Will be interesting to see if National becomes the first major party to not get two terms under MMP. I suspect we may not know tonight, though.
I recently made a post asking for email providers, and no one has yet mentioned Mailfence, I hadn't heard of it until seeing this post. What are people's thoughts on it?
I think it's fine. Proton is still better than big tech. I want to move away from Proton for myself but that's because I am not tied to an address (custom domain) and am happy to do the switch. I would still encourage Proton over big tech for regular people. We do the best we can do.
Nah what I need is for specific addresses on my custom domain to be forwarded. E.g. my wife uses big tech email but has used addresses on my domain at times, and these need to be forwarded to her if used.
It's a different use case than relay email, which is also something I heavily use.
Interesting. I am keen to avoid all the AI slop projects but websnz looks like it predates that era. And they charge for usage, which is a cool model.
130k is not a fuckton in Auckland. It is a fuckton in Eketehuna. Living costs and the cost of raising kids varies hugely across the country.
But why would adults be required to be supported by their parents? And why such a disparity between similar rules?
My assumption was that it would not have some of the features I want as a new service, but I'll consider it once it launches.
I thought that at first, but then Tuta to Tuta emails are the only ones encrypted. Where as you can put GPG in your email client for IMAP and encrypt email to anyone that has GPG in theirs, regardless of their email inbox. Tuta doesn't seem to support that and the number of emails going to Tuta are likely almost zero for me. So I'm happy with a provider that supports GPG/PGP if they support IMAP for the E2EE available with GPG.
Proton has better support, with Proton to Proton encryption plus they support PGP to some extent as well. My experience with Tuta shows me that Proton are definitely further along in features.
Hmm it only started in 2024 so not much history, and they seem to have many AI features. Without more info I'd be a bit worried it was vibe coded given the timeline, push for AI, and that they don't seem to be a known company who could have invested in it.
This article mentions how Fastmail laid off most of the group of their staff trying to form a union...
I think a lot of us are 😂
Thanks for the suggestion! I feel like I'm gonna have to sign up to everything to see if they support forwarding emails to another address as no one seems to list it in their features 🥲
Hi all, a couple of years back I moved to Proton on a 2 year plan. Then the CEO started spouting Trump stuff. I cancelled at the time but the subscription is only now up for renewal.
I have moved everything across to Tuta recently, but I don't like it, so I'm looking for further suggestions.
Why didn't Tuta work for me?
- No function to auto-forward emails to another email address.
- No bridge or IMAP so I can't connect to Paperless
- Mobile app is janky - when I swipe to archive, it sort of sits there for a while as it talks to the server. And just generally it feels slow like it's waiting for the server for every action instead of backgrounding the requests.
- Web app is weird. It doesn't even have an archive button, I have to use "Move -> Archive" making it slow to go through my inbox.
- Importing emails is only available on their most expensive plan. Weird to not want people to move to your platform? (it also couldn't handle 15000 emails, I had to load them 1000 at a time)
Things I want:
- Must support custom domain
- Must support catchall
- Must support forwarding an email to another email address based on the "to" address
- Must not be run by dicks (e.g. Trump supporting CEO or Proton, union busting like Fastmail, and no big tech) - as close as possible at least
- Should have some method to connect to my self-hosted Paperless NGX (e.g. Proton's bridge, or just IMAP)
- Should have emails encrypted from provider if possible - not sure if anyone other than Proton or Tuta do this.
- Should support GPG
- Should allow importing email history from previous provider
- Should have a nice web/mobile app or allow IMAP. Bonus points if I don't have to use the Play store.
Honestly I'd put up with the janky app if Tuta had the functions I want, I mostly just want my money going to some provider that aren't dicks, but having the provider not be able to read my emails would be a bonus.
Anyone got suggestions for me?
Partial quotes from the article:
Thousands of young people will lose access to unemployment benefits due to parental income testing being brought in on Monday.
The government has ended Jobseeker payments for 18 and 19-year-olds whose parents earn a combined income of more than $67,225.
In October last year, it was estimated that about 4300 young people would become ineligible for support as a result.
The change leaves some 18 and 19-year-olds to rely on their parents for support, unless they can prove they are unable or unwilling to.
Unemployment rates are currently at an 11-year high of 5.6 percent.
Beneficiary advocate Kay Brereton told Checkpoint the cut off point of $67,225 was outrageously low.
"If that offspring was 17, you'd still be getting a family tax credit at that rate.
"When this was introduced, we thought they would at least be looking at the same income cutoffs as they do for student allowance."
The cut off for student allowance payments is currently a combined parental income of $131,670 when living at home with parents, or $141,451 if living away from parents.
With the end of the university year approaching and many students on the hunt for summer jobs, Brereton said she worries that many will be left in the lurch if they can't find work.
"I'm really worried that there's a whole lot of students, and they will look for holiday jobs. They don't all find holiday jobs, they're not necessarily living at home, they're living out there in flats, wherever the university is, and they're going to have no benefit to fall back on.
"I think a whole lot of students are on student allowance, where the cutoffs around $131,000, will be really shocked when they find out they can't get a student hardship job seeker during the holidays, [then they] can't pay their rent, they might have to move home, there might not be any room for them."
Apparently pre-rinsing confuses the dishwasher or something. Not doing it leaves me with residue all over the other dishes though 🤷
Welcome back for our next financial update. See the previous one here.
This quarter we moved to a dedicated server at $45USD per month, still with Zappie Host in their Auckland data centre. This dedicated server is significantly more powerful, having:
- CPU: E3-1270v5
- Ram: 64GB
- Disk: 2 x 1TB SSD (in RAID 1 configuration for redundancy, so just 1TB usable)
- Traffic: 10TB
Compared to the previous shared server:
- 4 vCPU
- RAM: 9GB
- Disk: 160GB
- Traffic: 1TB
We also stood up https://piefed.nz/ running the PieFed software, as an alternative to Lemmy (but they federate, so they generally see the same content, with some differences). In addition there was also https://threadiverse.nz/ created as a shared help resource for LemmyNZ and PiefedNZ. Piefed.nz was registered way back in February as I've had the idea floating around for a while, so I haven't included that cost. But I have included the Threadiverse.nz domain registration as that was done in September. Lemmy.nz was paid up for a couple of years last year so no cost for that this year.
Expenses for July - September 2026: $216.82
The expenses are made up of:
- VPS: $155.26 (two months of hosting, the other month was covered by the previous 6 months prepaid)
- Image and backup storage: $17.29
- Domains: $44.27
Expenses are allocated to the period they were paid, not to the period they cover. This is based on the actual amount charged to my card.
Contributions in July - September 2026: $559.82
This is huge! Thanks everyone 🙂
In addition to this, I've done a square up on donations reported in the platform vs cash out, and there's an additional $22.83. The platform removed fees, but also not everyone used NZD so there was actually more paid out than previously reported. This month's report is based on the cashed out value, which I will try to use going forward.
The main reason for this change is that we got a bunch of donations in other currencies which made it tricky to report on, so I have cashed out and got it all into actual cash in hand I can use for paying for the server.
We received donations totalling $559.82 this quarter, with much of that coming in a flurry after the last financial update showed a shortfall. Thanks to everyone who contributed!
Overall position: $187.97
- Opening balance: $-177.86
- Contributions: $559.82
- Expenses: -$216.82
- Adjustment for cash out difference: $22.83
- Total: $187.97
- Future costs covered by cash on hand: approx 2 months
Numbers are in NZD.
Donations
If you want to contribute to the cost of running LemmyNZ and PieFedNZ, see the page here.
The usual caveat: Please don't contribute if it will impact you financially. I don't want to see anyone saying "I only had $5 in my bank account but Lemmy is important so I donated my last $5" like I've seen on other instances. If you can't afford it then don't feel bad, this round is on me. I don't mind, truly. But if you can easily chip in a few bucks a month, then it is appreciated 🙂
Pātai
As usual, feel free to ask any questions!
Some quotes in summary:
A Dutch environmental group claims New Zealand has broken its climate change promises in the free trade agreement with the EU and is lodging the first complaint of its kind through the European Commission.
The most extreme consequences could be losing access to the lucrative European market, but the group is seeking compliance rather than the suspension of trade benefits.
It claims New Zealand failed to uphold its legal commitments in the EU-NZ FTA not to weaken environmental protections in order to "encourage trade or investment," and to effectively implement the Paris Agreement.
But the Trade Minister is firing back, saying its "not for overseas countries, organisations or lobby groups to tell New Zealand how to meet its obligations".
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.
![Bar graph showing ethnicity, with 27 indicating NZ European, 12 inicating pākehā, 2 Chinese, 1 Chinese/NZ European, 1 Māori/European, 1 "Māori [Te whānau-ā-Apanui :) Omaio Marae], Pakeha", 1 European descent, 1 Cook Islands Māori, 1 Māori](https://lemmy.nz/pictrs/image/febc910c-706b-4bb3-a94b-679d001db7e8.png)
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.

