https://the-federation.info/platform/73 says for lemmy we have: 1,073,211 Users
It also says that: Last month users: 38897
Which is 2 orders of magnitude of a difference. If you look at the list of instances there ones like https://the-federation.info/node/details/48405 which have 50k users and 10 active last month users.
That means almost all of the 1 milion users are fake users.
I’m seeing people celebrating every 100k users every couple of hours without realizing this.
It’s not bullshit, it’s because of two reasons:
First, “Active last month” refers to users who have posted a comment in the last month. Every site like this has a large number of lurkers. A good rule of thumb is 10% of subscribers/users actually post/comment/participate. So 350-400k “legitimate” users sounds like the right ballpark.
Second, the numbers are so high because there has been a known bot attack. A few instances didn’t have email verification/captchas enabled so it was very easy to sign up for accounts very quickly. Some instances went from 500-800 users, to 10,000 users overnight.
It’s also probably inflated due to people making multiple accounts. I’m sure there’s lots of us (myself included) who made an account on one instance and then decided to swap to a different one.
That’s true. I first tried to create an account at beehaw but forgot about my application so I ended up on lemmy.world because it had open signups, so there’s at least 1 “useless” user account there.
Seeing how beehaw shut themselves off, things kinda worked out for me lol.
It’s not bullshit
Yes it is
lemmygrad.ml has 606 active users and 231752 comments
https://the-federation.info/platform/73
Go on this page, sort by total users and compare to active users.
This is horrible
Go on this page, sort by total users and compare to active users.
Yes, I’ve been using this site for tracking too.
lemmygrad.ml has 606 active users and 231752 comments
I’m not sure I understand your point? If you’re saying that the active user : comment ratio for all other instances is off, then I think you got it the wrong way round. lemmygrad was one of the first instances to be developed, way before the reddit exodus, so their number of active users has dropped even as their comment count slowly grew over time.
And part of what led to lemmygrad in the first place was subs like /r/Genzedong being banned. I think the kinds of people who seek a new location after their sub is banned are much more likely to be in the 10% group who comment and create content. Besides that, the political nature of lemmygrad (and the fact that all those users are likely on the same page about a lot of things) leads to a much more engaged userbase.
In short: lemmygrad is in no way a representative example/sample
600 active users a month making 230000 comments a month? Those are pretty active indeed
Most of instances having 40K users but less than 100 actives?
Compare the data of Lemmy.world with others. There is a common trend of ratio between users/active/posts and comments among them, and then there are those huge instances by users but zero activity?
I’m sorry but there’s either a huge problem in the way users numbers are aggregated, or those users are just fake.
