How many millions of users does it have? How many posts? How active are they?
The answer is (currently) ~42k monthly active users.
Interesting. Active users in decline, posts and comments on the up.
School breaks probably have an impact
Remember when forums would be super active with, like, 500 users?
“Millions of users” is a vanity stat. The critical mass needed to keep a discussion group alive is actually quite small – assuming you’re interested in, you know, discussing things. So, how active “Lemmy” is is entirely dependent on which topics you’re interested in.
There is a point where a forum is too active and you need to either split it or implement weird and complex rules so things don’t get too large.
Hasn’t Lemmy sort of already accomplished that both with federated servers and communities?
yes, the only benefit more users would have is allowing niche games/topics to have flourishing communities within it.
No. Federation means I’m on a mbin serner and still interacting with lemmy. If a community goes big there is no way to enforce who goes to which split.
Not sure, but compared to about a year ago, it seems more active.
According to the fedidb, it’s about the same.
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About 0.04 million monthly active users
Just say 40,000. Which is a pathetic number, but perfectly fine for the type of niche communities budding up here and there across all the domains connected together here.
40k users is huge. Remember, lemmy is not profit driven. We don’t need to grow at all costs, we can grow naturally and sustainably.
We’re actually at about 43k
43.001k! I just joined with my own instance in my over engineered lab 🧪
Welcome!
…I kinda like it right now. Some communities of less than a 1000 have much more human responses. It nice. And not just from one server.
There are huge subreddits that are basically dead or just filled with spam. The ratio of active/passive users on Lemmy must be much much larger. A Lemmy community with 100 active members almost feels like a subreddit with 10 000 members.
A Lemmy community with 100 active members is more likely to be 100 active humans than a subreddit with 10,000 members is, based on the last time I went to Reddit: it was so, so clear that everything was either ChatGPT, or a repost of shit even I had already seen, or was just otherwise obviously not an authentic human sharing something interesting.
So yeah, not entirely surprising.
It might also be that we were some of the prolific posters on reddit. I heard somewhere that the top couple percent of posters on reddit used to make a majority of the new posts. And the rest lurk
That’s probably true, though I’m not sure who has ever actually made a legitimate determination since you’d have to remove the non-humans from the numbers first and, well, Reddit isn’t going to tank their MAU numbers by ever releasing that kind of stat.
It’s also not helped once you hit a certain size and the nature of scale takes over and the level of toxicity goes up: even in small groups, when a new person shows up and asks the same question for the 20th time, they start taking shit for it. If you’re in a BIG group, it turns into a giant dogpile, and people stop asking questions because who the hell likes that kind of response, so you end up with a lot of people who are subscribed to something, but none of whom actually contribute at all.
The density of quality users and interactions on Lemmy nowadays reminds me of Reddit’s earlier days
40000 is enough to be a functioning social media. most fediverse softwares don’t have that much. Sure, it is not enough to have discussions over non mainstream stuff, but there are still enough people for a variety of topics.
I would have, but they asked in millions and I was being cheeky.
I don’t find it pathetic, I’m quite happy with it. Sure, I’d be happy to get more but in no rush.
Active enough 🤷♂️
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Heyo!
These sort of comments always make me wonder who recognises my nick. A ranking of ‘user-recognition’ would be fun. Though obviously impractical.
I’ll make sure to remember your name moving forward. Your current ranking: Awesome
Honestly, it depends on your circles and network. I only remember seeing The Picard Maneuver maybe twice, didn’t know of them before this week. I’ve seen your username far more, for example.
True true. I think Lemmy.ml tends to be more insular than most instances though? e.g. the default sort is Local rather than All. Like basically for people who already had most of their Fediverse needs met, there was less need to join communities across the wider range?
I don’t know enough to say if it’s more insular or not, I don’t know how common it is to have the default sort as All, but we’re definitely worldly enough for other instances to have some users pushing stereotypes on us when we comment.
You do have some point about lemmy.ml having enough instances that you can get by with Local as default, but I assume most people would be subscribing to or exploring other instances too? I really don’t know.
Well it is one of the top 10 instances, and defederated from almost no other instances, so it definitely is rather well-known:-).
These sort of comments make me wonder who is reading usernames. I barely ever look because it doesn’t matter except in reply threads.
I usually passively recognize them. Even more if there is an avatar
I originally found it surprising how often you run into the same names, feels a lot more small town than reddit in that way.
