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 Anyways, I’m not trying to be super specific so I’ll go with 1 billion since it’s 4 years out of date anyways.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- one last small factor, reddits data is 4 years out of date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
Yeah that’s mainstream for you. And if ever those users started to really migrate to non-corporate social media like the fediverse, you bet I’ll be peacing out to a smaller subset or just chatting on forums and private blogs.
I would be happy for them, but I don’t know if it’s healthy to round up that many users on one platform.
Top comments before I actually read them all are quibbling about how the Reddit number refers to “accounts” rather than people, which is valid,
but let’s be real: not so valid as to move the needle on that ratio very much.
I think the lesson here, is in just how few users are actually needed, in order to have a community that works.
People have this tunnel vision now, that sites like Twitter, which briefly became global information infrastructure and an arbiter of legitimacy, were somehow an inherent good, which has been ruined by Musk et al. I think it was already quite horrible, for our discourse, our culture, our ability to discuss things with nuance, and the fact that the whole world got locked into it has created a permanent albatross around our necks, as we struggle to reestablish a society of laws and science.
40k is probably about as many users as a site or network can have, with very tight controls on bots to be sure, before things get bad. The people who talk about the whole world moving to the Fedi as a “new twitter” free of capitalism, are really lacking imagination in how good the internet could be.
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.
I still believe in the future of this website. While I still browse Reddit. I know that a social media site lives and dies by it’s users. Almost all of the content on social media sites is user-generated. Every website started with a small user base and continued to grow from there. Why should Reddit get to be a for-profit publicly traded company, when besides hosting servers and other cost related expenses, doesn’t create anything of value?
Enjoy it while it lasts.
Only 1 oyster in about 10 000 will form a pearl.
Accounts. Not people.
Yeah there’s no way reddit has a billion users. Not human ones. They’re doing everything they can to push people away. I’d be surprised if their user growth wasn’t actually negative.
“People”
It’s at least 2/3 bots. If not upwards of 80%.
Any subreddit that glorifies engagement above all else is just chock full of them. The relationship advice, the angry experiences, the politics, and all the nostalgia posting. It’s all infected with bots.
There are dozens of us.
DOZENS.
Bonus c/autism has 10.6K subscribers implying that a quarter of our users are on the spectrum!
Seems low tbh, I bet some just aren’t subbed to that community
Yeah, haha
*glances around nervously
In other words, you’re saying that every Lemmy user is worth 25,000 Redditors.
So, when the war starts, each one of us has to take on 1000 people and ~24,000 bots?!
Who gives a shit
Indeed, 'tis a silly place.
There are 450 million people in the world with English as their mother tongue. There are a lot of people who speak English, but I’m guessing they prefer social media in their own language or are not proficient enough to not be called out on Reddit. Of the 450 million, around half would be out of the age group that is likely to be interested in Reddit. Around half of those are women who, again, are less likely to be interested in Reddit. I have no hard figures or evidence of any of this, but it seems unlikely to me that there are 1000 million human users on Reddit.
I don’t think reddit had an age group, sure most people are probably in their 20s and 30s but there are plenty in their 60s and 70s too
