FOSSDLE PieFedLemmy Just Broke the 54k MAU Record Set During the 2023 API Exodus!
submitted by
Sunshine (she/her)https://lemmy.ca/pictrs/image/529239db-1204-4bc9-a2f4-851709d5e22d.png
https://lemmy.ca/pictrs/image/529239db-1204-4bc9-a2f4-851709d5e22d.png
The growth in 2025 has been staggering, ngl. And this is the kind of thing which converts from a trickle to a tsunami very quickly. It never happens with one shock. But a consistent amount of enshittification shocks. Reddit's desperate struggle for profitability practically ensures those will keep happening, so this is all inevitable at this point. The only thing that is uncertain is whether digg can recapture the fleeing masses who are not cognizant of the dangers of corporate vc-backed enshittification yet, like bluesky did to Twitter.
The user growth we're seeomg could result in an overwhelming flood of users at anytime. Which is why people should consider supporting the lemmy devs and instance admins either financially or through contributions so that the lemmy software and infrastructure is ready to handle the growth.
Deleted by author
The difference is the way it is run. You got it. And if one day Midwest.social starts doing things you hate and treating it’s users like crap, then come on over to lemmy.world or lemmy.ca, or one if the other thousands instances.
People hosting the database are not the owners of the platform unlike Reddit. They get to tell us how we can use it just because they host the database.
I've already moved at least once and have been very happy it was as easy as it is.
I’ve never moved, but I assume you just create a new account and start over. Or is there more you can do?
it's possible to migrate your subs on lemmy
it's possible to both migrate your subs and make a redirect on mastodon for followers, but the redirect requires the old server to remain in service.
You bring up some good points and I do believe that the model that Lemmy use can insulate it from a lot of those issues.
One thing that makes Lemmy better is that its made by the users for the users. We have the code, we have the protocol its built on. This means we can have Lemmy tailored to however we want. We are not at the whim of a massive company that only cares about profit. If I have an idea for a feature i can goto the github and suggest it, better yet if I could program it I could help build that feature. If I dont like a change that is made by the lemmy devs I can fork the project and remove the change and still interact with the rest of lemmy.
There is beehaw.org a very peculiar instance, they defederated from lemmy.world to preserve their unique community vibe. Fediverse enables a more fine grained approach to handle those issues.
A lot of problems are still there but there are other projects that want to address them like piefed
lemmy already has a bunch of echo chambers, I think it's inevitable from the design of a network like this where the user selects what content to view and be served
Deleted by author
If your instance gets destroyed, there will be others to join.
Yeah. Reddit is currently enshitifying in overdrive. They used to just do dumb features nobody wants, but now they are actively harming the base. The entire Luigi over-moderation this is just bad, and it feels like they want the formerly leftist site to go full maga now. and even if I do have to use it, the website often tends to not function properly these days, with the site constantly reloading, or voting functions to be broken. This is the year of lemmy.
I figured the planned paywalling of content was going to be the last straw for me, but then they gave me a fucking warning for upvoting. I made a Lemmy account the same day. Fuck them.
The paywall shit is still planned for this year afaik so be prepared to see more of Reddit heading this way.
I got a warning for a comment. Ive been on reddit for almost 13 years and have never been warned before. It’s crazy. My beliefs and writing style haven’t changed. Reddit has.
Yup. Literally the day they announced that shit I peaced out.
Reddit and X, sitting in a tree.
I think the proper term is enshittification sharts
Lel
Worth noting is that what counts as an "active user" has changed between now and then. During the Reddit API exodus, an "active user" was a user who had posted or commented in the past month. Now, it includes users who have voted. If the 54k MAU record was set using the first algorithm, it is likely that the MAU using the new algorithm (which includes voting) would have been much higher.
Huzzah, us lurkers now count towards the global stats!
I think that change was done way back when. Do you have a reference for the algorithm change? I tried a quick search and came out empty.
The change was merged in Dec 2023 (see here). The Reddit Exodus was in summer 2023.
Thanks 👍
Probably in the 0.19.3 changelog. There was a bump when LW changed, and I don't think they've updated since
Good point
Deleted by author
Woo! That's awesome. I am seeing quite a few more people.
We are already successful, I'm seeing stories, news articles, and videos that normally would never get pushed to the top. We can actually talk about things without overwhelming censorship, strange algorithms, or ads.
Maybe just maybe a link aggregator and discussion platform doesn’t need to make money. Maybe it can just be good and make the users happy.
I'll just say, the more I hang around Lemmy, the more I enjoy the genuine conversations. It feels like less snark, less joke replies, and just a generally more community-type feeling. Reminds me of when I first tried Reddit after leaving Digg way back when.
