Relative size comparison of social media platforms (December 2023)
cross-posted from: https://lemmy.whynotdrs.org/post/494473
Compared against the predominant incumbent social media platforms, the fediverse is very small.
information sources:
cross-posted from: https://lemmy.whynotdrs.org/post/494473
Compared against the predominant incumbent social media platforms, the fediverse is very small.
information sources:
As always, you guys are way too fixated on size.
Thing is, you have to measure from the user base on the underside, this graphic obviously uses the wrong method.
Meh. Not like there are shareholders to appraise of growth…
Here too there are misconceptions!
What's important are the hard numbers, soft metrics like user count are misleading! Some may look large at first, but hardly grow with higher engagement, while in others engagement greatly increases the size.
True. Related to that I wish there were more engagement on lemmy. Most of the posts in my stream have zero replies or 1 and it’s the bot. But let’s keep smaller numbers - quality over quantity.
We’re not filtering for quality vs quantity at the moment, more people isn’t going to change anything for the worse there.
True, it’s not at all stage where it’s likely to be a problem. The army of very old persons isn’t at the door just yet ;-)
I feel like I want to contribute, I just haven’t found the right community yet…
Same for me. I started to chit chat a bit here and there just to have some more activity but I miss a community I like to be part of.
Lemmy alone creates more content that I care about. This is fine.
Not always
Lemmy still doesn’t create enough content that I want
But I try to use lemmy more anyways
Hopefully more people will use lemmy more
It's not the size of the ship, it's the motion of the ocean.
Yeah, and let me tell you… Facebook’s motion does nothin for me, as big as it is…
Yes. Quality is the key thing about fediverse. Also - size doesn't mean everything. Black holes are small, but mighty. Lemmy sucks most of my spare time already.
My take away from this is lemmy is so good it’s actually a gravitational singularity pretending to be a social network 
Yeah technique is really important too.
So is my wife
An elite 1.5 million.
I'm absolutely fine with 1.5 million. I enjoy lemmy much more than reddit. I feel like content and conversations here are better. None of the karma farming and corporate promotion disguised as natural content.
Although you're correct, I find fediverse lacking in the department of the more niche stuff, e.g. fandoms of specific games, communities by geo proximity, obscure hobbies.
But well, Reddit wasn't like this from the start and I hope the diversity and smaller communities will be here instead of there with time.
Former r/fountainpens Reddit refugee here, and I agree 1.5m users doesn't generate the kind of traffic for my hobby to figure in any sort of way. I miss the engagement
Yep, I used to be on r/diyhotas and that was already a niche within the HOTAS niche within the simulator game niche 😂
While I was also part of some niche communities back in the Reddit days, thanks to Lemmy, I switched to Linux and have found interesting new websites, tools and apps. So I'd say overall it's a net positive.
People need to realize that it's okay for smaller forums to exist. Imagine if we measured fucking teamspeak servers by numbers. Would be just as ridiculous
If anything, smaller might be better in this case. We kind of have an idea of the type of demography we have here, with Reddit you could be arguing with a 9-year old in every other thread and you wouldn’t even know.
1.5 million is almost entirely Mastodon users which have no clue how Lemmy's commenting culture works so rarely contribute in a way that makes sense to both the Mastodon commenter and the Lemmy comenter/poster at the same time.
Lemmy has ~20k ish actively commenting accounts.
I'm happy with this. I feel like Lemmy is an oasis of nerds in a social media world of toxic people obsessed with all the wrong things.
das ist richtig
Bep bup! German Bot here!
"Das ist richtig" means "That is true"
Like and follow this bot so its creator may someday claw themselves out of the joyless pit they have dug themselves.
Close! Richtig is the German word for "right", not true.
In Swedish, we have the word "riktig", but I guess that's a bit of a shifted cognate, since it means "real".
I'm surprised that the fediverse is as popular as it is, I would've guessed <500k. That's awesome. I'm also shocked that Threads is apparently that popular, I completely forgot it existed immediately after it launched. I also didn't know that Snapchat still existed, so maybe I'm just out of touch on social media stuff.
