cross-posted from: https://lemmy.whynotdrs.org/post/494473
Compared against the predominant incumbent social media platforms, the fediverse is very small.
information sources:
An elite 1.5 million.
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.
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.
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
Yep, I used to be on r/diyhotas and that was already a niche within the HOTAS niche within the simulator game niche 😂
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.
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
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.
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.
For now.
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.
das ist richtig
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.
Close! Richtig is the German word for “right”, not true.
In Swedish, we have the word “riktig”, but I guess that’s a bit of a shifted cognate, since it means “real”.
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.
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.
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.
The 90-9-1 rule, 1% of users create content, for 9% of users to interact with (upvote, comment, whatever), while 90% exclusively lurk
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.
I have five lemmy accounts and only post from two. That checks out.
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.
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.
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.
To keep your interests separate, to prevent doxing, to break up your post history, etc.
Fair, but these are all perfectly valid reasons to do so on Lemmy as well, so I still think it makes more sense to do so here than on Reddit.
I think Xitter has it’s fair share of bots…
WE’RE ON THE RADAR, BOYS!
LET’S GOOOOOO!
TO THE ATMOSPHEEEEEERE!
And girls
WE’RE ON THE RADAR, LEMMINGS!
Baby steps are better than no steps for sure
So Facebook is:
Boring Full of bots Soulless
An we are:
Real people mostly Engaged A cute little dot!
Like someone said, 1,5M people are enough for me, specially if they are mostly active and it seems they are. Are they stats for mean user activity?
Not being able to scroll recycled content all day has been hugely detrimental to me. I’ve actually started reading books again. BOOKS.
I’m so sorry, I can’t imagine how you bear it
Same. It’s amazing how much time I have when the algorithm isn’t shoving me endless content, trying to keep me engaged.
Really shows how everyone has been addicted to social media, myself included.
Quality > quantity.
The masses have been duped into forgetting that.
You can show more ads with more quantity, any ad driven platform will trend that way.
Well you know, “quantity has a quality all its own”
When I saw that number I was pleasantly surprised.
Wow, the Fediverse is actually visible :0
I wonder how long it’ll take before we finally collectively reject the SV ethos that size is the only metric that matters and success is only achieved via monopoly…
There was a time when Usenet and BBBses and IRC was tiny and yet people still found value through community in those places.
Maybe, and I know this is a wild idea, platforms don’t have to include every human on the planet to be meaningful, relevant, or valuable.
There are dozens of us! Dozens!!
It does feel like a small pond, but it’s a nice one, with smart fish.
I must confess to missing the vastness of Reddit, but I’ll never go back. The company I keep here is better, by far.
And a how do you do to you too dear Doctor.
I’m trying fast-forward and imagine how we’ll end up also hating lemmy in the future.
The Germans have a word for us too!
Fuck Spez… amirite ? Guys?
If you’ve been to Reddit since the API meltdown, it’s pretty clear that large sections of it were fucked by angry moderators, and still remain that way. I don’t think the fediverse was ready to take over, but Reddit very clearly has fewer people working for them for free.
Specifically, there are several subreddits where they used to be strict about submissions, and now they let anything mildly related in.
I’m honestly pretty surprised that they still haven’t recovered. At this point, I’m hoping that their mediocrity will continue to push people away until Lemmy can catch up.
I think the struggle is that we still need to build more tools for the fediverse ecosystem. I’ve been building Lemmy frontends but it’s a big lift to make a world class experience for users, moderators, instance owners, etc.
Progress is being made, but I agree that Lemmy was not prepped for the wave of Reddit users.
With the way this graph is looking spez is pounding your ass to the bone and is about to give you an aneurysm. fuck spez has been given an entirely new meaning
Not really. Here’s some statistics from reddit itself.
If you even have minimal activity, according to reddit recap you’ll be in the top 1% of reddit users for that year. With that one can conclude that reddits true userbase, can not exceed 5 million.
Reddit in its usercount counts all accounts, including banned ones that have long been replaced by ban evasion accounts. This and the sites old age leads to grossly inflated numbers.
Want even more damning numbers for reddit? Well the maximum participation for r/Place (read, everyone who even as much as viewed the event. Not even participating.) Was 1.9 million. Considering how intensly it was promoted it is likely people would have clicked on the giant banner notification. That means out of the less than 5 million active users, 3.1 million didn’t even glance at the giant event that has been promoted with massive popups, banners and shiny symbols over the reddit page.
1.9 million users is still one hell of a userbase more than lemmy will ever see maybe if some major events happen such as reddits rules getting stricter or mods getting more heavy on the ban hammer then we may see some more users join lemmy
I think you’re selling freedom short, yeah convenience and momentum are hard to beat but Lemmy is where the open source Devs are and the first adopters, I think we’re gonna go see a lot of interesting things emerge here which will draw a lot of users into trying it out - especially if all the other social media sites are closing their doors to people without accounts from viewing information.
What Lemmy needs is it’s own version of place, not the same thing but things that are fun and novel and community building. The basic stuff is still getting finalized but as things get established we’ll see plenty of tools made to help moderation, to enable new features and useful ways of interacting with information. Hopefully some fun games and toys too.