Hopefully, us exiles can leave the Reddit back at Reddit.
I find a bunch of snark here, but it absolutely feels more genuine. With reddit it felt like half the comments I saw were from bots. More than half, maybe.
I hate everyone on lemmy but at least I'm hating people
Aw. We hate you too.
Yeah, fighting with bots is just boring. At least if a human gets mad at me it's more real.
I feel the exact same, and I’ve been hanging around here for almost two years (the great 3rd party app exodus of ‘23).
This place feels more like a community filled with people versus a firehose of internet wrapped in layers of corporate and right wing BS.
Reddit was almost exclusively read-only for me. Here, I am commenting all the time.
This is one of the reasons I stayed. It was still small enough back then that you actually started to recognize people you had conversations with, and not just the troll farms.
A democracy, if you can keep it, in a sense. Lemmy is healthy. Time will tell if the idea works, but I think it is a huge advantage tearing away corporate ownership and really investing in a platform that is owned by its users.
I like a lot of things here better than Reddit. For one thing, I don't see the stupid buzzwords like literally or cringe in 98% of all posts. There's no hivemind here...yet. And hopefully there won't be.
Also not the same 5 memes repeated for 15 years.
hey! fuck you! i resent your sentiment somehow and also want you to feel bad!
but seriously I agree.
Slow and steady wins the race. Also helps to not be shit. looking at reddit.
Yeah, we also turn a lot of people away by having boring UI and no Algorhythm, but I consider those to be more of a personality filter.
Fuck the algorithm. Idk why people like that shit.
Especially on Lemmy, the only thing it's really doing is bringing some discoverability but the discoverability isn't all that bad on Lemmy you have to look around for like 2 minutes to find the communities, okay, well you have to understand that there are like communities on multiple instances, figure out how to switch from local to all, then look around for 2 minutes
After hanging out on Blue sky for a bit I'm pretty sure Mastodon could use a little algorithmic help. The communities on Mastodon are so loosely formed they can be a little hard to find, you end up looking for people with the same taste and follow their followers. It works but nothing ever gets surface to you that you didn't actually actively look for and it seems to be kind of a mess in a Twitter scenario.
Maybe we do want a minimum barrier to entry that involves the slightest amount of patience and forethought.
Maybe it's like playing mosquito tones through speakers at malls. You have to be old enough to live through text-forward websites to put up with a text-forward websites.
Except I know there are some younger people here, I don't know what it is exactly, It just seems to me that there's better discussion and more acceptance on sites that have less frills.
Deleted by moderator
Block lemmy.ml if you don't like it
(Actually, is lemmy.world on too old of a version to have instance blocking? They're so far behind on updates)
They're being diluted though! It was so much worse last year
Help retain users by discussing more than just politics
For real we need more uplifting subs, my feed is just Musk and Trump diarrhea.
be the change you want to see. Post and upvote.
Instructions not clear. Posted upvotes.
Sort by "hot"
I think this is an artifact of what's oddly the biggest weakness of the fediverse: decentralization.
When I used reddit back pre-api stuff, my front page was 100% niche subs I'd subscribed to, but those niches have trouble le growing here because there's so many instances.
I was super active in the scuba subreddit. Here on Lemmy, there's several scuba groups that tried to form, but none of them stuck because they were all on different instances instead of one central location where everyone could work together to make the community.
As a result, most of us haven't been filtering out 99% of Lemmy because the 1% where we'd be active doesn't exist. It's like joining reddit and having your frontpage be /r/all. It's a shitty experience that g9ves a lot of weight to political posts.
I don't think the subs failed to get off the ground because of federation, I think they did because they didn't have a dedicated person tirelessly filling them with posts and single-handedly carrying them. Because that's still where we are population wise. 50k+ MAUs is very nice, but not nearly enough for niche subs to be self-sustaining. Look at any small but active Lemmy sub right now and it's often a single person doing 90% of the posting. The only real way to get a new sub going is to be that person.
At least now we have stuff like Lemmy Federate and places like !newcommunities@lemmy.world and !communitypromo@lemmy.ca that are both fairly active, so getting a new sub off the ground should be much easier than two years ago.
But you don't need to be on the same instance to contribute?
No, but there's fragmentation of communities. Instead of one central place for the community to form, you have to look at dozens of locations, where there may be a sub, but it may have 1 post in the last 4 months.
It doesn't matter almost at all which instance a community is on. People could just unite the different scuba groups into one. Basically any they see fit. I'm not sure the decentralization really causes this effect. Or does it make it too difficult to find communities? I've been plenty able to find communities from various instances, at least.
