I discovered lemmy back when reddit started to charge for their API. However upon taking a look at it, it seemed that apart from like 8 communities,there was not much going on elsewhere. Things seem to have changed since then, quite a lot of active communities these days. So how many users do yall reckon lemmy has now? Is it close to 5M? or perhaps even higher?
It’s about 50k active users. Communities are generally less important than instances.
MAUs are users that post or comment right? Or does voting also make you a MAU?
The number is correct according to the existing crawlers. Also i wonder if lemmy users are slightly more active on average than reddit users.
For more numbers https://fedidb.org/software/lemmy
Unsure on the specifics of how MAU is decided.
As far as I know, from when this was discussed after the first Reddit exodus, only commenting and posting makes you an active user. So the number is somewhat deceivingly small, as the vast majority on platforms like this are lurkers who maybe post/comment every once in a while at most.
It was changed in 19.0 and now votes also count towards MAU https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/pull/4235
Oh, thanks for the info, that is great to know!
Ah, gotcha.
Oh wow, if thats the case then I have overestimated the numbers by alot. Seems like we’re still in the nichest of the niche
It’s much bigger than it used to be, and is relatively stable now.
Mastodon is the biggest fediverse platform and that has just short of 900k MAU (monthly active users) with around 8M registered users.
In terms of non activity pub but federated protocols, matrix is probably the biggest with a user count in the hundreds of millions. They also market very well to goverments and the public sector tho so they get lots of users from massive deployments with millions of users on one server.
People say this, but I’ve been on Lemmy and Mastodon for about 1.5 years and Lemmy feels a lot more engaging than Masto. My posts there get one or two likes and boosts, while posts and comments here regularly get dozens if not hundreds of upvotes. I think Blue Sky is eating their lunch right now.
Microblogging is about individuals while lemmy is about topics.
With the former, unless you involve algorithmic recommendations or recommendation lists like bluesky, its going to be a lot of work for users to get a nice feed from just following individual people.
With the latter, the things i mentioned are basically built into the system so its easier to get a lively experience even with much fewer users.
My experience goes against this position.
Between quite a few really active users and the ability to follow hashtags I have had a very active timeline almost since day 1 in Mastodon.
To put it in comparison, I find it hard to keep up with the Masto timeline while my 6-hour best sorting starts quickly showing a ton of doubles (wouldn’t it be great if we could somehow make them go away? )
In Thunder you can at least disable showing crossposts which should remove a lot of duplicates.
You can be +1. ;)
Keep in mind that these are active users, many networks with huge numbers have registered accounts, but most have no activity.
In any case, be the change you want to see, help the network grow by providing content and activity, you will always be welcomed.
Can you ELI5 for me why Instances are more important than communities?
Doesn’t matter as much for lemm.ee as it’s more of a utility than an instance, but I see instances more like traditional “subreddits” and comms within them as “hashtags” and categories. Hexbear’s “games” comm is very different from Lemmy.mls, as an example.
So, more like servers on discord?
Yep! Great example.