How many millions of users does it have? How many posts? How active are they?
Can’t give precise numbers, but at least that I can notice, despite greatly filtering what I check, there’s enough stuff to make running out of stuff to check rather unlikely. Besides, as I started using RSS feeds a lot recently, mainly for federated platforms (not just Lemmy ones), and the reader I use can hide posts marked as read, it’s being a struggle to lower the number of posts to read in comparison to the sum of posts automatically pulled during the set up of each link.
The answer is (currently) ~42k monthly active users.
Interesting. Active users in decline, posts and comments on the up.
School breaks probably have an impact
Active enough 🤷♂️
About 0.04 million monthly active users
Just say 40,000. Which is a pathetic number, but perfectly fine for the type of niche communities budding up here and there across all the domains connected together here.
I would have, but they asked in millions and I was being cheeky.
I don’t find it pathetic, I’m quite happy with it. Sure, I’d be happy to get more but in no rush.
40k users is huge. Remember, lemmy is not profit driven. We don’t need to grow at all costs, we can grow naturally and sustainably.
…I kinda like it right now. Some communities of less than a 1000 have much more human responses. It nice. And not just from one server.
There are huge subreddits that are basically dead or just filled with spam. The ratio of active/passive users on Lemmy must be much much larger. A Lemmy community with 100 active members almost feels like a subreddit with 10 000 members.
The density of quality users and interactions on Lemmy nowadays reminds me of Reddit’s earlier days
A Lemmy community with 100 active members is more likely to be 100 active humans than a subreddit with 10,000 members is, based on the last time I went to Reddit: it was so, so clear that everything was either ChatGPT, or a repost of shit even I had already seen, or was just otherwise obviously not an authentic human sharing something interesting.
So yeah, not entirely surprising.
It might also be that we were some of the prolific posters on reddit. I heard somewhere that the top couple percent of posters on reddit used to make a majority of the new posts. And the rest lurk
That’s probably true, though I’m not sure who has ever actually made a legitimate determination since you’d have to remove the non-humans from the numbers first and, well, Reddit isn’t going to tank their MAU numbers by ever releasing that kind of stat.
It’s also not helped once you hit a certain size and the nature of scale takes over and the level of toxicity goes up: even in small groups, when a new person shows up and asks the same question for the 20th time, they start taking shit for it. If you’re in a BIG group, it turns into a giant dogpile, and people stop asking questions because who the hell likes that kind of response, so you end up with a lot of people who are subscribed to something, but none of whom actually contribute at all.
40000 is enough to be a functioning social media. most fediverse softwares don’t have that much. Sure, it is not enough to have discussions over non mainstream stuff, but there are still enough people for a variety of topics.
We’re actually at about 43k
43.001k! I just joined with my own instance in my over engineered lab 🧪
Welcome!
Not sure, but compared to about a year ago, it seems more active.
According to the fedidb, it’s about the same.
It feels most active the month after June 12, 2023. Then it kinda got quieter
Remember when forums would be super active with, like, 500 users?
“Millions of users” is a vanity stat. The critical mass needed to keep a discussion group alive is actually quite small – assuming you’re interested in, you know, discussing things. So, how active “Lemmy” is is entirely dependent on which topics you’re interested in.
There is a point where a forum is too active and you need to either split it or implement weird and complex rules so things don’t get too large.
Hasn’t Lemmy sort of already accomplished that both with federated servers and communities?
No. Federation means I’m on a mbin serner and still interacting with lemmy. If a community goes big there is no way to enforce who goes to which split.
yes, the only benefit more users would have is allowing niche games/topics to have flourishing communities within it.
I am seeing slow and steady growth in the areas I follow.
The economics of a social platform relies on growth over time and Lemmy is growing at the perfect pace because it’s not a single entity but a collaborative entity.
Once bigger federations break through to the mainstream market you’ll see the relevance of smaller federations growing along with it as it becomes a ‘bigger’ ecosystem
Mentioned in the comment section below what is necessary for community growth and it doesn’t require millions, only a few hundred active members.
So active that I always recognize the 100 or so usernames that are everywhere
These sort of comments always make me wonder who recognises my nick. A ranking of ‘user-recognition’ would be fun. Though obviously impractical.