If people have to follow breadcrumbs to find which of the dozen groups is active, if any, very few people are going to join.
On reddit, if you wanted to find a sub for airbrushing, you would type in /r/airbrush. That was it.
On Lemmy, there's no central location for communities, but even worse is that most of the big instances WILL have a community with that name - it'll just be a dead community that someone started but never took off, so there's a bunch of false leads.
You aren't wrong with that :)
The problem exists, although its scale isn't as big as it first seems. On Lemmy you can write "Airbrush" and join the biggest of the communities. It's quite visible that this is what is happening in several communities. One starts growing and then that's what people choose to join, etc.
Yeah, I feel like people on here have a bad habit of relating even completely unrelated posts back to US politics. But if you keep reading the news then your brain tends to do that.
I've blocked most of it with a keyword filter
One of the things I feel like Lemmy is still missing or is under developed is the niche hobbyist and tech help communities. I'm referring to places users can go to ask questions and start to build up a knowledge base of sorts that people will find and reference. Kind of like how if you want to actually find useful information for something, you used to add "Reddit" to every search to get meaningful results. Hopefully, that can become Lemmy. Assuming of course search engines even index Lemmy well enough
One way to start could be just having people post small tutorials or solutions for popular problems or topics in respective communities. I know the internet has changed a lot but "back in the old days" that was a great way to get engagement going at least on tech forums.
search engines hardly index lemmy unfortunately. Probably due to having too much repeated content on different URLs.
It seems like its gotten better in the last 2 years as I can at least get lemmy results now, and popular instances show up more but yea, still not great.
Wouldn't that be closer to stackexchange?
Well not really, as I'm talking about any type of self-help content not just computers/tech. Any helpful content that people would be able to find vs just all news, politics and memes
I have a gimmick sublemmy, !horseblindness@lemmy.world. Post images that may or may not contain horses!
I see no horses posted -- oh, right
It's so nice to see the servers are not crashing anymore this time around like how Lemmy.world did for me a few times back when I first joined in 2023 and I remember when the only app that was available on ios was just Wefwef before Memmy and Mlem came out of testflight. Today the apps are much more developed as we now have: 6 ios apps, 10 android apps, advanced search, moderator tools, user tags, in-app video playback, baby account indicator, advanced markdown editors, crossposting, watch support, expanded customizations, content filters, fediseer integration, side by side posts, alternate sources menu, song service integration, direct messages in app, gallery view, local sub count on communities, troll buster, user theme directory, open web post in app, gestures, media bias check, alt check and personal contribution stats.
Yes I remember the lemmy.world servers being DDOS'ed every couple of days and having to switch between 3 clients and the webinterface because all of the apps were missing some features. The alternative frontends like photon and tesseract have really improved and imo should be the new defaults.
Makes me happy to see it, a future for a platform that is not locked by a single large player. Instead, I can have my own profile that I actually own and do not “lend”.
Yep! We come from all over.
The MAU of lemmy.world is ~18,600 which is a bit greater than the combined MAU of the next 7 instances (a big help here is lemm.ee which has ~7000 MAU). This is a really healthy spread of users and it means we don't lose lemmy if the biggest instance goes down.
Compare that to Mastodon, where mastodon.social has more MAU (~372,000) than the combined MAU of the next 30 instances at least (I gave up counting). Thats not healthy for the ecosystem. Though tbf the total MAU of mastodon is ~899,000 so without mastodon.social they will still have ~527,000 but it will be very spread out.
I don't think it's healthy enough but certainly better than the mastodon ecosystem
It's mostly because people keep recommending LW instead of other instances.
I didn’t really understand this on the way in. Is there an explanation somewhere. I found a mobile browser app and it sort of stuck me on one without me being able to select.
I think I’m with lemme ee?
Anyone can put Lemmy on their website
All the Lemmy websites talk to each other
You went to the website lemm.ee, so you're a lemm.ee user
It's good for the network if people don't all use the same website
Got it. Is there a way for me to transfer or do you just register into a new account once I figure out the best server for me?
You have to make a new account in order to move instances. But I think you can export your subscriptions.
Register for a new account, but you can also export, then import your subscription list and other settings.
You can browse instances without an account before applying for one, if you want to get a taste first.
Think of your instance you signed up as as your email provider. Using that email you can send messages to anyone else who has an email. You do not have to pick a specific email provider to use email, gmail, hotmail etc they can all talk to each other. Lemmy works in a similar way except it not limited to DMs, the instance you sign up for allows you to talk to people across all Lemmy instances and see posts from other instances. When you go to "All" on Lemmy you are seeing all posts across all instances. When you go to Local, you are only seeing your home instance.