I’ve got a lot of work to do on my main project at the moment but I’ve also got a lot of ideas for Lemmy stuff I want to play with when I’ve got the time, I’m sure theres a lot of other people cooking up ideas and watching things develop and stabilize waiting for the right time.
Lemmy needs is it’s own version of place
We actually already did! [email protected]
I’d love to see some similar community projects.
Maybe it’s worth moving to a bigger instance. I could see something like this gaining a large amount of momentum if it visible to a larger audience
I know it’s not the full truth(maybe?) but I feel like we’re not attracting the worst kind.
And you know what?
One and a half million people, I can work with that. I know it’s not going to stay that number but it’s seriously enough for anyone, except some soul-less megacotp ofc.
Yay! I love it!
Also I am very much impressed how much content this small number of users can generate.
Bots, lots of bots xD
But I thought that was the excuse we were using for why Reddit still has lots of users?
Not attacking you, just pointing out the ludicrousness of everyone saying that all of Reddits accounts are bots when Lemmy is full of them as well.
99% of posts on Lemmy only ever see a comment from that annoying arse tldr bot.
That bot alone is probably the most active Lemmy account around.
I turned off the ability to see bot accounts in my lemmy setting and it has vastly improved my experience
Do you do this through the webpage or through an app?
I did it on the web page
So I go to lemm.ee the website then go to all my account settings from (I think) that little hamburger menu
then where there’s all the checkboxes one will say “show bot accounts” and just uncheck that
I browse exclusively on mobile and both on Avelon and Memmy I haven’t seen bot posts. Comments it’s a coin flip imo
It’s not the size of the fanbase, but the quality of its media and the community of its users.
TBF explodingheads and lemmygrad exist.
Can’t wait until the ability to block instances is introduced.
I personally believe that communites such as lemmygrad and people like the main developer are driving people away from lemmy
me too! 💜
It’s like that saying “better be alone than badly accompanied” (mieux vaut être seul que mal accompagné).
If alone is lingering with 1.5 million people who share at least something with you… I’m okay with that.
💙💜💖
It’s nuts how a difference of hundreds of millions of people doesn’t actually feel like a ton more people or provide any better quality except in some niche spots
I already saw this happening on Reddit. The largest subreddit were filled with generic posts. They got a lot of content, not necessarily good content. But there were plenty of small or medium sized subreddits that had much better content. The Fediverse feels like it is missing the big subreddits. It also feels too small to have the small niche subreddits. What is here in terms of content feels more like a few medium sized subreddits.
Just responding to what you say about generic, but lately when I lurk reddit the only stuff I see is REALLY generic Relationship stuff (front page without log in o/c) and recycled OAF memes.
This is a good point. My interactions with the Fediverse over the last few months has been sublime. Maybe users here are just proportionally more active?
Numbers are nice, but they’re not everything. Yeah, we could onboard 2 billion lurkers, but how would that improve anything?
You’re unlikely to be in conversation with hundreds of millions of people at a time; or even thousands of people. Conversations happen with just a handful of people. So those platforms with billions of people perhaps allow for some ultra-niche subgroups, but otherwise are just providing a lot of low-value noise with the additional people.
we really need to stop calling it formerly Twitter and just call it Shitter.
he ruined the platform, the people can ruin a name
Xitter
It was ruined long before he touched it
It just made it worse faster
Twitter’s best days were about 10 years prior to Elon buying it
deleted by creator
Why this many people use Snapchat is incomprehensible
There are so many good messenger apps and all of them, Snapchat’s giant userbase remains
I use it for the same reason I use anything, the people I talk with are there. I already drew a hard line in the sand with some devices and Windows.
Snapchat is a line I drew. It’s probably my single least favourite messaging option
Honestly, I prefer it over a few of the others. That doesn’t make it good though. I’d much prefer to get everyone I know on to something more open and free like Matrix, wire, etc.
Hell, why do this many people use LinkedIn? The whole platform was built off of scraping Windows user’s address books without permission, sending unsolicited emails to all of those contacts using the name of that user, and pretending like they were such a great platform that of course your friends are inviting you to also join. And I’m pretty sure they still use this practice today because I continue to get emails from people who have no idea why their name is being attached to the spam I receive.
LinkedIn is very useful for job searching and networking. I don’t post on there, but it was key to getting several job offers.
I’m not aware of any other professional social networks.
I guess it just annoys me that they built a product on incredibly shady practices and have somehow managed to wedge themselves in to the business world under the guise of being “legitimate”. Trusting anything on their site, to me, feels as risky as trusting anything you see on Yelp – sure a real person might have posted the review, or maybe the business paid their blackmail tax to not get de-listed, but how many better opportunities are not being shown because the company deleted all their positive reviews?
I mean, sure, it’s not good if they did sketchy stuff to bootstrap their network. I hadn’t heard there before but I wouldn’t be surprised.