Bar graph
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.

Bar graph
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".

Bar graph
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.

Bar graph
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!
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 @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!
A Wellington firetruck has been taken off the road, after its engine caught fire, prompting a response from a fellow crew.
The New Zealand Professional Firefighters Union said the truck was only one of two high-reach heavy aerial-ladder trucks in the capital.
No-one was hurt in the blaze and the fire was extinguished.
Labour has promised to ban big companies from charging excessive prices, if elected.
Leader Chris Hipkins said a handful of big businesses were guilty of price gouging - that is, charging more than necessary for essential items.
The full policy includes:
- making it illegal for big companies with substantial market power to charge excessive prices for essential goods and services, or to pay unfairly low prices to suppliers
- setting a legal test for price gouging: holding prices "well above what they would otherwise be in a competitive market, sustained over time"
- requiring companies that gouge to pay penalties and hand back every dollar of excess profit
- giving the Commerce Commission power to investigate price gouging and supporting consumer groups and suppliers to do the same.
Williams said similar rules were already in place in the United Kingdom, Europe, Canada, and Australia.
National has made a supermarket break-up a key part of its election pitch, proposing to sever Pak'nSave from New World in a bid to drive down grocery prices.
National's plan would turn the company into supermarket chains: Pak'nSave, New World/Four Square and Woolworths.
The breakup, however, would be contingent on a six-month review by the Commerce Commission into whether the split would leave shoppers better off.
Hi all, this is just a quick update to let you know I've set up a Discord channel that is bridged to our Matrix chat.
For a long time we've had a Matrix chat room, many people joined in the early days but over time that fell off and became just a handful of regulars. Matrix isn't exactly common, and many users are only using Matrix for Lemmy and they have Discord for their other groups. So I've now set up a bridge so you can message to the Discord channel and it will appear in the Matrix room, and vice versa.
Check out our help page on the chatroom, or click these direct links to join: