cross-posted from: https://lemmy.whynotdrs.org/post/494473

Compared against the predominant incumbent social media platforms, the fediverse is very small.

information sources:

301 points
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As always, you guys are way too fixated on size.

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76 points

Thing is, you have to measure from the user base on the underside, this graphic obviously uses the wrong method.

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46 points

Meh. Not like there are shareholders to appraise of growth…

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30 points

Here too there are misconceptions!

What’s important are the hard numbers, soft metrics like user count are misleading! Some may look large at first, but hardly grow with higher engagement, while in others engagement greatly increases the size.

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59 points

Lemmy alone creates more content that I care about. This is fine.

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5 points

Not always

Lemmy still doesn’t create enough content that I want

But I try to use lemmy more anyways

Hopefully more people will use lemmy more

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28 points

It’s not the size of the ship, it’s the motion of the ocean.

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19 points

Yeah, and let me tell you… Facebook’s motion does nothin for me, as big as it is…

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0 points

That’s true but it does take a long time to get to England in a row boat

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22 points

Yes. Quality is the key thing about fediverse. Also - size doesn’t mean everything. Black holes are small, but mighty. Lemmy sucks most of my spare time already.

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16 points

My take away from this is lemmy is so good it’s actually a gravitational singularity pretending to be a social network 

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12 points

Yeah technique is really important too.

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6 points

So is my wife

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1 point

I wasn’t fixated on size when I met your mom

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150 points

An elite 1.5 million.

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84 points

I’m absolutely fine with 1.5 million. I enjoy lemmy much more than reddit. I feel like content and conversations here are better. None of the karma farming and corporate promotion disguised as natural content.

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58 points

Although you’re correct, I find fediverse lacking in the department of the more niche stuff, e.g. fandoms of specific games, communities by geo proximity, obscure hobbies.

But well, Reddit wasn’t like this from the start and I hope the diversity and smaller communities will be here instead of there with time.

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16 points

Former r/fountainpens Reddit refugee here, and I agree 1.5m users doesn’t generate the kind of traffic for my hobby to figure in any sort of way. I miss the engagement

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5 points

Yep, I used to be on r/diyhotas and that was already a niche within the HOTAS niche within the simulator game niche 😂

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1 point

While I was also part of some niche communities back in the Reddit days, thanks to Lemmy, I switched to Linux and have found interesting new websites, tools and apps. So I’d say overall it’s a net positive.

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0 points

What we need is some queer-accepting instances

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People need to realize that it’s okay for smaller forums to exist. Imagine if we measured fucking teamspeak servers by numbers. Would be just as ridiculous

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14 points

If anything, smaller might be better in this case. We kind of have an idea of the type of demography we have here, with Reddit you could be arguing with a 9-year old in every other thread and you wouldn’t even know.

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15 points
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1.5 million is almost entirely Mastodon users which have no clue how Lemmy’s commenting culture works so rarely contribute in a way that makes sense to both the Mastodon commenter and the Lemmy comenter/poster at the same time.

Lemmy has ~20k ish actively commenting accounts.

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1 point

For now.

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109 points

I’m happy with this. I feel like Lemmy is an oasis of nerds in a social media world of toxic people obsessed with all the wrong things.

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16 points

das ist richtig

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18 points
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Bep bup! German Bot here!

“Das ist richtig” means “That is true”

Like and follow this bot so its creator may someday claw themselves out of the joyless pit they have dug themselves.

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5 points

Close! Richtig is the German word for “right”, not true.

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93 points

I’m surprised that the fediverse is as popular as it is, I would’ve guessed <500k. That’s awesome. I’m also shocked that Threads is apparently that popular, I completely forgot it existed immediately after it launched. I also didn’t know that Snapchat still existed, so maybe I’m just out of touch on social media stuff.

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35 points

Facebook forgot it existed too, they just recently made it possible to delete threads accounts without deleting Instagram

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12 points
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Meta realized the same thing we all realized when we came here: userbase entrenchment is significantly more difficult to overcome nowadays than it was back in the 2000s when Facebook managed to pull everyone over from Myspace.

Legitimately, it seems like the average user nowadays is so hellbent against even a modicum of inconvenience or a slightly less populated environment that they will accept literally anything. The big tech and social media platforms couldn’t shake off users if they tried anymore. They can do every every shitty, anti-user, anti-consumer thing under the sun and users will bitch about it, but never, ever try an alternative.

And that’s why these companies and their devs don’t listen to feedback anymore. Why bother?

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-2 points

This is just factually untrue with the numbers lemmy by itself has being having. Not to say anything of Mastodon and et al. There wouldn’t be a mass exodus of highly engaged folks from reddit to lemmy if users just didn’t move anymore. Threads got big but then instantly deflated to a much lower number immediately.

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5 points

Threads was built on top of Instagram infra (essentially Instagram but for text posts) so it’s not surprising the two accounts were intertwined. Would have made it easy to roll out an MVP (minimum viable product) when there was a need for it, and quickly iterate on it after launch. The original launch didn’t even include a web version as it wasn’t finished yet.

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16 points

I’d like to see the breakout in the Fediverse for Mastodon vs. all others.

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16 points

Thales was kind enough to provide a link:

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6 points

What is a misskey?

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4 points

Peertube is bigger than I thought!

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8 points
1 point

Thanks!

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1 point

I’m surpsied Kbin is so low.

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1 point

I’m just curious what you thought might have happened to Snapchat? What app took its place in your estimation?

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4 points

I think I got Snapchat and Vine mixed up or combined in my head. I’ve never used either one, I thought it shut down years ago, but what I’m remembering is Vine shutting down.

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1 point

Vine was basically TikTok with shorter videos. I feel like it was a bit ahead of its time - phone cameras weren’t as good when it launched, and a lot of people didn’t have enough data to watch a feed full of videos.

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1 point

The fact that I regularly recognize my fellow Lemmings by username makes it feel small, but its not too hard to find a community full of strangers either.

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1 point

Mastodon is by the biggest contributor to Fediverse as a whole. Has been adopted by tons of Orgs like EU, W3C, Verge, Flipboard, etc.

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-2 points
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Didn’t FB use some shady practice to make their users fall into Threads without noticing?

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4 points

I think this was a misunderstanding of a bit of shitty functionality in threads. If you had Instagram and made a linked threads account, you would see follow suggestions for people who hadn’t made an account yet. It was basically “if this person makes a threads account I want to be following them”. I don’t believe it meant those suggested people had a shadow account or anything like that though. Still sketchy and probably drove inorganic growth, but I believe the number of users is counting the number of people opting into opening an account.

It’s just naturally going to be incredibly high, because so many people use Instagram and would’ve been exposed.

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-4 points

The Fediverse is going to get a lot bigger once Meta turns on federation for Threads.

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6 points

Or it’ll kill it!

RIP XMPP

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7 points

How? XMPP still works anyway.

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60 points

There’s no way reddit has more “real” users than Twitter // X. Maybe with bots but half the shit on reddit is a Twitter screen cap or repost.

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48 points
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That’s a strange read on Reddit. I’ve heard people say this before, and it’s baffling.

Reddit is, and always has been, a link aggregator first and foremost. Of course it’s reposts and screenshots of others sites. That’s kind of the point. To bring you Twitter so you don’t have to actually be on twitter.

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Not to mention a supermajority of reddit users are inactive. Recap has shown that even with minimal activity, you end up in the top 1% of reddit users.

That means reddit has roughly 5 million active users. Meanwhile nearly every person that creates a lemmy account, is active too.

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23 points

The 90-9-1 rule, 1% of users create content, for 9% of users to interact with (upvote, comment, whatever), while 90% exclusively lurk

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10 points

nearly every person that creates a lemmy account, is active

This is false. There’s about a 10:1 ratio of Lemmy accounts registered to lemmy accounts posting comments.

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2 points

I have five lemmy accounts and only post from two. That checks out.

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9 points

A couple of years ago I ended up in the 1% because of one single thing I posted 2 weeks after I signed up purely to generate some rage because so many subs needed minimum karma… Can completely attest to this.

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3 points

I suppose this is related to your “users are inactive” point but I also feel like it’s more common on Reddit to have multiple/alt accounts. Hell, in my time on Reddit I think I made 7+ accounts.

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2 points
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Why? I feel like that would be more common on Lemmy than anything. There is an actual point in using different instances here, I don’t see any point whatsoever on Reddit.

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14 points

I think Xitter has it’s fair share of bots…

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