I think the biggest instance, lemmy.world, not being operated by the Lemmy devs is also a good health indicator - on every other Fedi service I can think of, the server run by the devs is the biggest by far.
Doubly so considering how the main devs manage their instance according to their highly controversial political views LMAO
the point is that it doesn't matter, since most people are on lemmy.world anyways
Deleted by moderator
I think the distribution is fine as long as we still have nodes with good capacity. Our real issue is everyone demanding to be on the same instance because they're scared of Federation.
What I'd REALLY like to see is a Federated Resource Locator service, kinda like nameservice for a federated user.
rumba@mastodon.social is 101254684, if I move to rumba@ingrowntownail.es, I want all my followers to do that lookup and still be following me. It's great to have my settings migrate with me, but it would be bangin' to have other people linked to me to still follow me.
There are no followers on Lemmy
there are on mastodon
Deleted by moderator
Downloading an app instead of using the web gui helped me a lot, almost gave up on Lemmy couple days ago. But some of these apps are so well made. Really shows commitment
I dig alexandrite if you are looking for a web ui.
Onboarding process is definitely smoother, and we fixed a lot of the Federation bugs. Usability is an all-time high. I don’t know what the critical mass is, but we are definitely gaming momentum.
You know it's bad for Reddit when people were even talking about going back to Digg
Digg still exists?
They just announced they were coming back the other day 😂
Yup
It is really awesome here. Like the good ol internet days.
Absolutely. Feels like it's 2005 again, and you discover all kind of new places on the internet.
Agreed. I hope it doesn't become so popular that it turns to shit.
Eh. to some degree, enshittification is going to happen as more people come in, because more people = more shitty people. If we want to have the good niche communities that are IMO the only excellent thing about reddit, we'll have to put up with the fact that that also means a bunch of annoying people use the service.
At least Lemmy has far, far better tools for dealing with them.
Our most precious features is you'll never have to. If a community turns to shit, they just get defederated. If you can't find a server that defederates them, you can host it yourself. Your groups will be smaller, and you'll lose something in the transition, but what you have is what you'll put up with.
Yeah in a few days I'm going to delete my Reddit account, liking this place so far, you get news and genuine discussion.
Please keep it, it can be useful to promote Lemmy a bit, like we do on !fedibridge@lemmy.dbzer0.com
Glad that you like it here!
Don't close it. Get permabanned instead. Make those fuckers miserable.
Get in some good trouble.
I am one of the proud new users, and this is great to see!
Welcome! It feels fresh to not be on a big tech platform.
I hope they feel welcomed here to stick around. I've quit Reddirt in 2023 during the API exodus, came to Lemmy and never looked back.
Samesies. About the only thing I ever go back for is askhistorians
Honestly, I miss some subs. But I just cut my losses. The usability and UI of the site went to shit. The toxicity was horrible. The site policies went to shit. No third party apps. No point.
I only come back to answer necrobumps and one time to update my own post that was a support question where I managed to figure out the answer. I don't want to leave behind those forum posts like in XKCD where they have the same issue but don't answer anything. 😅
I think it's OK here, but some communities here are a bit shit and very vocal
It's very exciting to see 48k MAU jump up to 55k in such a short time.
To anyone new wondering about phone apps for Lemmy, I use "Thunder" and it works great.
Also, feel free to say Luigi without getting banned.
Voyager also work good.
Or if you like it simple I can only recommend Jerboa
Yup that’s what I’ve been using. The only downside is it’s hard to know who responds to whom.
Luigi!
Luigi?
I personally prefer Raccoon at the moment, but the gestures are starting to wear on me, so I might be switching back to Thunder. Honestly, can't remember why I left it. I'm a persnickety bitch about apps sometimes lol
I switched to thunder from boost and it's great.
Just stay on the right side of pineapple on pizza.
/s
Insta-ban!
Are tomato's on pizza ok?
Are tomatoes a fruit?
I love that neither of us made it a point of which side is right :P
We all know the right answer...
Deleted by moderator
Because 3rd party apps provide a native app experience to the mobile. Its far nicer to browser with all kinds of gestures than be limited to a 3rd party web browser
Deleted by moderator
"Hello, HR!"
I’ve just looked at my instance on both my app (Voyager) and my mobile browser (DDG)
The difference in presentation is stark.
Reddit refugee here. Can I say Luigi?
It's more frowned upon to not do so.
Can you say Luigi lol. Son, you're required to pledge allegiance to Luigi before every post you make here.
We can say whatever the hell we want
Only if you finish in a sock or something.
