Current breakdown at the time of this post sorted by the number of monthly active users:
- lemmy.world: 101,013 total users / 27,472 active users
- lemmy.ml: 41,972 total users / 4,905 active users
- beehaw.org: 12,270 total users / 4,178 active users
- sh.itjust.works: 17,509 total users / 3,381 active users
- feddit.de: 8,675 total users / 2,935 active users
- lemm.ee: 10,348 total users / 2,751 active users
- lemmynsfw.com: 22,967 total users / 2,310 active users
- lemmy.fmhy.ml: 8,777 total users / 1,704 active users
- lemmy.ca: 5,072 total users / 1,656 active users
- programming.dev: 5,058 total users / 1,242 active users
That’s pretty cool.
I’m truly not being a negative nancy but the last time I checked reddit had 400M user accounts. We should be comparing active user numbers, but either way, this is a drop in the bucket and reddit rightly does not consider Lemmy a threat to its supremacy at this point.
We’re doing great though! Good trajectory.
I don’t need Lemmy to compete with or kill Reddit. All I wanted was any one platform to get enough of an influx of users to be self-sustaining even after the outrage started to die down, which appears to have been successful.
Yeah as long as we have an active enough community here it doesn’t matter what goes on at reddit.
It kinda does in that when things worsen, more people come to Lemmy, but I agree that Lemmy’s success doesn’t depend on reddit’s demise.
It should behave as a viable and threatening adversary for reddit. As long as reddit carries on doing as it does and lemmy’s communities carry on building, we’re winning by blocking Reddit’s monopoly on mainstream forum-type social media.
I guess what I’m saying is: Lemmy won’t kill reddit, reddit will kill reddit.
Yea, but that is how most large organizations fail. Just by sheer inertia they continue to exist. Digg failed because of Digg, not because of Reddit.
Exactly. I don’t want or need to build another McDonalds or Starbucks; I just want to go to the Mom and Pop down the road without worrying if they’ll tank.
Great analogy
This is exactly it
I agree. Just give me some decent posts and discussion. For niche things I can go to a big platform with all the users. For my daily browsing, I appreciate a small but active community.
That actually tracks, since lemmy is supposedly populated mostly by “older nerdy males”. I mean they have a point, the quality of discussion is definitely better – for now. That could end with an Endless September event.
I agree, reddit got too big to be fun. That said lemmy still needs to get bigger in order for communities to actually thrive.
I disagree. What made Reddit for me is that there were so many people on it, than any niche hobby had it’s own space.
Sure the main big subreddits were shit shows, but the hobby subreddits were great! Something that still isn’t a thing for Lemmy. Specialization.
I still find myself checking Reddit out for subreddits on specific niche games for example.
Like there is literally a subreddit for almost anything. Robot vacuums. Sins of a Solar Empire. Crusader kings. Fish tanks. MotoGP.
Things that probably will take a while to get running on Lemmy.
Right now Lemmy is too “general” for me to really have a feed of things I actually care about.
The 40k community is pretty solid here and growing
You’re right, Reddit has a lot of established communities. But if you were going to start a new community? I think it’s all downhill from here.
The niche hobby subreddits and the small games ones are still king on Reddit, in my observation.
Exactly. Well said. We have all the time in the world to grow. What we needed was a good start, and we got it. Just keep creating content, volunteer to mod somewhere, and don’t look back.
What it really needed was a good app.
It’s still glitchy though… like on memmy, if you swipe too far to downvote, and go back, the color for upvote is still the downvote color
I tried a few different apps but I settled on just using the mobile website on my phone. The interface is solid even there, which I think is a great feat.
I’ve only just been able to log into this account using private mode, I only just realised that emptying the cache would’ve worked or something - but the weird thing is my account wasn’t working on mobile apps either so I didn’t think to empty cache on desktop…
Sync for Lemmy can’t come soon enough.
Personally I don’t care if I’m talking to millions of people vs hundreds of thousands as long as there are enough people to make it feel alive and like a community.
Exactly. I don’t give a fuck about Reddit any more. I’d rather be in a niche community with (some) quality content than on some huge site with mainly reposts. We’re not in competition with Reddit. Were trying to be a better alternative.
It’s a hard habit to break, because we’ve been trained to think this way for years, but try to remember: we don’t need to attract millions of users to be valuable. This isn’t a commercial enterprise. We don’t sell advertising. We don’t measure success by the number of eyeballs we can promise paying customers.
