It’s very exciting to see 48k MAU jump up to 55k in such a short time.
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.
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.
ALSO with this model, maybe we can get away from the 24-hour news cycle mentality where a post that’s more than a day old is dead. Comment on something from 2 weeks ago!
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.
and start thinking about it as this small forum you like to use sometimes
Well, that’s how I felt three years ago, before two (relatively) huge exoduses.
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.
I super agree, would rather have one decent regular than a thousand average redditors who don’t fit the vibe around here
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.
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)
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.
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… a gnat in the wind as a Reddit alternative. Better to measure them on their own merits.
reddit has the advantage that you need it to make google useful these days
Yeah, see my rant elsewhere in this comment section, but I personally do not desire Reddit 2.0. More users here will be good, but if Lemmy ever becomes the size of Reddit, even with its differences, it will not be what we want it to be anymore
Agreed, but the proportion of users that contributed and made it a positive experience there was significantly smaller.
Quality over quantity.
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.
I’m in this picture and I like it!
You know it’s bad for Reddit when people were even talking about going back to Digg
Digg still exists?
Yup
They just announced they were coming back the other day 😂
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.
MAU? Mostly Anal Users? Martian Appalachian Upholstery? Mass Ass Underwear? Missing Alligator Utensils? Moldy Apple Uterus? Massive Arctic Uranus?
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.
Thanks
Make Americans Useful.
Start at the top.
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.
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.
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.
Zoidberg voice: hooray im helping
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.
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.
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.
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.
We can actually talk about things without overwhelming censorship, strange algorithms, or ads.
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
Fedidb used to have graphs for lemmy no? Now its only for all fediverse stuff combined :/
It seems like the other two tools only report about 49k MAU, any idea why?
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.
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
Good for Lemmy.
Yay!!! Let’s go :)
Nice
