according to reddit they had 918 million Monthly Active Users (MAU) in 2022, then they stopped reporting it for I assume stock reasons 🤷♀️. Anyways, I’m not trying to be super specific so I’ll go with 1 billion since it’s 4 years out of date anyways.
The widely shared number for Lemmy MAU is ~40,000. I’ve heard this shared for many years and I wasn’t sure if it was accurate anymore. The actual numbers are easy to find so I added all of the totals from piefed statistics page for Lemmy + Piefed + Mbin.
It turned out to be 40,272. guess the number was correct after all!
https://piefed.social/statistics?software=Lemmy
so that’s 1,000,000,000 vs 40,000
that’s 0.004%! I lowkey forgot how big reddit is.
EDIT: for all the people saying my data is inaccurate, I know. There’s many factors that offset the accurate statistics of what a ‘user’ is. I’ll list a few, including some nobody else has considered
- reddits estimate includes bot accounts
- lemmys estimate includes bot accounts
- reddit estimate includes alt accounts
- lemmys estimate includes alt accounts (arguably moreso than reddit due to ppl having accounts on multiple instances)
- reddits estimate includes signed out accounts, lemmys does not
- VPN / dynamic routers can largely bias reddits number
- one last small factor, reddits data is 4 years out of date
I’m literally a college dropout because I’m bad at math, I just looked up numbers and divided them.
instead of constantly winging about data inaccuracies how about yall do something about it. comment a more accurate estimation and I’ll edit my posts title and give credit. stupid smelly nerds
Once Lemmy gets filled out a little more with some Niche communities it will be great.
Reddit is too big. Comments are useless as the posts have too many responses.
If the lemmy communities stay the size of a reasonably active forum its exactly what I would want.
Those are bots fam
so. whats the point here. is the assumption that more is better?
I’ve jumped ship from Reddit. I would’ve been here sooner but didn’t know about it. I’m a baby here and already I like it better.
How many of those accounts on Reddit are dead? How many are bots?
There are a decent number of dead and bot counts on Lemmy as well though.
Roughly one in every 25,000 people is worth your time. I like this.
Reddit is also over twenty fucking years old.
instead of constantly winging about data inaccuracies how about yall do something about it. comment a more accurate estimation and I’ll edit my posts title and give credit. stupid smelly nerds
The usual thing to do when you lack reliable data to answer a certain question is to refrain from making broad, sweeping statements on the basis of data that don’t support it. Other people are neither responsible for providing you with the evidence for whatever you want to say, nor does making bullshit claims make other people responsible for disproving them.
No one disagrees that Reddit is the larger community. But since large does not mean good, and reliable data are impossible to obtain anyway, it’s kind of pointless to argue about the exact ratio. If I wanted to be on a bigger site, I would go there, and I don’t.
Yeah that’s mainstream for you. And if ever those users started to really migrate to non-corporate social media like the fediverse, you bet I’ll be peacing out to a smaller subset or just chatting on forums and private blogs.
I would be happy for them, but I don’t know if it’s healthy to round up that many users on one platform.
Accounts, not persons.
I’m like 7 of those accounts on reddit.
The other 24,993 are all bots, I promise.
everyone’s a bot except you
Maybe this was true all along?
When I joined Reddit almost 2 decades ago, it wasn’t nearly as large as when I left. After a point, bigger wasn’t better, hence leaving. Lemmy will grow.
I wish more folks understood that bigger isn’t better.
People out there praying for the next eternal September.
I tell them. Now is the good times. Now is what you will lament missing later. Enjoy now.
Lemmy is great.This is so true! I feel like my social media history is over and over switching platforms because they turn into shit once they get too big. And now its reddit that got to that point (a while ago tbh). Not sure how to break that cycle but the federation gives me hopes.
Lemmy cannot be part of that same cycle because it has no owner. Those other services turning to shit coincided with them getting big, but it was not the direct cause. Those sites got big because they had a desirable service and an acceptable monetization model. Once they get big, the owner invariably turns the monetization screws more and more until it triggers an exodus big enough to effectively kill the service.
Lemmy can’t do that because its just a foss self-hosted software program that a bunch of private individuals and groups are hosting and inviting us to join, with barely extant trivial barriers to migrating your account and history to another copy of Lemmy on some other guy’s server.
The quality may diminish as the lowest common denominator deteriorates, but there can’t really ever be monetization that is at all onerous or everyone will likely bail to a neighboring instance overnight.
I can see value with bigger, more robust platforms that can house smaller communities. More platforms like Lemmy could allow for a future where entire communities can move platforms if it no longer suits them or a better fit emerges would be nice. Need more platforms that don’t constantly abuse their users with dark patterns for that to happen though.
Fortunately, there really is no motive to implement dark patterns in FOSS software, and its addition would promptly trigger a fork.
That’s why I’m here. Really enjoying it, it reminds me of early days of reddit when it was just a bunch of nerds. I saw a socially awkward penguin meme yesterday, just need some gammer aficionados in the comments now.
I think that you see these new services attract different cohorts of people based on the service they provide and their overall renown. The first group that shows up seems to almost always consist heavily of programmers and system administrators, then IT generalists, then power users and gamers, and finally the general populace with no specific demographics.
Each group seems to have certain preferences, some of which do not align. For example, the first 2 groups seem to prefer the service have a small, like-minded user base, liking it less as it grows and broadens. The later groups seem disinterested in a service unless it has at least some certain minimum, but large market share.