I do
Yeah, but you’re like the community directory, you know everything 😂
First time I hear this ha ha 😂
These sort of comments always make me wonder who recognises my nick.
I wonder that too. I know I have seen yours, but not enough to dislike you if that means anything lol.
I recognize yours
To be fair, that happens on Reddit as well.
It’s a feature, I’m gonna try to remember people’s names more
Some clients (at least Connect and Voyager on Android) have a user tagging feature, so I’ve been tagging people I see over and over or trolls, or whatever. It’s really handy to start to easily see who’s around and posting.
So do I!
You’re one of us too!
I am seeing slow and steady growth in the areas I follow.
If you care about American politics and being outraged at every and any thing thrown at you during the day, it is active enough. However you are SOL if are curious about any other topic that does not involve narcissistically talking about yourself.
Assuming you are invested enough to find or create a community for a topic you care about, be prepared to be talking to yourself for a long time and consider yourself lucky if you manage to get 2 other people commenting on it.
TRUE
Feels like it’s just memes and specifically war and American politics
The only actually different communities I found were about ancient times and history posts (thank you for that by the way)
The big three are:
- memes
- politics/news
- tech
There are a couple dozen people who keep a smaller community alive (like PugJesus on history, anon6789 on owls, JohnnyEnzyme on euro graphic novels, LaurenceWolse on b movies, Nexius Lobster on traditional art, etc); occasionally someone takes over a community and starts posting regularly, and occasionally someone burns out and the community dies.
this is actually why meme communities I block over time (new ones come up though like constatnly). I like to peruse all looking for interesting things. unfortunately news and politics are to important for me to clear out and I mean. who wants to clear out tech :)
Fwiw PieFed (which is a Lemmy alternative that isn’t quite ready for mainstream usage yet, but is nonetheless coming along nicely:-) has Categories of Communities - e.g. https://piefed.social/topic/news - so that at a touch of a button you can switch to see a feed dedicated to that, or some other, topic.
Then see also those sub-topic links at the top allowing further filtering to your more specific desires, like “US Politics”, “World”, “RSS Feeds”, etc. Using this, you can have your cake (e.g. all the memes, yes I mean ALL of them!!! 😁) and eat it too (i.e. they politely go away whenever you want them too:-P).
That’s not really possible in Lemmy itself just yet (except probably in some apps but I don’t use those so not sure which ones) unless you create multiple alt accounts and set up subscriptions for each one tailored to a specific interest type.
Which wrapping back around to the OP, helps explain why we are far less active than those Fediverse activity stats show - e.g. I personally am 3 of those Monthly Active Users. Not that that’s bad, just saying that they are known to be inaccurate.
this is very interesting and definately has some features I want. mbin/lemmy have future plans to integrate with mastadon and such I believe. do you know where piefed stands on that?
No but it’s pretty early in development (and yet amazingly well developed for that) as a Lemmy alternative, and so I doubt there are plans to expand beyond that like to Mastodon or Friendica, at least until it becomes more fully featured regarding its Lemmy functionality. e.g. user tagging like @[email protected] is not implemented yet. It does already have hashtag support though:-). Certain features are just amazingly well done, while more basic and foundational features are needing to catch up. Thus it is something to watch with close interest, as well as a few of us with early adopter mindsets to test out even as a daily driver.:-)
yeah I mean I started on kbin as despite complaints on how he did things he seemed to be making something I liked better and when it blew up I went to mbin but I notice the features do not move as quickly as when earnest was in the mix. so im already not on lemmy. will give it a try.
do you know if there is a way to get the list of topics in a way to choose more topics after the start? I clicked on a fair amount and figured I would just hit go and add more later but I can’t seem to get the checkboxes. Just the list of topics for perusing.
Mbin already integrates with Mastodon.
I got a few responses and worked it out.
Yah I wanna contribute alongside pugjesus
go for it, fam! Yeah, I think it’s a lot more fun to be posting when someone else is already posting there. (instead of just posting by yourself.)
I made a meme about this a while ago on [email protected]
Definitely still relevant
Please do so, it’s terribly lonely being the only poster some weeks DX
[email protected] help active posters to discuss common issues
- [email protected]
- [email protected]
- [email protected]
- [email protected]
- [email protected]
- [email protected]
[email protected] can help to find communities
The new communities part was a good recommendation actually, but the rest I’m not interested in
I found two new communities I am going to contribute to, so thanks
Happy to help
Congratulations. You are bringing your dozen communities that only survive due to your incessant work, which kind of exemplifies my point: Lemmy has maybe a handful of communities outside of the politics/meta-fediverse topics.