What matters now is the quality of conversation. In fact, that’s the ONLY measure of any consequence. It’s strange, because in the past, someone’s often tried to use services like this as a way to make money, or as a way to make something else they were selling more attractive. We expected it. It was always in the back of our heads. It even got to the point that if a company did something that wasn’t an effort to increase profitability, we criticized them. Generosity, real generosity, was alien to us.
It’s hard to wrap your head around the idea that people volunteer their time and money to build and maintain the fediverse, simply because they want us to be able to communicate. That’s it. There’s no hidden agenda. There’s no quest for profit at our expense.
I’m perfectly fine with the fediverse growing slowly. I don’t want it to be strained beyond what the mods can handle. Bigger isn’t necessarily better.
Coming from the non-profit world, it is never that easy. Even when there is no one officially making any money, there are people who will see it as a way to make some bank. There is also a drawback in that not making money can and will affect the amount of time people can put in unless there is a fair way to get them compensation. Volunteering also brings a huge amount of interpersonal and inter-organizational drama. That is why grassroots organizations and movements have a habit of fracturing into smaller groups.
At the same time, there is power in goodwill and being non-profit. You just really need to be careful in vetting your instance and keep an eye on issues in a way people not used to this type of world are not familiar with.
But I wouldn’t be here if I didn’t have a belief that it could be successful enough as a community. I also wouldn’t have been working in the NGO world for the past decade if I didn’t believe in that. But let’s not have too rosy glasses on. Growing slowly will also give this community a chance to work out the kinks and not die in a blaze of fire.
In the case of social network like this, bigger generally is better for the users. The thing that made Reddit great was that whatever your niece interest, there was a community of thousands of other interested people. There was so much information and advice on whatever obscure topic.
There’s a reason why there’s only around 10 really popular social networks and it’s certainly not that those platforms are any good. The network effect is important.
Agreed on the need to adjust mindset. Initially I behaved similarly to how I did on that other site until I realized that Lemmy is different and that’s ok. It’s a lot smaller and federation has its advantages and drawbacks and we’ll see it in action soon enough. Many seek the comfort of the familiar and are not always finding it. Start by appreciating the hard work that has allowed many of us to transition here quite easily. Take a deep breath, look around and realize that we are now playing a different game.
Yeah. It is kind of weird at first. You and I have PRSD - Post Reddit Stress Disorder.
I personally don’t derive any value from high quality conversations about topics I don’t care about. That’s why I need these millions of users, so that there are people I can talk with. About topics I care about. I’m willing to go on a limb here an say that your interests and mine don’t fully align.
That’s a reasonable point.
for me i’m over comparing to Reddit, I’m just looking for somewhere in a similar format but without a bunch of the issues that I can enjoy
I’m truly not being a negative nancy but the last time I checked reddit had 400M user accounts. We should be comparing active user numbers, but either way, this is a drop in the bucket and reddit rightly does not consider Lemmy a threat to its supremacy at this point.
Even when considering accounts across all lemmy instances, it still only combines for a total of 2 million. But overall I’m optimistic about lemmy’s trajectory too.
The other thing is, how many of those 400M accounts are bots?
A fuckton. Also I created over 10 accounts over the years as I left reddit and came back. So I know that number is bloated af.
Or dropshippers. Or karmawhores
Or my personal favorite: karmawhoring bots reposting content stolen from other peoples’ OnlyFans accounts.
Right lmao. And to what end? Are people making money off of it? Or is this truly karma whoring at its most basic level?
I went back onto Reddit today and like 20 posts in popular had 5k+ comments. I really miss the variety but, we’ll get there.
On a good day maybe 500 of those are quality comments and the rest are bots, emojis, trolling, or general meme/shit post comments.
I get what you mean though.
How many did they have when they were the age Lemmy is now?
I kinda don’t agree that that would provide any valuable insight unless you factor in the ease of access to the internet and speeds and availability of smartphones and computers across the world back when reddit was in its infancy
It would provide more insight than comparing their current figures. When Uber started, if you compared the number of people that got taxis in those first months to Ubers numbers you’d have bet on Uber to be out of business in months.
Some thoughts on that, Reddit has half a billion monthly active users. Lemmy has about 50k monthly active users. That’s .01% or one ten thousandth. We won’t be displacing Reddit anytime soon, but then we don’t want to. That’s the main problem with Reddit, it’s too damn big and too damn corporate. The main thing is Lemmy sees enough growth to stay relevant and viable. It doesn’t have to compete with anyone.
I did rm -r * / the first time I ever jailbroke an iPhone by spazzing and hitting enter before I’d finished typing the full command. (I’m terrible at mobile typing.) I’ll never forget the full body sweat that put me in immediately.