Friend, you can say Luigi is a hero.
lemmy.world might have some rules against endorsing violence, but on most Lemmy instances, I can even tell you I hope all the healthcare CEOs are assassinated the same way. No corporate overlords to appease here!
Deleted by author
It's more of a requirement than a punishable offense on Lemmy.
https://lemmy.world/c/luigimangione
And we love you for it❤️
✨️
This is great but i feel like we still need some speciality communities that will drive people here. This is an amazing start though
I think we need default instances that new users are put in to stream line the sign up process. Instances with little to no defederation so people can window shop for a instance that reflects their values. Or even just browse.
Looking through a intimidating list of instances all with their own special rules is not for everyone.
I agree, though you'll probably get a lot of pushback on that from Fediverse enthusiasts since it goes against the idea of the decentralised concept and we should "distribute the users more evenly among instances". At least that was the way discussion went on this topic back in 2023.
For the moment I feel like lemm.ee is a fairly solid "default" to recommend, though. Few defederations and great admins, very stable amd large enough to have a populated /all but not the massive behemoth that is .world (which I do agree has gotten too large).
Would it make sense to a preselected list of general instances in each region and simply have a sort of round robin approach to those instances that are within the users geolocation. This will align with legal laws of that user while removing the complexity and offering some sort of balancing of new signups? I know the idea with the fediverse is to be decentralized which it could still be for the users that care but i feel the most majority of people coming from Reddit probably won’t care (at least not at first)
I flipping love Lemmy.
Fantastic! New people (and old as well), please give to the community! Post and/or comment as much as possible, to make Lemmy an even better place!
You can do so by just regularly commenting and/or posting, but also by creating new communities and bringing some activity to inactive ones!
Deleted by moderator
Glad to be part of it!
I'm in this picture and I like it!
Hmm. I wonder if the server i just launched was number 600 😁😁🔥😁
I hope this keeps growing. I'm loving it here, and the fediverse idea is amazing. I hope we succeed and descentralize social media. Power to the people again
Let's go Lemmyyyyy!!!!
Let's go! I hope to see these numbers continue to go up as the days go on.
Wow. And we’re almost at the halfway point of the month. I wonder if we’ll reach 100k at eom.
Zoidberg voice: hooray im helping
where can I check these status? Which website do you use?
The one shown is from join-lemmy:
https://join-lemmy.org/instances
Also of interest for people that love statistics (which I do):
https://fedidb.org/software/lemmy
https://lemmy.fediverse.observer/stats
EDIT: As you can see, the Fediverse being what it is, it's basically impossible to get an exact, definitive count, so the numbers will always be a bit fuzzy. But they clearly show trends
It seems like the other two tools only report about 49k MAU, any idea why?
on fediverse observer, you need to switch to daily stats not monthly stats, right now it says 53,225 MAU for March 13th as the latest datapoint
https://lemmy.fediverse.observer/dailystats
fedidb is probably doing something similar, just showing the average for the whole month, instead of the current day
I can't be certain in this case, but the usual suspects are not being connected to as many servers (e.g. not scraping some because of robots.txt settings), delays in scraping the stats, or excluding some servers consciously because their stats are deemed a bit suspicious.
Fedidb used to have graphs for lemmy no? Now its only for all fediverse stuff combined :/
I'm calling this one the exodus of st mangione
Luigi Migratione
Deleted by moderator
Have you considered reddit? I hear it's a great platform for people without any sense of humour.
lol what did it say
Just some very basic moaning about tankies and pro-luigi memes, I don't remember too well
The bitching about tankies gets more grating than the tankies when the tankies aren't there. Bitch about them when they say stupid shot otherwise stfu and don't mention them.
Currently using phtn.app for browsing lemmy, though it’s a bit buggy on mobile. V2 will be coming soon so hopefully most bugs will be fixed.
What y’all using?
Jerboa. Tried several and liked it best.
That's the one I like. Or piefeds mobile on Firefox.
Self hosted tesseract web UI.
https://tesseract.asudox.dev/
This one looks sleak af.
Voyager on android, im perfectly happy with it.
Boost for Lemmy on Android.
Tesseract on desktop and mobile.
Thunder. I used to use Sync for reddit before, and used it a bit for Lemmy. But I like thunder a bit more.
I also use Interstellar for mbin.
Interesting. Is mbin the same as kbin or?
From what I understand, it's a fork of kbin. when kbin dev went silent and didn't trust anybody else to help them, a few other devs forked it.
And what do you think of it? What’s the general feeling? I remember being hyped about kbin then there were lots of problems with the site, then dev disappeared.