But I don’t think it’s really the same as Yelp. Or at least not how I use it. Trust isn’t really a factor. I don’t use LinkedIn to review a company. I don’t look at their soulless posts about how great their team is. I use it to see “do I know anyone who works at this place that has an opening I want?” Then when I see my old friend is a manager there, I shoot him a message (possibly not even via LinkedIn if it’s someone I know well) and ask if it’s someplace I would want to work at. There’s not really a lot of room for fake in that process.
Also sometimes recruiters just message me. Some of them suck but that’s not really particular to LinkedIn.
You’re not thinking of Glassdoor, are you? Because that’s more like yelp and I don’t especially trust the positive reviews on there.
I don’t really want to go to bat for Microsoft though. I’d be happier if there was a better professional network out there. But, you know, capitalist hellscape.
LinkedIn is a “need” for the ones wanting a job and trying to tell their new job /company is the best. Once these needs are satisfied they forget about it and only come back when the need arises again.
I’m in IT management at my company, the general management and HR folks basically require anyone in a leadership position to have a filled out LinkedIn profile with it linked to your Office account so it shows up in your outlook card and linked in your signature. So we look “professional and tech-driven” since all social media is lumped in with the tech industry for some reason
I really hate it but I still have active group chats that I haven’t had luck getting elsewhere. I get the impression it’s the same for most people because I haven’t heard anyone say anything positive about it in years
Different generations choosing different platforms I guess: >40 using facebook and <25 joined Snapchat.
Don’t know why you got downvoted. There is absolutely an “age” component to why people use a certain platform.
Social platforms have enormous retention leverage also. Once all your friends are there…
The age component is absolutely a reason and so is the leverage of the community and friends like you said. No doubt about it. It’s herd mentality and FOMO. Finally it is also how easy to get in and stay sucked in. These other platforms have the dopamine trigger game figured out on their apps. Fediverse doesn’t have that so much, other than the organic “did someone reply to me?” feeling. If you don’t engage then fediverse is not pulling you in.
Ngl FB Messenger is way better than Snapchat.
I don’t like Meta but at least the app feels like it isn’t making its users even more ADHD by the minute
There is an interesting, and almost universal phenomenon on reddit that every time a subreddit gets past about 40,000 subscribers, the discussion quality immediately drops off a cliff, unless extremely harsh moderation policies are implemented to explicitly weed out low effort content which brings its own set of problems.
My theory on why this occurs is the scaling power of moderation. I think you computer people are probably very familiar with the concept of scalability, and that size is its own challenge at the hyperscale. So for a centralized system like Twitter or Instagram or Facebook, moderation can only scale vertically, so a huge moderation team is needed to contend with the scale of these platforms alone, which also forces the need of personalized recommendation algorithms to promote this that are actually interesting to individual users.
Reddit was able to partially avoid this phenomenon with the subreddit system, which means everyone was able to effectively manage their own, smaller subgroups who shares common interest without intervention from the site admin/mods to achieve a form of pseudo-horizontal scaling. You can also see the success of that with Facebook Groups, which are one of the few reasons why people still use Facebook for social media even though they do not want to interact with the current Facebook audience.
Lemmy, and the rest of the fediverse platforms would suffer the problems even less, as now every group admin can now be completely independent from one another, which means that real horizontal scaling can be achieved and hopefully preserving the discussion quality to a degree as it grows.
IMHO, the other part of the problem is that spicy hot-takes quickly get engagement from other users and bubble up to the top. And a lot of those spicy comments are trash, but not in violation of rules, so mods leave them up.
You can see that clearly with both Twitter and reddit. There is no worse feeling than spending time to write something with thought only to not have anyone interact with these posts at all, while tired one-liner and ragebait gets a ton of likes and comments.
However, Lemmy’s algorithm doesn’t really punish writing long form contents the same way reddit does from my experience, so I feel more free to take a little bit longer to write out my thoughts here compared to elsewhere.
One way I thought of to encourage long form content and high quality, is to limit the number of short form content from users.
I imagined every week users would be granted 14 comments that are limited to 250 characters and unlimited long form content. You could also grant more short form comments with every long form comment or with every new oc post.
The only issue would be that long form does not mean high quality and with chatgpt it’ll be easy to create long form posts. Maybe an AI system that evaluates the quality of the post could work but then gaming the system would happen.
Just a thought I had, the numbers about the length and amount of posts could be optimized or use an AI
I like that you’re describing an anti-Twitter, where people have to express themselves in over 250 characters, rather than under 140 or 280.
Just saw a meme the other day about how the old mantra “Don’t feed the troll” seems to have fallen by the wayside and about 90% of the issues on the internet right now are caused by that.
This is a big thing killing my interaction with Lemmy as well. I want to like it, but I drop into a discussion thread and the top-engaged/boosted comments are spicy and almost designed to promote maximum anger. And I feel like, “Do I really, really want to spend significant time writing out a deeper comment to engage with this community…?”
great comment!
i tend to agree. i think the fediverse is probably the best model moving forward. it is a challenging problem!
I think this is great. It might be 1/1000th of these other systems, but I think the fediverse is at a tipping point where I’m not seeing the same things every day. I don’t think critical mass needs to be a ranked competition.
