How many millions of users does it have? How many posts? How active are they?
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.
Active enough 🤷♂️
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.
…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.
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.
So active that I always recognize the 100 or so usernames that are everywhere
To be fair, that happens on Reddit as well.
You’re one of us too!
These sort of comments always make me wonder who recognises my nick. A ranking of ‘user-recognition’ would be fun. Though obviously impractical.
Heyo!
So do I!
The answer is (currently) ~42k monthly active users.
The real answer: https://lemmy.ca/post/35073012
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.
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.
Not sure, but compared to about a year ago, it seems more active.
It feels most active the month after June 12, 2023. Then it kinda got quieter
According to the fedidb, it’s about the same.
I am seeing slow and steady growth in the areas I follow.
Anyone saying that it’s even a little bit close to an adequate level for anything other than politics and star trek are lying to themselves.
I dunno, seems pretty good for queer spaces and shitposting, but I guess .world doesn’t know much about either.
I block politics, news and star trek.
Then the rest of the content is visible
Don’t forget to mention Linux. Literally eveywhere.
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
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.
[email protected] help active posters to discuss common issues
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.)
- [email protected]
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[email protected] can help to find communities
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’m practically a fixture on Lemmy, and I view everything sorted by newest comments so I see only new posts and posts actively being participated in through replies and I’d say it’s only slightly less active than Reddit appearance wise. Surely there is less things being posted over all, but I can just refresh the page every few seconds and get entirely new posts almost every single time, barring a few hours in the middle of the week.
I know that someone has a statistic site for Lemmy that could actually show you exactly what you wanna know, but I haven’t saved the URL and don’t know it off the top of my head.
Reddit is very quiet lately, probably due to school breaks
The dips I see on Lemmy are probably from people actually working. I at least have a job where nobody cares if I use my phone because I can still work while fucking around on it, so long as it’s not in the dining room where customers can see me.
Can confirm that sorting by new comments makes it appear a lot more active. There’s a reason why old forums’ only sorting method was thread bumping.
