The fourth week...

... is over now and despite I'm still quite satisfied with ipernity there is also I strong feeling of stagnation. To check if this is only some emotional thing or can be based on some numbers I looked around a little bit.

Start with personal experiences. That's not very objective, I know, but nevertheless. That there was slightly less activity on my stream while in the weeks before it was always increasing, might be due to the pictures I loaded up, if they are not hitting the taste of my contacts, there will be no activity. But another thing is more meaningful. I went through my contact list and found easily about 10% inactive accounts over two or three weeks. I know, some people are on summer vacation, but that's not case here, they're still active on flickr. Which holds in principle for all of my contacts with two accounts. Only the genuine ipernity people who hadn't have as contacts on flickr, seem to be only active here. Belonging to some hard core ipernity community, which is numbers rather small.

So that's about me, but what's going around out there? I looked at our dear friend Lea ipernity. She's now slightly above 8000 contacts, something like 500 new compared to the week before (in the beginning she got far more than 1000 a week!). Bot okay, 8000 is still a good number. So we have thousands of active ipernity members here? No! I looked through here network, and on every randomly page in here contact list (contains of 16 contacts each), I found that 30-50% had never uploaded any pictures! Only maybe 5-10% had a significantly high number of pictures (something like more than 50), which I would call then an really active account. The rest has mostly something between 5 and 20 pictures online, which I would call a test account with not much future.

So in principle we have something like 400 to 800 people which are more or less active in a regular way. That's not much! On flickr I would call this a small group, hardly to find.

And this numbers fits to experience I had made concerning canceled accounts. Instead of finding more of my old flickr contacts here (I haven't found any new lat week), some have deleted their account.

Regarding the pictures, one got a similar picture. Before I came in, ipernity has about 107000 pictures. One week later 70000 more. Then there was peak of 103000 new in the following week. After that 77000 new ones, and last week only 41000 new picture. So the total number is till below 400000. And this originates mainly in the complete move from flickr of some members here, which is now almost finished, I think.

Another thing is pseudo group activities. Weeks ago there was a lot of activity, photo contests, photo games, topic groups and so on. A lot of things based on exchanging pictures, looking and commenting on them. Meanwhile the blogging function is more or less only used as a normal blog with diverse topics. So instead of building up a photo centric community, the active part is just building up a community with no special interest in the photos. maybe I'm wrong here, but that's my impression looking through the blog entries of my network.

The future of ipernity is still open, maybe it will grow, maybe end of the year only a few people are left, still agreeing with each other what wonderful place this is and how awful l flickr is. last thing is little bit of what we call in German "Geburtsfehler" I think. the community here is build up from the negative impulse of disliking flickr and not from the positive impulse founding a new community. Ipernity was chosen randomly as the exile of a large, old and mainly German flickr community united in the dislike of flickr. That ipernity may be a better place was an idea build up later, after the move. And it seems that people with a more neutral opinion about both place are now going back or at least slowing down their activities here.

Ipernity needs increase, input of fresh blood to have success, at the moment there is stagnation. I hope we will not see a decrease in future. I myself will be out some days from tomorrow on and, as I wrote yesterday, new pictures from me have to wait until August. Maybe we will have groups then and this place will show more activity afterwards. But honestly, reading some things what groups should be or do, about nightmares on flickr groups and the hope blocking function will work fine, I'm not sure if they will be success in terms of being fun...