
being in some other walled garden is just one piece of the problem in trying
to move users to something else. But that something else needs to be an
intuitive and viable alternative in the first place.

P.S.: I'm not a tech newbie.

P.P.S.: I try to push people I know to better (if not the best) platforms and
services when it comes to privacy.

~~~
mmccaff
I haven't checked it out in awhile, but the last time I did, I also remember
not being able to find the Logout functionality.

"I'm not a tech newbie." <\-- I suspect that is why the UI is difficult for
you (and me too). Ello's UI seems to purposely break convention and therefore
predictability for anyone used to convention, in the spirit of an artistic and
minimal design. I'd liken it to how millennials enjoy the "playful discovery"
of Snapchat's UI and anyone over the age of 25 finds it confusing and
frustrating.

I agree it's a confusing UI (probably only at first, as with anything) but I
also appreciate that they are trying some new ui patterns and doing something
different as far as design. That's kind of their point, they're not Facebook
or Google+, they're something different, and they have the freedom to
experiment and be different.

------
robotnoises
I always appreciated the minimalist approach ello was going for, I just wish
their execution was a little better. Thinking about Svbtle...

------
bovermyer
I'm glad that Ello is growing. I like niche social networks. I just don't
understand which niche Ello caters to.

~~~
gabrtv
I'd say the niche is "creatives". Designers, artists, musicians, hipsters,
etc.

~~~
mmccaff
Agreed.

Also, I suspect that the release of mobile apps (supposedly this spring) will
be a huge boost for them. I know that I would be checking in on activity there
much more if I could do it on my phone.

