Hi all, for those unaware, we do a census each year to get a feel for our users. No questions were mandatory, so different questions will have different numbers of responses, but overall we got 78 responses, with 52 of those remaining once we remove those that don't use LemmyNZ (they don't have a LemmyNZ account AND do not participate on LemmyNZ communities). I posted this census in another community so we have a bunch of people from the wider threadiverse. You can see that post here.

You can also see previous years: 2024, 2025

To start, here's the responses by day. You can see there are a flurry of responses when I post the reminder posts but there tends to not be many responses outside of this.

Next, let's look at respondents relationship to LemmyNZ. Note that our new PieFedNZ did not exist at the time the survey was run.

What represents you the best?

Around 1/3 of respondants indicated that they do not use LemmyNZ communities or user accounts, and unless specified, these respondants are not included in the remainder of this post. I will do a separate one to cover this group.

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Section 1: Where is everyone from?

Where do you live?

Out of the group of users indicating they participate on LemmyNZ or our communities, 86% live in New Zealand. This is in line with previous years.

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Out of those living in NZ, after Auckland had it's one year on the top, we are back to Wellington being the largest group of users. Other regions are largely in line with the [population distribution](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regions_of_New_Zealand) considering the sample size.

What size does your community fall under?

This year we have rural users falling quite a bit. We had 7% in the first year, 16.3% last year, and this year we are at 6.5% if we include the "Other" answer that indicated living semi-rurally. One "Other" respondent indicated they live on a sail boat, travelling between anchorages and marinas.

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What is the speed of your main internet connection?

For anything that indicated "Fibre", I have used 100Mbps down as the speed as this appears to be the minimum speed available for Fibre in NZ. We also had answers like "slow", "reasonably fast" or "varies", which are not included in the graph as it's a bit hard to guess at what these might mean. I found it interesting that no one had speeds faster that gigabit, all >=1000 responses were for gibabit speed even though faster speeds are available over much of the country.

The average speed down was 504Mbps. This is in fact slower than the average of 524Mbps last year.

For upload speed, I've only includes responses that explicitly gave a value, The average upload speed was 254Mbps, faster than the average of 230Mbps last year.

How many people live in your household?

All in all over 1/3 of us have two people in their household, with an average of 2.76 people per household, compared to an average of 2.84 last year. One response indicated "n/a" which I wasn't quite sure how to interpret. I haven't included this response in the counts.

Section 2: Who are you?

What age range do you fall into?

In our first year the 40-49 age range was well about the others. Then last year, there was a significant drop in this bracket. This year we can see a large recovery, though this group is still smaller than the 30-39 age bracket. Over the past three years, the other age ranges haven't had any significant movement.

What is your ethnicity?

In past years it's been pretty white around here. Last year we had 8% of users indicate an ethnicity other than just NZ European. The year before it was not much different. This year we have a much wider range of ethnicities! Due to the number of people saying they prefer the term Pākehā over NZ European, I've added this as a separate option this year, straying a little from our Stats NZ list of ethnicities. We had one user indicate they are ok with NZ European or Pākehā equally (they are included in NZ European), and another that said they hate the term "pākehā". For the first time we now have an indication of the preference between NZ European and Pākehā.

With the range, it's a bit hard to answer a question I wanted an answer to: is out lack of ethnic diversity improving? So here is a version where I group the groups into bigger groups prioritising non-European heritage. This shows our diversity is slowly improving, but we have a long way to go before we represent the NZ population. As I said last year, the 2023 NZ census showed around 44% of people identify with Māori, Asian, or Pacific ethnicities. We have 14.5%, but this is still a big improvement from the 8% of the year before.

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What sexuality do you identify with?

In 2024, 85% of people identified as straight. Last year 75.6% of respondents identified as straight. This year 72.9% identify as straight. The number of respondents is low so the margin of error is high, so this change probably isn’t representative of anything other than the particular people who decided to do the survey.

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What gender do you identify with?

We continue to hover around 87% of users being men. It's also our lowest recorded number of women since we started doing these surveys, though it's likely just variance from the small sample size. Our "Other" responses include an agender individual and someone who didn't specify further.

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

Here we see an increase in Yes and Other answers compared to previous year. This year there were two yeses and two others, so the sample size is quite low. Though it looks like we have doubled our yesses, it's likely due to the specific people that answered the survey this year.

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Do you consider yourself to have a disability?

This question has jumped around a little over the years, possibly due to having the question rephrased. We haven't consistently asked in the same way in any two years.

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What conditions do you have?

Around 1/3 of users selecting ADHD or ASD indicated "maybe" or "probably" for the condition. Here I have listed all the conditions specified with a percentage of respondents (only including people who answered the question, including "I don't have any"). One respondent can select multiple so one person may be represented in multiple bars.

What is your employment status?

Full time employment continues to hover around where it was last year.

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I have also graphed the more common answers with previous years, with some assumptions for minor grouping if it seemed right.