I do
Yeah, but you’re like the community directory, you know everything 😂
First time I hear this ha ha 😂
Honestly, it depends on your circles and network. I only remember seeing The Picard Maneuver maybe twice, didn’t know of them before this week. I’ve seen your username far more, for example.
True true. I think Lemmy.ml tends to be more insular than most instances though? e.g. the default sort is Local rather than All. Like basically for people who already had most of their Fediverse needs met, there was less need to join communities across the wider range?
I don’t know enough to say if it’s more insular or not, I don’t know how common it is to have the default sort as All, but we’re definitely worldly enough for other instances to have some users pushing stereotypes on us when we comment.
You do have some point about lemmy.ml having enough instances that you can get by with Local as default, but I assume most people would be subscribing to or exploring other instances too? I really don’t know.
Well it is one of the top 10 instances, and defederated from almost no other instances, so it definitely is rather well-known:-).
These sort of comments always make me wonder who recognises my nick.
I wonder that too. I know I have seen yours, but not enough to dislike you if that means anything lol.
I recognize yours
These sort of comments make me wonder who is reading usernames. I barely ever look because it doesn’t matter except in reply threads.
I usually passively recognize them. Even more if there is an avatar
I originally found it surprising how often you run into the same names, feels a lot more small town than reddit in that way.
I’ll make sure to remember your name moving forward. Your current ranking: Awesome
It’s a feature, I’m gonna try to remember people’s names more
Some clients (at least Connect and Voyager on Android) have a user tagging feature, so I’ve been tagging people I see over and over or trolls, or whatever. It’s really handy to start to easily see who’s around and posting.
Heyo!
To be fair, that happens on Reddit as well.
You’re one of us too!
Do you mean just Lemmy, or do you also want users from mbin or others fediverse instances that can access lemmy discussions?
713 monthly active users for Mbin : https://mbin.fediverse.observer/stats
135 for Piefed: https://piefed.fediverse.observer/stats
Anyone saying that it’s even a little bit close to an adequate level for anything other than politics and star trek are lying to themselves.
Don’t forget to mention Linux. Literally eveywhere.
I dunno, seems pretty good for queer spaces and shitposting, but I guess .world doesn’t know much about either.
I block politics, news and star trek.
Then the rest of the content is visible
If you care about American politics and being outraged at every and any thing thrown at you during the day, it is active enough. However you are SOL if are curious about any other topic that does not involve narcissistically talking about yourself.
Assuming you are invested enough to find or create a community for a topic you care about, be prepared to be talking to yourself for a long time and consider yourself lucky if you manage to get 2 other people commenting on it.
TRUE
Feels like it’s just memes and specifically war and American politics
The only actually different communities I found were about ancient times and history posts (thank you for that by the way)
The big three are:
- memes
- politics/news
- tech
There are a couple dozen people who keep a smaller community alive (like PugJesus on history, anon6789 on owls, JohnnyEnzyme on euro graphic novels, LaurenceWolse on b movies, Nexius Lobster on traditional art, etc); occasionally someone takes over a community and starts posting regularly, and occasionally someone burns out and the community dies.
Yah I wanna contribute alongside pugjesus
go for it, fam! Yeah, I think it’s a lot more fun to be posting when someone else is already posting there. (instead of just posting by yourself.)
I made a meme about this a while ago on !fedimemes@feddit.uk
Definitely still relevant
this is actually why meme communities I block over time (new ones come up though like constatnly). I like to peruse all looking for interesting things. unfortunately news and politics are to important for me to clear out and I mean. who wants to clear out tech :)
Fwiw PieFed (which is a Lemmy alternative that isn’t quite ready for mainstream usage yet, but is nonetheless coming along nicely:-) has Categories of Communities - e.g. https://piefed.social/topic/news - so that at a touch of a button you can switch to see a feed dedicated to that, or some other, topic.
Then see also those sub-topic links at the top allowing further filtering to your more specific desires, like “US Politics”, “World”, “RSS Feeds”, etc. Using this, you can have your cake (e.g. all the memes, yes I mean ALL of them!!! 😁) and eat it too (i.e. they politely go away whenever you want them too:-P).