Facebook forgot it existed too, they just recently made it possible to delete threads accounts without deleting Instagram
Meta realized the same thing we all realized when we came here: userbase entrenchment is significantly more difficult to overcome nowadays than it was back in the 2000s when Facebook managed to pull everyone over from Myspace.
Legitimately, it seems like the average user nowadays is so hellbent against even a modicum of inconvenience or a slightly less populated environment that they will accept literally anything. The big tech and social media platforms couldn't shake off users if they tried anymore. They can do every every shitty, anti-user, anti-consumer thing under the sun and users will bitch about it, but never, ever try an alternative.
And that's why these companies and their devs don't listen to feedback anymore. Why bother?
Threads was built on top of Instagram infra (essentially Instagram but for text posts) so it's not surprising the two accounts were intertwined. Would have made it easy to roll out an MVP (minimum viable product) when there was a need for it, and quickly iterate on it after launch. The original launch didn't even include a web version as it wasn't finished yet.
I’d like to see the breakout in the Fediverse for Mastodon vs. all others.
Thales was kind enough to provide a link:
What is a misskey?
Japanese fedi server
cooler mastodon
Peertube is bigger than I thought!
https://fedidb.org
Mastodon is by the biggest contributor to Fediverse as a whole. Has been adopted by tons of Orgs like EU, W3C, Verge, Flipboard, etc.
The fact that I regularly recognize my fellow Lemmings by username makes it feel small, but its not too hard to find a community full of strangers either.
I'm just curious what you thought might have happened to Snapchat? What app took its place in your estimation?
I think I got Snapchat and Vine mixed up or combined in my head. I've never used either one, I thought it shut down years ago, but what I'm remembering is Vine shutting down.
WE'RE ON THE RADAR, BOYS!
LET'S GOOOOOO!
TO THE ATMOSPHEEEEEERE!And girls
WE'RE ON THE RADAR, LEMMINGS!
Baby steps are better than no steps for sure
There's no way reddit has more "real" users than Twitter // X. Maybe with bots but half the shit on reddit is a Twitter screen cap or repost.
That's a strange read on Reddit. I've heard people say this before, and it's baffling.
Reddit is, and always has been, a link aggregator first and foremost. Of course it's reposts and screenshots of others sites. That's kind of the point. To bring you Twitter so you don't have to actually be on twitter.
Not to mention a supermajority of reddit users are inactive. Recap has shown that even with minimal activity, you end up in the top 1% of reddit users.
That means reddit has roughly 5 million active users. Meanwhile nearly every person that creates a lemmy account, is active too.
The 90-9-1 rule, 1% of users create content, for 9% of users to interact with (upvote, comment, whatever), while 90% exclusively lurk
This is false. There's about a 10:1 ratio of Lemmy accounts registered to lemmy accounts posting comments.
I have five lemmy accounts and only post from two. That checks out.
A couple of years ago I ended up in the 1% because of one single thing I posted 2 weeks after I signed up purely to generate some rage because so many subs needed minimum karma... Can completely attest to this.
I suppose this is related to your “users are inactive” point but I also feel like it’s more common on Reddit to have multiple/alt accounts. Hell, in my time on Reddit I think I made 7+ accounts.
Why? I feel like that would be more common on Lemmy than anything. There is an actual point in using different instances here, I don't see any point whatsoever on Reddit.
To keep your interests separate, to prevent doxing, to break up your post history, etc.
Fair, but these are all perfectly valid reasons to do so on Lemmy as well, so I still think it makes more sense to do so here than on Reddit.
I think Xitter has it's fair share of bots...
So Facebook is:
Boring Full of bots Soulless
An we are:
Real people mostly Engaged A cute little dot!
Like someone said, 1,5M people are enough for me, specially if they are mostly active and it seems they are. Are they stats for mean user activity?
Not being able to scroll recycled content all day has been hugely detrimental to me. I’ve actually started reading books again. BOOKS.
I’m so sorry, I can’t imagine how you bear it
Same. It’s amazing how much time I have when the algorithm isn’t shoving me endless content, trying to keep me engaged.
Really shows how everyone has been addicted to social media, myself included.
Quality > quantity.
The masses have been duped into forgetting that.
You can show more ads with more quantity, any ad driven platform will trend that way.
When I saw that number I was pleasantly surprised.
