according to reddit they had 918 million Monthly Active Users (MAU) in 2022, then they stopped reporting it for I assume stock reasons 🤷♀️. Anyways, I’m not trying to be super specific so I’ll go with 1 billion since it’s 4 years out of date anyways.
The widely shared number for Lemmy MAU is ~40,000. I’ve heard this shared for many years and I wasn’t sure if it was accurate anymore. The actual numbers are easy to find so I added all of the totals from piefed statistics page for Lemmy + Piefed + Mbin.
It turned out to be 40,272. guess the number was correct after all!
https://piefed.social/statistics?software=Lemmy
so that’s 1,000,000,000 vs 40,000
that’s 0.004%! I lowkey forgot how big reddit is.
EDIT: for all the people saying my data is inaccurate, I know. There’s many factors that offset the accurate statistics of what a ‘user’ is. I’ll list a few, including some nobody else has considered
- reddits estimate includes bot accounts
- lemmys estimate includes bot accounts
- reddit estimate includes alt accounts
- lemmys estimate includes alt accounts (arguably moreso than reddit due to ppl having accounts on multiple instances)
- reddits estimate includes signed out accounts, lemmys does not
- VPN / dynamic routers can largely bias reddits number
- one last small factor, reddits data is 4 years out of date
I’m literally a college dropout because I’m bad at math, I just looked up numbers and divided them.
instead of constantly winging about data inaccuracies how about yall do something about it. comment a more accurate estimation and I’ll edit my posts title and give credit. stupid smelly nerds
When I joined Reddit almost 2 decades ago, it wasn’t nearly as large as when I left. After a point, bigger wasn’t better, hence leaving. Lemmy will grow.
I wish more folks understood that bigger isn’t better.
People out there praying for the next eternal September.
I tell them. Now is the good times. Now is what you will lament missing later. Enjoy now.
Lemmy is great.
I can see value with bigger, more robust platforms that can house smaller communities. More platforms like Lemmy could allow for a future where entire communities can move platforms if it no longer suits them or a better fit emerges would be nice. Need more platforms that don’t constantly abuse their users with dark patterns for that to happen though.
Fortunately, there really is no motive to implement dark patterns in FOSS software, and its addition would promptly trigger a fork.
That’s why I’m here. Really enjoying it, it reminds me of early days of reddit when it was just a bunch of nerds. I saw a socially awkward penguin meme yesterday, just need some gammer aficionados in the comments now.
I think that you see these new services attract different cohorts of people based on the service they provide and their overall renown. The first group that shows up seems to almost always consist heavily of programmers and system administrators, then IT generalists, then power users and gamers, and finally the general populace with no specific demographics.
Each group seems to have certain preferences, some of which do not align. For example, the first 2 groups seem to prefer the service have a small, like-minded user base, liking it less as it grows and broadens. The later groups seem disinterested in a service unless it has at least some certain minimum, but large market share.
So, the gamers may yet come! We just need enough activity to attract their interest, which can be a “chicken or egg” problem.