To be clear, the time probably needs to be expressed via UTC / GMT or other time zone labels.
I regularly post across ~half a dozen communities, the most frequent being to my own, where I post at 9AM (UTC-4 / EST zone) so as to hit early risers in the States and afternoon surfers in Europe. But with other posts, I get the sense that it would be better to post later in the day to hit more viewers. I’m just not sure when that would be.
TBC, I usually use the PieFed scheduler to post, so it’s no problem for me posting at any time of the day.
Thanks for any insight!
While there might be a perfect time of day to post to the Threadiverse, please don’t put out all your posts at that time. I remember a couple years back when YouTube channels optimized for this and everyone published at 16 UTC, you had no new content all day and too much to watch when 16 UTC hit.
On here I don’t care what time or day it is at all. I just post what I want to post. If it has value it will still be in peoples’ top/hot/active feeds the next days.
Fret not. As stated in the OP, a lot of my posts are published at a ‘compromise time’ so as to hit both the Americas and Europe, and this would be a way to expand other posts in to more time possibilities.
The other thing I’ve come to observe based on comments and votes is that sadly, it looks like the majority of the FV audience doesn’t bother to scroll back much past… maybe 6-8hrs or so. Sure, there’ll be a ‘small stragglers crowd’ willing to read back a couple days, but it seems much smaller. 😕
The numbers are the bottom of this graph are the hour, in UTC. So 3 = 3 AM.

Looks like the quietest time is about half as active as the peak.
Thanks!
17:00 UTC is actually right around my guess for peak activity, based on what I’ve experienced.Will play around with this…
I can’t name a time of day, but I have noticed that this whole place is a ghost town on the weekends. At least on reddit that made sense because people primarily interacted at work, but lemmy seems much less “work friendly” and I would never view it on company hardware.
I pretty much only vist here during the week. I think its a sign of a healthy userbase that they go outside and do shit on the weekends.
I would never view it on company hardware
I browse on a company device and have noticed that i guess images uploaded to communities from users on instances are sometimes considered “low reputation” domains, and do get flagged as suspicious or oddly as pornography for whatever reason? Fortunately i am able to see and dismiss these in my org, and justify the usage as “cyber intelligence news gathering”
Why do we do this, C.G. and I?
Every night vegetables, minds numbed by THC
I’ve got my pen, C.G. the remote
Laurel and Hardy is the best bet at 4 AM on a Friday
No dreads about the working day after, though
Funny thing about weekends when you’re unemployed, they don’t mean quite so much
Except that you get to hang out with your working friends
We got a Spaghetti Western here on 36
I like spaghetti westerns, I like the way the boots are all reverbed out walking across the hardwood floor
In fact, everything’s got that big reverb sound
Well, what do I do now?
Go to sleep? Pull the pud?
We need new pornos
Guess I’m still writin’Deep cut Primus, good stuff!
I suspect that this is instance and perhaps even community specific and given the nature of federated distribution, I doubt that it will be meaningful information.
I agree with you on the community distinction, but federation across instances should be quite fast, no? (like under a ~minute)
If we throw out the C angle, when might the most heavy traffic be across Lemmy / Piefed, or just Lemmy if that’s easier. Personally I get the sense that the lion’s share of traffic for Lemmy comes from the North & South American timezones, but that’s just a guess.
federation across instances should be quite fast, no?
It should, but federation is definitely not perfect. Posts usually federate pretty much instantly, but I have absolutely had the occasional post that took an hour or more to federate out to a remote instance for whatever odd reason.
Similarly, I’ve seen delays in people reacting to certain posts in situations where typically there’d be at minimum a couple quick ‘nibbles.’ Had some of that just last week IIRC.
According to https://lemmy.lvanrem.com/stats the most active days are Monday through Friday from 12 to 22 UTC
Thanks. That lines up a lot with what I was roughly thinking… ~8AM-8PM through a center line of the Americas, or something like that.
I’ve always been curious about this kind of stuff also. Without any real data, I just stuck to what seemed to work for me.
I post at 6am EST, right when I’m done breakfast and getting ready to leave for work. That gives early risers here about 90 minutes before I get my laptop set up at work and can bang out the easy replies for the early group. Around lunch I’ll just be at the end of the Top 6 Hour scrollers for the US/Canada ppl and can knock out those questions and any harder morning questions during lunch. That’s about 90% of the interaction with my posts, and I have the afternoon and evening off from Lemmy other than my post prep.
I wish I got more overnight comments because I feel they’d be more folks from other parts of the world and they may ask different questions or share my local knowledge about things I know less about, but I’m not sure how many Asian users we have or anything like that.