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

The only IT workers to give more detail were software developers. One engineer specified they worked in automation. One of our production/manufacturing responses specified they work with food. Various people indicated teaching or education so I've grouped these into a new category. We also have zero people working in hospitality, tourism, or sales, which was a surprise to me.

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I've graphed some of the most common ones over the last three years, to the best of my ability given the answers weren't exactly the same every year, and it seems we have either a pretty steady type of user or a pretty steady group of users.

Are you currently studying?

For our bachelor's degrees or higher, we have one studying aerospace engineering and another doing a masters. Our "something else" answers include te reo Māori, programming, and "MS learning in data/BI/powerApps".

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Over the last three years we have seen a slight trend towards having more users studying, though as we saw above these are mostly not people in full time study.

Section 3: Instance usage

How often do you visit Lemmy.nz?

I have split these into LemmyNZ users (their account is on LemmyNZ) and LemmyNZ participants (users that indicate they participate in our communities but their account is on another instance). LemmyNZ users are more likely to visit daily.

Users that participate in LemmyNZ communities but have their account on another instance are likely to visit less often, which makes sense as they would only visit for new LemmyNZ posts where as LemmyNZ users would visit for all of their browsing. Here the "other" options basically indicated they visit LemmyNZ communities when posts show in their feed, not on any particular schedule.

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

Eleven responses indicated in some way that they are happy with their current level of activity Eight responses indicated that more local posts and activity on the posts would encourage them to be more active in LemmyNZ communities

One user said mobile push notifications - personally I have email notifications on, then have my email client send me push notifications. Not for everyone, especially if you get lots of other emails. I think some apps do have push notifications, maybe people can suggest some?

One user said a list of communities active on Lemmy.nz. For actual active communities, it's really just !newzealand@lemmy.nz and !politics@lemmy.nz, but we do have a bigger list of communities here. This includes NZ communities on other instances. Realistically most are not very active, but because so many people browse All you should still get seen posting to them. If you're using our new piefed.nz, there is a topic in the Explore menu that has NZ communities.

One user mentioned they don't participate in the kōrero threads as their life isn't very interesting. I feel the same sometimes, but somehow Dull Man's Club is pretty active on Lemmy so maybe we can post our boring lives. Or just respond to others if they comment. This user also mentioned they don't live in NZ anymore and is not sure if they should be contributing - you're always welcome! We don't have any rules against any particular people participating, and we have a focus on people with an NZ connection, which is you!

One person mentioned that the Voyager client could do a better job of showing smaller communities. Have you tried the "Scaled" option? This is supposed to rank smaller communities higher so they can compete with posts from big communities.

One person mentioned nudity would get them to be more active. Well I hope you've found fedinsfw, you won't find me sharing pics there but that's probably for the best.

And one person mentioned they would like to see syndicated content (from RSS feeds). That can be controversial, due to the small nature of Lemmy people tend to prefer posts from a person which can start a conversation, rather than replying to a bot. However, PieFedNZ allows community creation, and has a RSS feature to automatically post to a community. Perhaps you'd like to set it up?

How do you typically use Lemmy.nz?

Here we see that two thirds of us consider ourselves lurkers, with the other third doing the posting and commenting.

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How do you access Lemmy most often?

In past years this has hovered around 75-80% of users using mobile, with the remainder using desktop. This year I guess the question allowed multiselect as a bunch of people chose both desktop and mobile as their most used method, so I have added a categorty for both equally. Interestingly, we have very few people that chose desktop as their main way to access lemmy, with just 5.9% of people choosing desktop compared to 21.7% in 2025 and 18.8% in 2024.

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

Like previous years, most users spend less than an hour on Lemmy, and the vast majority spend less than 2 hours on Lemmy each day. Based on the responses to the earlier question about if people want to be more active, it's clear than many don't see this low figure as a bad thing. Many of the users that wanted there to be more activity were also in the group of less than one hour on Lemmy per day.

Looking back at previous years, people are spending a similar amount of time on Lemmy as previous years, at 1 hour 5 mins compared to 1 hour 7 minutes from 2024. As we don't have exact figures, I've used the middle of the range for averages (e.g. for 1-2 hours, I've used 1.5 hours).

On desktop, what interfaces do you use?

Desktop users overwhelmingly use the default Lemmy-UI website. For the "Other" responses, two people indicated RSS and two indicated PieFed.

On mobile, how do you access Lemmy?

Voyager is still the clear favourite here, as it has been every time we've done the survey. Using the default website from a browser is still in second place. But the official Jerboa app has now been knocked out of third place by Boost. Our "other" answers included RSS, Blorp, Eternity, and Interstellar.

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

We have a range of answers here, though not too many from each instance. PieFed has pulled ahead here, having just one user in the last two surveys they have now pulled into first place.

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

Largely responses indicated that the instances are about the same speed as other websites. The one Other response said "No idea, is speed an issue?", well that's what we are trying to find out! LemmyNZ was running on a VPS at the time of the survey and I found it slow at times, but it seems people didn't notice too much of an issue. Now we are on a dedicated server it's pretty snappy. I have broken this one down into all responents (regardless of if they participate on LemmyNZ) and a group for just people who actually access LemmyNZ through the Lemmy.nz server.