Idk it doesn't really feel different NGL
I haven't been using both Lemmy and mbin that long, just lurking mostly
And for that I don't have any problems
And the same way I used reddit, both I use for mobile. So apps make or break it. And the choice of Lemmy apps outshine the only app for mbin. Interstellar is good for mbin, but I just like thunder and sync more for myself.
I picked mbin for the combined threads posting like reddit and microblogging like twitter/masto but have to day I don't try to take advantage of that
On the other hand I'm looking forward to piefed maturing more. Since they have multireddit / combined topic community feeds
I’m using Mlem as I think it looks the best!
Will look on it too, heard about it back in 2023 but never tried it.
Deleted by author
I also just use the web interface and it is so simple and excellent to use. I will never use an app for this.
Phtn.app is actually a website/selfhosted interface for lemmy. The mobile PWA is a big buggy, but the desktop one works fine.
Deleted by moderator
Voyager on iOS is great.
I tried it but I have one beef with it: once logged in, my subscribed communities are no longer appearing and i have to resubbscribe to all of them. I did it once on phtn and wouldn't want to do it all over again as I'm hopping around lemmy apps.
Wait, aren't community subscriptions synced with your account?
I thought so, but at least in Voyagger iOS after I logged in I had no subscriptions. I didn't bother to double check for now as I'm quite happy with phtn.
LE: reinstalled voyager and now I have my subscriptions linked with my account. Looks dope too.
Nice!
Connect for Lemmy. Super under- rated.
Firefox
Eternity on phone, Lemmy as a PWA on my tablet and official Lemmy site on my laptop and on desktop.
vger.app
Deleted by moderator
Summit for Lemmy
I was using Sync since the
spoiler
reddit
However when I tried out Summit it had the right theming and gestures to be comfortable coming from Sync, along with an excellent unique screenshot tool that I've come to rely on.
I will try out phtn.app as an alternative on desktop since I don't browse Lemmy much outside of the apps.
Yay!!! Let’s go :)
Good for Lemmy.
People are finally done with reddit's shit! Thank God and welcome
Let’s gooo
I'm beyond thrilled! can't wait to see some of my favorite communities spring up here.
MAU? Mostly Anal Users? Martian Appalachian Upholstery? Mass Ass Underwear? Missing Alligator Utensils? Moldy Apple Uterus? Massive Arctic Uranus?
Most Awesome Users
Monthly Average Users
as opposed to DAU (Daily) or WAU (Weekly)
For a live product, the number of average users / time is a pretty telling metric.
I wonder what the arc will look like this time.
Monthly ACTIVE Users
Yup, my foggy brain......
Thanks
Make Americans Useful.
Start at the top.
I guess some people get off on go team go, but to me looking at market share is very corporate thinking. If lemmy is better than reddit (which I think it is) it will just naturally grow, which is great. Whet I'm cheering for is that developers of federated platforms are slowly taking social media away from the business world by doing it better for free - whether that turns out to be lemmy or some other software.
So by my math and some googling, that's about 0.00005% of Reddit's MAU.
On the one hand, cool, growth is growth.
On the other hand maybe it's... healthy to stop looking at Lemmy as an "alternative" to anything and start thinking about it as this small forum you like to use sometimes. Worked for me in the 90s, works for me now.
Well, that's how I felt three years ago, before two (relatively) huge exoduses.
You're off by some orders of magnitude.
It's 0.005%
But that's based off of the 1.1 billion number I saw. Somehow I very much doubt there's 1.1 billion people with accounts who login and browse at least once a month.
Yeah, 1 bill with all the bots and alt accounts maybe.
In spez’s wildest jizz wet dreams there are 1 billion Reddit users.
Also never underestimate how many bots there are. And how many users have 10+ accounts. Seeing less evidence of that on Lemmy so far, though who knows honestly.
Reddit is calculating its MAU differently. They seem to be counting even not-logged-in users coming from search engines - without that numbers like "1 billion monthly active users" really don't make any sense and even that is a crazy metric, if you think about it. There is no way that 1/8 of humanity is browsing on Reddit in a month. Lemmy seems to count only users who are doing something (submitting, commenting, upvoting)
If they're doing that, it means they're counting unique IPs, which is a ridiculous metric. Even lemmy would have easily 10x the MAU with it.
Again, doesn't matter. There's data on logged in users and it's also many orders of magnitude larger than Fedi.
By most independent metrics Reddit has more visits than Netflix. Than Pornhub, while we're at it. It's one of the top ten most visited sites on the Internet, and by most accounts it's actually grown since the "exodus".