I don’t post on [email protected] that much anymore, it’s usually other posters now. Same for patientgamers, parenting and casualconversation
I never post on !foodporn
showsandmovies we are now 2.
I started posting on [email protected] recently, now it’s mostly other people too
Lemmy has maybe a handful of communities outside of the politics/meta-fediverse topics.
That’s already a much different statement than
consider yourself lucky if you manage to get 2 other people commenting on it.
- https://feddit.org/post/6346355 157 comments
- https://feddit.org/post/5821462 59 comments
I don’t understand why you want to exaggerate the situation, while there are clearly other communities than American politics
For people reading this: https://lemmyverse.net/communities
You want to use the extreme end of the distribution curve and make the argument that it is close to the median case. It is not.
There are 44k monthly active users on this platform.
According to you, they only talk about American politics.
According to me, they also talk about other topics.
Another thread I open yesterday, 55 comments: https://sopuli.xyz/post/21023787
I’m providing examples and numbers to back up my claims, you use incorrect hyperboles.
The number of discussions about American politics are orders of magnitude higher than discussions about any of “other topics”. This is more than enough to justify the use of hyperbole.
Nobody is denying that discussions over American politics are very active.
Thankfully, those communities can be blocked.
On top of that, [email protected] added a new rule against US politics questions, so new questions are about anything else.
Random post from yesterday, 158 comments https://feddit.org/post/6407464
Do you mean just Lemmy, or do you also want users from mbin or others fediverse instances that can access lemmy discussions?
713 monthly active users for Mbin : https://mbin.fediverse.observer/stats
135 for Piefed: https://piefed.fediverse.observer/stats
There are dozens of us - not quite a dozen dozen, but at least multiple dozens! (on PieFed) :-P
The stats are irrelevant, imo. What matters is how useful lemmy is both to average users and specialty users.
Right now, the more niche the hobby/interest is, the less useful lemmy is unless it fits into the handful of subjects that lemmites grok.
That being said, for general use, lemmy is great. Plenty of memes, plenty discussion about subjects of general interest, and plenty of posts for casual scrolling on the john. In that regard, it’s better than bigger forums because you don’t have to scroll through a dozen fake posts to find things that interested a fellow human.
I can usually, on bad days when I’m not very mobile, spend an hour or so on lemmy before I get back to where I had previously left off. That’s about the sweet spot, imo.
I’m an active user who post and comment regularly, and I would say that the experience is very similar to Reddit. Except for less adds and smaller numbers on the main/all page. The experience is probably very different if you’re mainly a passive consumer of content.
Though I’ve never been active in “large” subreddits and I tend to block them from my feed. So guess I don’t know what I’m missing.
You have ads? Where do you see them? Not sure if I’m being ignorant and not recognizing them or did something right that made me not see them
Ok, I rephrase. Zero ads on Lemmy. 🙂
Some Lemmy phone apps have ads.
The main deficiency is niche and hobby communities, they’re mostly empty or missing on Lemmy.
This is about right. Its a great general interest thing and you have some really great folks but you don’t have a ton of pathfinder people talking about pathfinder or sto people talking about sto on an sto sub, etc. so we have a general gaming community that is pretty active but if you want to know day to day whats happening with a particular game. not so much.
The real answer: https://lemmy.ca/post/35073012
“Do you know about our lord and savior, Linux? Let me tell you about it…”
Well actually we use Arch btw…
Also, technically...
I’d just like to interject for a moment. What you’re referring to as Linux, is in fact, GNU/Linux, or as I’ve recently taken to calling it, GNU plus Linux. Linux is not an operating system unto itself, but rather another free component of a fully functioning GNU system made useful by the GNU corelibs, shell utilities and vital system components comprising a full OS as defined by POSIX.
Many computer users run a modified version of the GNU system every day, without realizing it. Through a peculiar turn of events, the version of GNU which is widely used today is often called “Linux”, and many of its users are not aware that it is basically the GNU system, developed by the GNU Project.
There really is a Linux, and these people are using it, but it is just a part of the system they use. Linux is the kernel: the program in the system that allocates the machine’s resources to the other programs that you run. The kernel is an essential part of an operating system, but useless by itself; it can only function in the context of a complete operating system. Linux is normally used in combination with the GNU operating system: the whole system is basically GNU with Linux added, or GNU/Linux. All the so-called “Linux” distributions are really distributions of GNU/Linux.