That’s not really possible in Lemmy itself just yet (except probably in some apps but I don’t use those so not sure which ones) unless you create multiple alt accounts and set up subscriptions for each one tailored to a specific interest type.
Which wrapping back around to the OP, helps explain why we are far less active than those Fediverse activity stats show - e.g. I personally am 3 of those Monthly Active Users. Not that that’s bad, just saying that they are known to be inaccurate.
this is very interesting and definately has some features I want. mbin/lemmy have future plans to integrate with mastadon and such I believe. do you know where piefed stands on that?
No but it’s pretty early in development (and yet amazingly well developed for that) as a Lemmy alternative, and so I doubt there are plans to expand beyond that like to Mastodon or Friendica, at least until it becomes more fully featured regarding its Lemmy functionality. e.g. user tagging like @openstars@piefed.social is not implemented yet. It does already have hashtag support though:-). Certain features are just amazingly well done, while more basic and foundational features are needing to catch up. Thus it is something to watch with close interest, as well as a few of us with early adopter mindsets to test out even as a daily driver.:-)
do you know if there is a way to get the list of topics in a way to choose more topics after the start? I clicked on a fair amount and figured I would just hit go and add more later but I can’t seem to get the checkboxes. Just the list of topics for perusing.
yeah I mean I started on kbin as despite complaints on how he did things he seemed to be making something I liked better and when it blew up I went to mbin but I notice the features do not move as quickly as when earnest was in the mix. so im already not on lemmy. will give it a try.
!fedigrow@lemm.ee help active posters to discuss common issues
The new communities part was a good recommendation actually, but the rest I’m not interested in
I found two new communities I am going to contribute to, so thanks
Congratulations. You are bringing your dozen communities that only survive due to your incessant work, which kind of exemplifies my point: Lemmy has maybe a handful of communities outside of the politics/meta-fediverse topics.
I don’t post on !movies@lemm.ee that much anymore, it’s usually other posters now. Same for patientgamers, parenting and casualconversation
I never post on !foodporn
showsandmovies we are now 2.
I started posting on !AskUSA@discuss.online recently, now it’s mostly other people too
Lemmy has maybe a handful of communities outside of the politics/meta-fediverse topics.
That’s already a much different statement than
consider yourself lucky if you manage to get 2 other people commenting on it.
- https://feddit.org/post/6346355 157 comments
- https://feddit.org/post/5821462 59 comments
I don’t understand why you want to exaggerate the situation, while there are clearly other communities than American politics
For people reading this: https://lemmyverse.net/communities
You want to use the extreme end of the distribution curve and make the argument that it is close to the median case. It is not.
There are 44k monthly active users on this platform.
According to you, they only talk about American politics.
According to me, they also talk about other topics.
Another thread I open yesterday, 55 comments: https://sopuli.xyz/post/21023787
I’m providing examples and numbers to back up my claims, you use incorrect hyperboles.
The number of discussions about American politics are orders of magnitude higher than discussions about any of “other topics”. This is more than enough to justify the use of hyperbole.
Nobody is denying that discussions over American politics are very active.
Thankfully, those communities can be blocked.
On top of that, !asklemmy@lemmy.world added a new rule against US politics questions, so new questions are about anything else.
Random post from yesterday, 158 comments https://feddit.org/post/6407464
The stats are irrelevant, imo. What matters is how useful lemmy is both to average users and specialty users.
Right now, the more niche the hobby/interest is, the less useful lemmy is unless it fits into the handful of subjects that lemmites grok.
That being said, for general use, lemmy is great. Plenty of memes, plenty discussion about subjects of general interest, and plenty of posts for casual scrolling on the john. In that regard, it’s better than bigger forums because you don’t have to scroll through a dozen fake posts to find things that interested a fellow human.
I can usually, on bad days when I’m not very mobile, spend an hour or so on lemmy before I get back to where I had previously left off. That’s about the sweet spot, imo.
The active user base is trending slightly downward as a few instances have shut down recently but the amount of registered users is steadily increasing so those trends will reverse as the largest barrier to entry is just knowing about Lemmy and creating an account.
Users: 467k
MAU: 42k
Posts: 10.8m
