The large subreddits each have more users than all of Lemmy. So yes.
However, like others have said, who cares? Community and quality of discussion is more important than raw user count. Here, what you post is actually seen by people, even if the thread is days old.
Yeah but don’t worry; Reddit will do something stupid again soon so more users will leave for places like Lemmy until that place is pure AI hell
yup but its a good size from my experience when engaging with it overall. if we get larger we will definately need more niche things.
Yes. Go up to someone on the street and ask what Lemmy is.
That’s fine, though, we’re not going anywhere, and we can only grow.
it can easily shrink
How? Something else would have to pull community members away from the fediverse. I don’t know what that would be right now.
Meanwhile, non-federated platforms will enshittify, be bought out by a crazy billionare who wants to ruin everything, or (like has happened with other, older monopolies) be broken up during a dynastic feud. I see some strong parallels to how Linux has outgrown proprietary alternatives over the decades, and arguably it’s even harder for an OS.
How?
The number of people who use it decreases when the number of people who stop using it over some period of time is greater than the number of people who join
Yeah, but like, I gave some actual reasons why that probably won’t happen.
How?
It is difficult to find conversations on the Fediverse that don’t boil down to “America bad” “Linux good” “is the Fediverse growing?” and if that trend keeps up for terribly much longer people will stop logging in because they’ve experienced all the platform has to offer. Even people who hate America and love Linux are going to wander off if you don’t show them enough cat pictures.
Threads like “ask a question and my guinea pig will type the answer” are way too rare here.
Do you see a bunch of “America bad” posts or a bunch of News/Discussions which places a negative light on America due to the bad things America does?
There’s a huge difference, people don’t typically get tired of being aware of and discussing current events.
There’s a definite bent, but I actually don’t feel starved for diversity. Looking at the posts in my feed sorted by new, it’s about half America bad but there’s also miscellaneous news stories and programming memes. No ancient Roman memes or goofy maps today, but I also spend a lot of time on that.
I suspect the next people in line to sign up are also interested in OSS and unhappy with Trump, but less likely to actually post about it, so basically content will regress to the mean fast enough to keep up. We’ve already seen a lot of movement away from Marxist-Leninist politics, which is what the devs started with.
That hasn’t been the trend though.
Reddit seems to be about 1000x bigger.
It should be noted that social media companies like reddit, facebook, twitter, etc all have major incentives to inflate their user counts (with bots, or counting inactive users). Those user counts are the product that they’re selling to advertisers to set up on their platform.
We don’t have that incentive, in fact its the opposite, we’d rather have less users that are more active, as more users require more moderation resources and time.
That is a valid point. If we take those numbers with a hefty heap of salt, Reddit would still be 10x or 100x bigger than Lemmy.
Atleast we are growing steadily. Never heard of misskey tho
Yup, and Reddit started in 2005 (which is 2 decades ago now) with its large migration in 2010. Lemmy only really got going in 2023, and it’s growing
Misskey is a Mastodon style platform, that is popular in Japan and existed from a while back. They added activitypub support in 2018
Misskey is like “the default” fediverse software for Japanese and (Asian) ACG (Animation-comic-games) communities.
This side of fediverse is relatively big, but almost their community rarely reach out Western fediverse mostly due to language and law-related stuff. They have unique photography, online comic market, and and various creative centric community that rarely found on mainstream Western fediverse.
In fact, before Mastodon.social, the biggest fediverse instance is Japanese – Pawoo.net. At that time, it was managed by Pixiv (Japanese equivalent of DeviantArt), but later sold to random corpo, the moderation collapse, and now abandoned by its community.
On paper, Lemmy does look like there’s a lot. In practice, there’s not really a lot that reflects the total number of registrations.
Reddit, even with its bots and whatever, still has a large amount of active users compared to Lemmy.
Plot twist: reddit is one guy and all his bots.
Interestingly
https://lemmy.ca/comment/5057563
The original reddit was closer to hackernews than the generic site it is now. Not only that but spez has admitted that the original traffic was artificial, by which I mean, the owners themselves were creating fake engagement through various means, such as scraping and cross-posting content from sites like digg via sockpuppets to appear that the site had way more traffic than it had.
A particle on an object.
Not even comparable. /r has more users and bots.