Did that once many years ago on a Linux system, wanted to delete a directory tree, but I was logged in as root and didn’t realize I was at the root prompt. Wiped out the whole drive. Not a big deal since it was just a test install so I was being careless anyway.
Back then Linux didn’t protect root from making stupid mistakes. I think now you need another switch to actually delete the root directory. I’ve since gone to using FreeBSD mainly and I haven’t tried it there, but I think at root as root you can still wipe the drive with that command. FreeBSD is less idiot proof than Linux. I think iOS is based on BSD Unix, isn’t it?
Woof. I’m glad I’m not the only one that’s done these things!
I want to say that you’re right, but I’m not NEARLY as familiar with *BSD or it’s history as I am with Linux. My understanding, though, is that iOS/macOS are based upon Darwin, and that Darwin derives a fairly significant portion of its code base from BSD. So, in part I believe the answer is yes.
As a total side note: do you have a recommendation for a good BSD derivative distribution to try? I’ve tried probably 15 Linux distros, but never made it to BSD-world!
do you have a recommendation for a good BSD derivative distribution to try?
The thing about BSD is it’s fully POSIX compliant which can be good and bad. The good is it’s highly consistent in terms of architecture and how things operate. The bad is standards constraints can limit flexibility. Linux is somewhat POSIX compliant, but has a tendency to go off the rails at times. In any case if you’re comfortable with Linux you’ll be comfortable with BSD right out of the gate.
Linux can suffer a lot from fragmentation due it’s market bazaar style development. FreeBSD is run by a single entity responsible for design top to bottom. There’s been some big changes to Linux in modern times I don’t really care for (such as systemd). With BSD you always know what to expect. You won’t get blindsided by some off the wall change in architecture or design which happens a lot with Linux.
There’s a number of BSD distributions that are open source and free. The main open source BSD distros are FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD, and DragonFly BSD. FreeBSD is most popular and is designed to be good all around. It’s probably going to have the best device support, but other BSDs can have other strengths. For example DragonFly BSD is stronger for desktop use.
Honestly the best application for BSD is in a sever or development environment. Linux is more advanced when it comes to support for desktop use. Though I think BSD provides a much cleaner and consistent operating system as it conforms to specific standards. You can get it to work well for desktop use with a little extra work and preselection of compatible hardware.
I mean, it’s more of a threat than it was. In all likelihood, this won’t be the last time reddit does something to really anger it’s userbase. There is a much higher chance of people leaving in future incidents if there is an alternative platform with enough users to actually have the content people want.
We’ll get another flood of people once they finally axe old.reddit
and nsfw content
No, what we should be comparing is Reddit year 1 numbers with these. They’ve had 20 years to grow organically. I bet Lemmy’s start would look a lot more promising than Reddit’s. And Reddit also had much larger competitors when it came out, if you recall.
I had 3 Reddit accounts and I can’t be the only one with multiples.
I think the stat is actually 430M monthly active users. https://www.businessofapps.com/data/reddit-statistics/
It’s nuts.
Quite–that’s why active is a better metric. And as others have stated, metrics maybe don’t even matter; or they misrepresent.
My point was only for those who want to know the fate it Lemmy as it compares to Reddit: Reddit doesn’t care right now. They’re not going to feel the pain of the bleed for quite a while yet
so, like, 500,000 after deducting OF thots?
Do we know how many of those accounts are bots? I’m curious because I definitely ended up interacting with many many bots recently on that site.
Nobody’s ever gonna have an accurate answer.
Hello… beep boop
On a user-driven platform, not all users are created equal. Lurkers bring little to no value to the platform beyond clicks. There might be a huge engagement difference on a per user basis.
Moreover… I just want my niche communities to be active. We will never have Reddit’s archive of content, but we can get to a point where the Lemmy’s corpus of knowledge grows to at the same rate as Reddit’s. I don’t know how many users it’ll take to achieve that; 500k? 1m? 2m? 10m? No one knows that number, but to me that is the number to beat.
Have to agree with others, we don’t want the majority from reddit here. They helped to turn reddit into crap.
I would rather see this be like the Linux community. Just a few percent of users, but all very motivated and interested in Linux.
I make new reddit accounts everyday.
I’m working on a bot that makes them for me and manipulates votes.
Fuck reddit.
Sorry dude, you’ll have to subtract one unfortunately. I created a NSFW account to have two different home feeds.
Apologies for the inconvenience.
Ummm. I have a friend that has a 2nd NSFW account too.