I don't use it and I do like it here, but the idea that Lemmy is somehow encroaching on it is absurd. And self-defeating, too. Lemmy and its satellites are very worthwhile for what they are... but just a gnat in the wind as a Reddit alternative. Better to measure them on their own merits.
Deleted by author
reddit has the advantage that you need it to make google useful these days
Agreed, but the proportion of users that contributed and made it a positive experience there was significantly smaller.
Quality over quantity.
It doesn't really matter. For one thing, MAU and unique users are different metrics and they're both valid, so if Lemmy is counting verified uniques they can just call it that.
For another, I looked at the data for logged in users and Fedi's MAU is 0.125% of their daily logged in users, so the point stands regardless.
Totally, we don't want numbers for the sake of numbers. We need passionate people who are ready to ditch other mainstream ones for federated alternatives. Then only we can grow.
Like Haskell's (unofficial) motto, "Avoid success at all costs". Depending on circumstance, that should be read as "(Avoid success) at all costs" or "Avoid (success at all costs)". We're mostly in the latter condition I think, with only a couple of things (such as DMs) being shoddy enough that success should be avoided.
I super agree, would rather have one decent regular than a thousand average redditors who don't fit the vibe around here
Reddit is inflating its numbers by a wide margin.
A sub like https://old.reddit.com/r/BuyFromEU/ has 150k subscribers, but the activity definitely doesn't reflect that compared to !buyeuropean@feddit.uk and the 9k weekly active users
It may or may not be.
It is definitely not inflating its numbers by the orders of magnitude it'd take to make a dent on this particular takeaway.
The problem with (very) low user count is the more nieche things will not have activity.
Yep. Which ends up being why old forums were such tight-knit communities. You ended up hanging out with a handful of people. I'm mostly fine with that. If anything, it requires starting something yourself for your niche interests and being fine with it being dormant most of the time.
I think this is where lemmy/fediverse shines compared to reddit: you can have instances for niche things, yet be able to communicate with other instances. And each instance is free to have their own rules and (de)federate with others. Also the improved tools for searching/posting/modding of lemmy compared with old forums.
Sure. I mean, having a single log-in for all of that is definitely useful, as is being able to chat with others. Defederation as a moderation tool is... overrated, but it is there.
Why do you think defederation is overrated? Genuine curiosity.
Well, for one thing it only works asymmetrically. It's fine if you have a very specific source of issues that you can isolate and cut off, but it's not really useful if what you have is hostile users across the network. And it only protects the larger space. For smaller instances it's a choice between functioning as social media or not existing at all.
It's extremely far from a magic bullet, it is not resilient to large scale, systemic issues and the only reason its limitations haven't been apparent is that the AP ecosystem is too small to suffer most of the issues of larger social media.
Aaaaand it's designed to function via the petty squabbles of FOSS developer arguments, which I hate anyway. But that's a me thing.
Deleted by author
To the moon 🚀
I’m pretty new, but I like it here. It feels bigger than 54k MAU, probably because everyone is really active.
I completely agree!
Posting/commenting on Reddit largely feels like a waste of time to me if it’s not something big and attention grabbing. I would get zero people to interact for days, while on Lemmy I usually get a reply within a few hours if I have a question about a post.
Of course this isn’t evidence of anything, but I feel that it’s because Lemmy hasn’t been flooded with bots (yet? Hopefully never).
It also feels like half the activity on Reddit now comes from bots. It makes it feel emptier than it probably is to me when I go visit there occasionally, especially on the big subs. Which then makes me focus on the small subs, which end up feeling smaller or equal to the fediverse already, just on more niche topics.
Its still a shame that I will never recommend this place to anyone I know until the community changes here.
Its a bit chicken and the egg cause we likely need one for the other. But with the users proclivity for bans, and blocks you end up with a user base even smaller and discussion that more feels like a battle to be right most of the time because intellectual superiority is looked up to rather than conversation.
I still think a community of people competing to be the most right in every comment section does not lead to actual community and doesn't even help provide facts or info to most communities when there are not many niches to which people in here can participate in. Objective facts work best not in fandoms but in crafts. Like what glue doesn't melt Styrofoam when doing prop building not which show or game is best.
I may be alone in this but I yearn for "the normies".
I think this depends highly on the type of community. (Although clearly I'm doing it to you right now. Sorry.)
Highly political topics and such are the worst, probably. But others where people come because of a shared interest, like a sport or food or animal or something, a hobby, I think tend to be more chill and mellow.
You would think. I still won't go back to the gardening community. And will probably just stop participating in anything around here.
The problem is that there is still to few others than those types. The topic seems secondary. The mellow places are where it's empty.