So, the gamers may yet come! We just need enough activity to attract their interest, which can be a “chicken or egg” problem.
Here, have my upvote. It’s worth 25,000. 🪙
I like it here, I came over from Reddit years ago and the only time I’ve been back is when searching for random tech or niche hobby stuff and a reddit thread shows up, but that’s about to end too due to the login thing.
I’d rather hang out with a small group of friends than be alone in a massive drunken rave. 🤷♀️
Here, have my upvote. It’s worth 25,000.
This made me think of another way to evaluate the statistic. The posts on the front page of Reddit do not get 25000x more upvotes or comments than the front page of Lemmy. I think 1 billion sounds way too high. A big thing was mentioned in another comment, Lemmy only counts logged-in users that actually do actions (voting, posting, commenting), while Reddit is probably counting anonymous visitors.
Still, it’s probably at least 5000x
Thanks for the gold, kind stranger
EdIT: Wow, this blew up!!!1
EDIT2: Omg, an upvote. I am touched. My thanks go out to my wonderful parents, my supportive spouse, my agent, my agent’s agent, my second-favourite child, my therapist, my therapist’s therapist, my high-school drama teacher who said I’d never amount to anything, the guy who held the door at the audition, my personal trainer whom I’ve never met, my dentist for the quiet moments, my accountant for the creative moments, my lawyer for the other creative moments, my neighbour’s dog who barked encouragement at 03:00, my neighbour who owns the dog, the other neighbour who sold the dog to my neighbour, my mother’s cousin’s former roommate, my great-grandfather’s horse, the horse’s reluctant biographer, my childhood imaginary friend and his imaginary lawyer, my ex, my ex’s new partner, my ex’s new partner’s ex, whoever left a half-eaten sandwich in the green room, the sandwich, the farmer who grew the wheat for the sandwich, the weather on the day the wheat was grown, the sun for showing up that day, the planet the sun lights up, my sourdough starter, Kevin, the other Kevin, the third Kevin who insists he’s not a Kevin, my cat, my cat’s imaginary rival, the vet who still won’t return my calls, my Wi-Fi router for never giving up on me, the 14 % of the Wi-Fi signal that actually reached me, the man who invented the chair, the chair I’m sitting on right now, the tree that gave its life for the chair, the tree’s family, the squirrel who stood by the tree, the squirrel’s pension fund, the lady at the bus stop who nodded at me in 2009, the bus, the bus driver’s mother, the pothole that built my character, the municipality that never fixed it, my left knee, my right knee for staying out of it, my append8x, which sadly could not be here tonight, my 3,412 followers, all four of them, my sleep paralysis demon for the stellar company, the voice in my head that said “go for it”, the other voice that said “don’t”, the third voice that was just humming, my houseplant Gerald, Gerald’s late predecessor, Gerald II, the mysterious stranger who once told me “nice shoes”, the shoes, the cobbler of the shoes, the cobbler’s cousin who dabbles in cheese, the cheese, the mould that made the cheese great, the lactose-intolerant colleague who still came to the cheese party, the alphabet for the letters, the number 7 for being consistently reliable, the number 8 for being a sideways infinity of encouragement, gravity for keeping me grounded, whoever invented Tuesdays, the Tuesday that changed everything, the stage, the floor under the stage, the Earth under the floor, the cosmic dust that made the Earth, the Big Bang for its explosive support, whatever came before the Big Bang for being so non-committal, my future self for pulling the strings, my past self for not stopping me, the multiverse versions of me who didn’t win and who I hope are doing fine, the Academy, which I’m told is not who is giving me this award, the person who actually is giving me this award, the person who is confused why I’m still typing, the orchestra playing me off, the orchestra’s union rep, the exit sign that has been glowing meaningfully at me for the last ten minutes, this guys dead wife, and finally, you, yes, you, for reading this entire list. You know who you are. I don’t. But thank you.
Same but ive almost entirely abandoned some of those niche things bc their site is so awful.
Top comments before I actually read them all are quibbling about how the Reddit number refers to “accounts” rather than people, which is valid,
but let’s be real: not so valid as to move the needle on that ratio very much.
I think the lesson here, is in just how few users are actually needed, in order to have a community that works.
People have this tunnel vision now, that sites like Twitter, which briefly became global information infrastructure and an arbiter of legitimacy, were somehow an inherent good, which has been ruined by Musk et al. I think it was already quite horrible, for our discourse, our culture, our ability to discuss things with nuance, and the fact that the whole world got locked into it has created a permanent albatross around our necks, as we struggle to reestablish a society of laws and science.
40k is probably about as many users as a site or network can have, with very tight controls on bots to be sure, before things get bad. The people who talk about the whole world moving to the Fedi as a “new twitter” free of capitalism, are really lacking imagination in how good the internet could be.
This is the conclusion I have started to come to as well, but it has been very difficult. The question I used to ask is “How do I contribute to something that overcomes the gravity well of the existing network effect?” And the answer, it turns out, is that it doesn’t really matter. People who want to come will come, and we are better off without the people who don’t. The fallacy of large N is pervasive. There is a happy spot where it’s just about perfect.
Yeah there’s no way reddit has a billion users. Not human ones. They’re doing everything they can to push people away. I’d be surprised if their user growth wasn’t actually negative.
They’ve banned most of the user base
One of out every eight people are on that website? There’s no bloody way. Absolutely impossible.
Accounts. Not people.