You and I must have the same friend ;)
“Of course I know him, he’s me”
I though I was me? This is getting confusing.
Make that 233 999 and one duplicate account by @[email protected]
Plus100.000 from threads which is part of the fediverse (maybe)
Threads isn’t federated yet, and this is just counting lemmy numbers anyway.
I know, I was just taking a piss of threads. I had to uninstall it cause it was clogging my phone, not joking. It’s true shit code
You and me both brother… Plus my dumbass might have made one user for pornlemmy and and other for lemmynsfw. I need to be learned
“I need to be punished”
Is lemmynsfw down? I can’t log in with my alt account
Do you have 2FA enabled on it?
Nope, works for me
Only two?
That’s how it’s meant to be.
A master, and a baiter.
More than just, I have accounts on 3 of those 10.
Why? There’s porn and general stuff. And this dichotomy is beautiful. Like yin and yang.
I created my lemmy.world account first, but I like the site name for sh.itjust.works so I have one there too.
I’ll probably make a professional identity alongside my personal identity. So two total. Yeah.
In my case:
feddit.de didn’t update and as soon as I switched to another account I couldn’t login again
So I created one on shitjustworks. (which ended up with the same problem, but I wouldn’t want to have a third sfw-account so I just waited until it resolved)
And I wouldn’t be surprised if there was another old account of mine on feddit.de from a time where lemmy was just this weird thing some people in r/berlin linked to
I think it’s okay, since people on all platforms create multiple accounts and throwaways.
Have a separate account on burggit.moe and lemmynsfw for this exact reason. Plus a lot of alt accounts on instances that are defederated (different usernames for each).
I think I can confidently say now that this is a legit Reddit alternative
Not to be the fly in the ointment, but you can’t really just add those up and expect that number to be accurate if we’re trying to look at unique users within the fediverse. If I had to hazard a guess, a not-so-insignificant chunk of those probably overlap (i.e. users who have made multiple accounts across several instances). I have made an account across lemmy.world, lemmy.ml, kbin and fedia just as backups in case one instance fails. I might be an extreme case having 4, but pretty sure it’s becoming increasingly common for people to have at least 2 accounts (1 on a different instance).
With this same logic in mind, I’d assume almost the entire population of lemmynsfw should be disregarded from this count, which is almost certainly majority comprised of people’s porn alts that they want to keep separate from their main accounts.
Hey, I resemble that remark…
If anything, I’m betting the population of lemmynsfw is more representative of the number of unique accounts across all instances since there’s really no point in creating more than one porn account.
Pfft, I’m horny on main 24/7 baby
Yeah, you’re not wrong. Too bad we don’t have unique user data to know for sure.
That’s why I sorted by active users (users who comment or post, not lurkers) instead to get a more accurate picture with the given data. For example, sh.itjust.works has more users than beehaw.org, but it’s ranked below beehaw because of fewer active users.
I think eventually instances with a lot of duplicate accounts will slowly fall out of the top rankings due to inactivity. That’s why I chose to look at just the top 10.
Yeah I have two accounts. But that’s when lemme.world was kind of crashing because of that update, and I thought I was doing something wrong. So I went to a different instance.
I made a bunch of accounts on a bunch of instances when I first started because I didn’t understand how they were connected. Even now, I’d suggest having one or two on the instances you like and decide which ones work best
To be fair, I am sure many people also have multiple accounts on the same instance. I am not sure what is the proportion between people opening accounts for backup like you and people just wanting alt accounts.
I don’t know if this is counted but it’s also perfectly reasonable to have accounts on defederated instances. So if this is counted that might inflate the numbers a bit.
yeah same, i made an account on 3 instances, since i see some instances being trigger happy with defederating, its just not clear yet which instances will be the most free.
How many if you include kbin?
Kbin adds another 63k.
Impressive
But remember too some people have multiple accounts and are active across at least 2.
I have 4 on lemmy and 1 on kbin and I have posted on all 5 in the past week.
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Tech enthusiasts tend to make up the early adopters of a new social media platform, and programmers tend to have some level of passion for technology.
Threads must be the exception.
Threads is new but not novel. It’s essentially just Meta Twitter and is using Facebook and Instagram to give it automatic momentum.
I’m a little surprised the one I picked made it lol
Hell yeah! Not sure if I’m active or not though
“Active users” in these sort of metrics tend to just be one sort of post/comment in the past 30 days, so probably!
Ha, glad to see our instance made the board!
Call me when it’s 1,234,567.
But I don’t wanna make that many alts…
Yeah, me either.
I wonder how many of these are unique? I’m sure that many, like myself, have created accounts on more than 1 instance.