Maybe it also depends on the topic. But there are always gonna be annoying people everywhere you go in life. 🥲
The topic was how much they hoped my garden withered because I couldn't afford to fully mulch all of it and was saying I was having to constantly weed the edge of my garden.
They proceeded to gleefully wish harm upon me and hardship for not doing or being exactly like them and as I begged for help from others to not feel alone was told I likely deserved it.
Yeah people are truly awful everywhere and not working on getting better.
That sucks. I'm sorry that happened =(
It was like that for me on the Marvel Rivals subreddit on Reddit. I didn't like all the smurfs (new accounts made by higher ranked players in lower ranked lobbies) but when I complained about it and said lower ranked or more casual players deserve to have fun, too, a bunch of people diminished my experiences, gleefully said they smurf, it's a skill issue, it's not a real problem (despite me checking enemy user profiles and sure enough, they're all experts at this game with barely any time played and all wins in their competitive matches), just to not play, etc. It's like pro basketball players dunking on little kid community games. They deserve to have fun, too!
Don't have any advice or anything, and what I said may not have made any sense to people who don't play the game, just empathizing on how much the internet sucks sometimes and your comment reminded me of that. Now I'm angry just remembering it lol.
Sorry. But yeah. Don't have an answer but it's a mess for being a new memeber when it feels communities don't care to remember that people have to start somewhere.
Sorry that it happened to you too.
Jesus. That's so obnoxiously mean. Sorry to hear you had this experience. I hope you don't take it to heart when people say things like that to you. It's hard not to, but please don't think their words have any meaning.
🩵 All the best!
Just keep posting and being the type of person you want to see as a community member here. The other site was exactly like you described above for a very long time!
I can't be responsible for changing others. That is an unfair request.
I was paraphrasing (see: paraquote, slang) Ghandi. "Be the change you wish to see in the world".
Yeah, and I am the person I want to be I just don't expect the change.
Me too, but I still prefer this place to reddit. I have the same exact gripe: those that must be the most right. I've just found a lot more of them on reddit than lemmy. I have lost count of the amount of times I start to write something on reddit, then imagine how someone somewhere, from some angle, can decide to be offended if they want to, then just delete the comment. It definitely happens on lemmy too, it's just in my experience it has happened less here, so I have been more willing to type out comments here. It really sucks that this has not been your experience.
this is a problem with fediverse in general imho.
the tools admins and users have are blunt (defederate or block). with all sorts of content moderation policies and opinions you will inevitably end up either alienated from everyone or surrounded by people that think and talk just like you.
fediverse does offer many advantages... creating a better online "town square" is just not going to be one of them.
I have this insane thought that shorter bans but publicly stated when/why/how-long would be more beneficial to keeping a community aligned when it's all we got. And that it would be harder to abuse and give insight into mods efforts.
But yeah I have said to others I intend to use it more as a link aggregator by effort but not community.
Tool development is one of the things that we're going to have to go that. Thankfully Creative Energy being poured into server software and apps is something that's already happening quite natural even that small user base numbers
Be the change you want to see. Host a instance. Show us how it's done.
Spend money I don't have to open myself to attacks for people I already say I dislike that don't like to told what to do at all.
No.
I should host an instance. About Apache. To learn how to do Apache configs. Then I could host an instance.
Oh wait.
Lemm.ee has been lagging for me lately idk if it has to do with all the new signups
Nice
Is there a live chart available?
There’s two at fediverse observer and fedidb.
Meh. These stats are so flawed. Its like 5 servers having most of the users.
Its like pretending we have this amazing distributed network when its actually extreamly centralized.
But im happy Lemmy is growing, its good.
5 > 1
even 3 would be a huge advantage over centralized
55.1k MAU are 55.1k MAU. What about that is flawed?
Fedidb observes 50k monthly active users. 65% of these are distributed between instances with more than 2000 monthly active users, making up the five biggest instances. Half (51%) are on either Lemmy.world or Lemm.ee, which are the only instances with more than 3000 monthly active users.
A fourth of us are on instances with less than 1000 monthly active users.
I don't think that's all that bad. But who am I to say, I'm not even part of the statistic. :)
imo we should focus on a statistic on the entire Threadiverse instead of only Lemmy. After all, these software are highly intercompatible, so excluding them doesn't make sense.
I agree - but I also appreciate that all instances of Mbin and PieFed combined currently have fewer monthly active users than lemmy.dbzer0.com alone, which is only the seventh biggest Lemmy instance. So for now it doesn't make much of a dent whether we're counted or not. :)
I know, but it's the principle of the thing.
shakes fist at sky