No, Richard, it’s ‘Linux’, not ‘GNU/Linux’. The most important contributions that the FSF made to Linux were the creation of the GPL and the GCC compiler. Those are fine and inspired products. GCC is a monumental achievement and has earned you, RMS, and the Free Software Foundation countless kudos and much appreciation.
Following are some reasons for you to mull over, including some already answered in your FAQ.
One guy, Linus Torvalds, used GCC to make his operating system (yes, Linux is an OS – more on this later). He named it ‘Linux’ with a little help from his friends. Why doesn’t he call it GNU/Linux? Because he wrote it, with more help from his friends, not you. You named your stuff, I named my stuff – including the software I wrote using GCC – and Linus named his stuff. The proper name is Linux because Linus Torvalds says so. Linus has spoken. Accept his authority. To do otherwise is to become a nag. You don’t want to be known as a nag, do you?
(An operating system) != (a distribution). Linux is an operating system. By my definition, an operating system is that software which provides and limits access to hardware resources on a computer. That definition applies whereever you see Linux in use. However, Linux is usually distributed with a collection of utilities and applications to make it easily configurable as a desktop system, a server, a development box, or a graphics workstation, or whatever the user needs. In such a configuration, we have a Linux (based) distribution. Therein lies your strongest argument for the unwieldy title ‘GNU/Linux’ (when said bundled software is largely from the FSF). Go bug the distribution makers on that one. Take your beef to Red Hat, Mandrake, and Slackware. At least there you have an argument. Linux alone is an operating system that can be used in various applications without any GNU software whatsoever. Embedded applications come to mind as an obvious example.
Next, even if we limit the GNU/Linux title to the GNU-based Linux distributions, we run into another obvious problem. XFree86 may well be more important to a particular Linux installation than the sum of all the GNU contributions. More properly, shouldn’t the distribution be called XFree86/Linux? Or, at a minimum, XFree86/GNU/Linux? Of course, it would be rather arbitrary to draw the line there when many other fine contributions go unlisted. Yes, I know you’ve heard this one before. Get used to it. You’ll keep hearing it until you can cleanly counter it.
You seem to like the lines-of-code metric. There are many lines of GNU code in a typical Linux distribution. You seem to suggest that (more LOC) == (more important). However, I submit to you that raw LOC numbers do not directly correlate with importance. I would suggest that clock cycles spent on code is a better metric. For example, if my system spends 90% of its time executing XFree86 code, XFree86 is probably the single most important collection of code on my system. Even if I loaded ten times as many lines of useless bloatware on my system and I never excuted that bloatware, it certainly isn’t more important code than XFree86. Obviously, this metric isn’t perfect either, but LOC really, really sucks. Please refrain from using it ever again in supporting any argument.
Last, I’d like to point out that we Linux and GNU users shouldn’t be fighting among ourselves over naming other people’s software. But what the heck, I’m in a bad mood now. I think I’m feeling sufficiently obnoxious to make the point that GCC is so very famous and, yes, so very useful only because Linux was developed. In a show of proper respect and gratitude, shouldn’t you and everyone refer to GCC as ‘the Linux compiler’? Or at least, ‘Linux GCC’? Seriously, where would your masterpiece be without Linux? Languishing with the HURD?
If there is a moral buried in this rant, maybe it is this:
Be grateful for your abilities and your incredible success and your considerable fame. Continue to use that success and fame for good, not evil. Also, be especially grateful for Linux’ huge contribution to that success. You, RMS, the Free Software Foundation, and GNU software have reached their current high profiles largely on the back of Linux. You have changed the world. Now, go forth and don’t be a nag.
Thanks for listening.
You don’t want to be known as a nag, do you?
have you heard of plan 9 and 9 front? What about gnu/Hurd?
Ooh gnu/Hurd, I heard that was coming out soon.
😂
I use Ubuntu. Wtf are you dorks gonna do about it?
Nah our lord and savior is Linus Torvalds and hes here to offer you Linux as his gift from the gods :3
The economics of a social platform relies on growth over time and Lemmy is growing at the perfect pace because it’s not a single entity but a collaborative entity.
Once bigger federations break through to the mainstream market you’ll see the relevance of smaller federations growing along with it as it becomes a ‘bigger’ ecosystem
Mentioned in the comment section below what is necessary for community growth and it doesn’t require millions, only a few hundred active members.
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Happy cake day