Everybody needs at least two. One for regular interaction, and another for porn. I mean for science.
“culture”
Culture and science.
I feel called out.
Research!
To be counted as active, you have to have commented or at least liked a post/comment, IIRC. So if you’re hopping around from one login to another within 24 hours and actively engaging on them then yes, you’d be counted more than once in these stats. If you’re just lurking, no.
I’m guessing most of the Beehaws at least have duplicates since they cut themselves off.
Why did they do that?
As a protective measure when lemmy.world got exploited.
Perhaps an unpopular opinion, but that’s looking to have been a prudent option if they wanted to avoid bad actors at all costs.
Yep, due to the uncertainty on the durability of instances, I have created my main user on a small instance to help the distribution but also backups on bigger ones.
I’m just curious what the nsfw patch does
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We should have a lemmy version of lenny face.
( ͡° ͜ﻌ ͡°)
͡ ( ͡° ͜ﻌ ͡°) ͡
͡ ͡° ͜ﻌ ͡° ͡
͡ • ͜ﻌ• ͡
͡ •̀ ͜ﻌ•́ ͡
ฅ ͡ •̀ ͜ﻌ•́ ͡ ฅ
͡ฅ •̀ ͜ﻌ•́ ͡ฅ
•̀ ͜ﻌ•́
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There is some stuff like auto expanding content and not blurring NSFW content. Simple stuff. Hoping those features will make it back up into Lemmy soon.
I’m guessing it’s the patch they did to show NSFW content whether or not the NSFW checkbox is checked.
I think that Lemmy does need more of the right exposure.
If you search for any Lemmy content on Google or Duck-Duck-Go, you don’t get any good results. This is probably because most people use Apps or secure browsers that don’t allow tracking.
Maybe Duck-Duck-Go need to have a !bang search modifier for Lemmy. https://duckduckgo.com/bangs
Doing course correction in fixing social media is a long game. It’ll take a while, and there’ll be turbulence, but this is a great start
Rather have 240k users here than 240m on reddit.
Sometimes it’s the quality of the shit posts and not the post shits.
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People who use lemmy are more likely to be power users. The people who use their reddit account once a month generally don’t know or care about the issues that caused a lot of us to migrate.
I think the users on here tend to be active on the site in general rather than just a few specific subreddits. And also the small amount of users all interacting on the same communities gives the entire site the feeling that smaller subreddits used to have. Which was always infinitely better than big subreddits will millions of users, infested with bots.
Diarrhea doesn’t always win.
Yep, reddit got too big for its own good.
Some of that prime, homegrown free range organic shit posting
Aww poor lemmy.dbzer0.com not top ten. 😭So close at #11 though!
The riches of dbzer0 shall remain hidden for now.
I’m liking the UI on their desktop site… I’m tempted to jump.
I love to new theme too 😊
How is lemmy.ca not in Canada?
We’re just behind cloudflare, the server itself and all us admins are Canadian.
It is surprising. A month ago they were Canadian servers, @[email protected] moved it to lunanode (Canadian).
Perhaps CDN was moved or the whole machine was moved to a cheaper hosting platform since it got very big from then and is under new admin management as of a week ago-ish.Edit: found the answer from @[email protected], TL:DR is CloudFlare
Correct! The server running this and all data is stored in Canada.
Here’s a blurb from a doc I’m working on:
Lemmy.ca is hosted in Canada at OVH in Beauharnois, QC with all data on a dedicated server. Backups are PGP encrypted and pushed to the OVH backup service, however these will be moved off-site in the near future.
We use Cloudflare as a security and performance layer in front of the server. They accept the traffic for Lemmy.ca through a worldwide network of ingestion points, scrub it of abusive traffic, cache the images, and pass it through an encrypted tunnel to our server. This means they can see in plain text the data sent between us including your credentials, posts, comments and images. You can read more about their policies at https://www.cloudflare.com/trust-hub/.
That seems plausible.
Found the answer.. Edited my comment to include it.
Nice to see my curiosity helped others :D
Hold on, is it not? Checking…
EDIT: Weird that it is private… But I guess that’s fine since they’re using a CDN… https://lemmy.fediverse.observer/lemmy.ca
Happy to see that my instance shows up! https://lemmy.fediverse.observer/lemmy.fancywhale.ca
The great Canadian-Dutch war. 4 people were injured and Kevin’s mom made pizza pops for everyone after.
That is very odd! The content certainly seems to be Canadian, though.
great. slowly transitioning into Lemmy from now on becuz fuck reddit