All users:

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Lemmy.nz users only. It seems we have fewer users reporting slower speeds than in the above group, but is that because our server is faster or because all the NZ users are used to slow internet?

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What other decentralized / federated platforms do you use?

Mastodon, Bluesky, Matrix, and PieFed are pretty popular options. Peertube and Pixelfed are services that seem to have dropped in popularity among our users. The "other" option was "NeoDB".

Have you donated?

This was multiselect so a respondent could select multiple, but when looking at individuals, 31% of us have donated in some way, with the most common being to donate money.

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

The big change from last year is that the top answer last year was that we use the centralised services, but use the Fediverse more. This year it seems people aren't visiting the centralised services much unless they happen upon a link.

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Where did you hear about Lemmy.nz, and what made you want to join?

This was a free text question, but I've tried to group things. Many people answered just the first or just the second half of the question. By far the most common theme was people trying to find somewhere that wasn't Reddit, many of whom indicated they came in the early Reddit exodus of 2023. Others found the instance by searching for an NZ one, and for those on another instance, it was more common for them to subscribe after coming across posts from the communities in All. We also had someone indicate they heard about Lemmy from a Tech Linked video.

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Have you encountered any accessibility related challenges while using Lemmy?

One user mentioned images occasionally not loading, and that they think this is a general Lemmy thing. I see this too. I tend to use the Summit app which lets you click "retry" and it often works on a second attempt. Images uploaded to most of the other Lemmy/Piefed instances are loaded direct from the other instance, sometimes it fails and sometimes the image seems to be deleted when the post isn't. I'm not sure if there is much more we can do here.

One user mentioned a password reset issue, not sure if anyone else has had this problem? We don't require or validate emails, so a mistyped email address makes password reset pretty impossible. But if you message me on Matrix or from another account I can always take a look.

One user mentioned not being able to follow users is frustrating. Good news! PieFed has this function, and we've recently started PieFed.nz, so come and join and give it a go. Many of the Lemmy apps also work with PieFed.

Another person mentioned that there are quirks that come from being spread over many sites, and their difficulties with subscribing to RSS feeds where it doesn't work if they e.g. join from Lemmy.world as thier account is on Lemmy.nz. Personally I think the quirks from Federation extend well beyond that, hopefully we get some smart people to come up with improvements in this space.

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

74.5% have said they would be happy to share, with the "Other" answers also happy to share but with comments or specific location info removed. Let me know if you want this data set.

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

A bunch of people saidthank you, keep up the good work, you're awesome, etc. And one person mentioned trying different instances and LemmyNZ is the best!

A comment on it being a nice quick survey: great to hear it! It was a key focus for me this year as I found last year's too long.

One person mentioned Ice cream on cheescake being the superiour desert, so it seems I'm still getting teased for my spelling two years later 🫠

There was also some feedback on specific questions, so thanks for that feedback! I tweak things every year to try to get better. Someone mentioned clarifying the conditions questions better, I'd appreciate help with that if there are volunteers! Just flick me a message.

What is your favourite movie of all time?

Lots of people said things like "I don't think I can pick a favourite, but I liked...", well now that's your favourite for the purposes of this question! Also, many people put multiple. I know that unfairly sways it but I've included everything mentioned anyway.

One person has watched Pretty Woman 200 times, including 5 times back to back on a flight 😲

One person said "Do I have to?" No, you don't have to do anything you don't want to.

Here's the list, slightly edited to get better grouping. Here's the ones that multiple people submitted:

• 3 The Lord of the Rings (also one vote for "The Fellowship of the Ring", so I guess that's 4)
• 3 The Matrix
• 2 Alien
• 2 Scent of a Woman

These all had one each:

• 2001 a Space Oddesy
• African Queen
• Airplane
• Annihilation
• Bio Dome
• Blade Runner
• Brazil
• Bridge on the River Kwai
• Cable Guy
• Cars
• Donnie darko
• Eyes Without A Face (1960)
• Ghost in the shell (1995)
• High Fidelity
• Hot Fuzz
• Howl’s Moving Castle
• Hunt for the Wilderpeople
• Interstellar
• Kung Fu Panda
• Kung Pow: Enter The Fist
• Lock, stock and two smoking barrels
• Momento
• Primer
• Project Hail Mary
• Pulp Fiction
• School of Rock
• The big lebowski
• The Castle
• The fellowship of the ring
• The Prestige
• The Road Home
• Un Coeur en Hiver
• Wendy and Lucy
• Young David

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. It has been nice to be able to graph some time series for the first time, now we have done this three times over three years, even if things mostly stayed the same.

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 @absGeekNZ@lemmy.nz whose colour scheme I used again this year, scripts as well but they are now quite heavily modified.

Also thanks to @otter@lemmy.ca 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!