Wow, the Fediverse is actually visible :0
I wonder how long it'll take before we finally collectively reject the SV ethos that size is the only metric that matters and success is only achieved via monopoly...
There was a time when Usenet and BBBses and IRC was tiny and yet people still found value through community in those places.
Maybe, and I know this is a wild idea, platforms don't have to include every human on the planet to be meaningful, relevant, or valuable.
this was very comforting to read
Lately I've been seriously thinking about resurrecting my FidoNet node. It looks like FidoNet still exists!
Nice! I just played through Road To Gehenna and it really made me want to do a modern BBS equivalent.
FidoNet does still exist, but it's commonly called "fight-o-net" for a reason, as there are... some characters there.
If you do resurrect your node, I'd suggest also picking up FSXnet, as it's the second largest network, is better maintained, and has a no-politics-or-religion rule that makes it way more pleasant to be on.
Or, you know, you could call one of the BBSs out there, and make a sysop's day by being a user, as non-sysop users are not super common, at this point. You can try my BBS at http://bbs.stormbbs.com or telnet://telnet.stormbbs.com, if you'd like to see FSXnet and FidoNet in their current lives.
But there are plenty of other BBSs out there, too, and my BBS is really only special because I have an ANSI calendar with a different graphic every day that I made 370-ish graphics for. It celebrates a holiday every day.
And if you're wondering about BBS networks in general, I recently found out about https://clrghouz.bbs.dege.au/domain/list , which has way more info than I was expecting about what the available FTN networks look like.
I was an avid Reddit user but dropped it like a stone in the kerfuffle - it took a while but Lemmy has now replaced that 90%
I'd love to see a content propagation analysis.
My sense is that a ton of new memes are first shared on Lemmy then shared across to other social media.
..Ok, so the niche forums don't have critical mass yet, and you'd have to post to some general thread to get any response - but all the cool and thoughtful people are here, so the level of general discourse is higher, I love it.
I hear this one loud and clear. I was on the internet in 95, and worked in SV for 20 years, and when I saw the small number for Lemmy in this graphic it made me happy.
Same. We don't need to be 500m
There are dozens of us! Dozens!!
It does feel like a small pond, but it’s a nice one, with smart fish.
I must confess to missing the vastness of Reddit, but I'll never go back. The company I keep here is better, by far.
I'm trying fast-forward and imagine how we'll end up also hating lemmy in the future.
And a how do you do to you too dear Doctor.
The Germans have a word for us too!
Fuck Spez.. amirite ? Guys?
If you've been to Reddit since the API meltdown, it's pretty clear that large sections of it were fucked by angry moderators, and still remain that way. I don't think the fediverse was ready to take over, but Reddit very clearly has fewer people working for them for free.
Specifically, there are several subreddits where they used to be strict about submissions, and now they let anything mildly related in.
I'm honestly pretty surprised that they still haven't recovered. At this point, I'm hoping that their mediocrity will continue to push people away until Lemmy can catch up.
I think the struggle is that we still need to build more tools for the fediverse ecosystem. I've been building Lemmy frontends but it's a big lift to make a world class experience for users, moderators, instance owners, etc.
Progress is being made, but I agree that Lemmy was not prepped for the wave of Reddit users.
With the way this graph is looking spez is pounding your ass to the bone and is about to give you an aneurysm. fuck spez has been given an entirely new meaning
Not really. Here's some statistics from reddit itself.
If you even have minimal activity, according to reddit recap you'll be in the top 1% of reddit users for that year. With that one can conclude that reddits true userbase, can not exceed 5 million.
Reddit in its usercount counts all accounts, including banned ones that have long been replaced by ban evasion accounts. This and the sites old age leads to grossly inflated numbers.
Want even more damning numbers for reddit? Well the maximum participation for r/Place (read, everyone who even as much as viewed the event. Not even participating.) Was 1.9 million. Considering how intensly it was promoted it is likely people would have clicked on the giant banner notification. That means out of the less than 5 million active users, 3.1 million didn't even glance at the giant event that has been promoted with massive popups, banners and shiny symbols over the reddit page.
I know it's not the full truth(maybe?) but I feel like we're not attracting the worst kind.
And you know what?
One and a half million people, I can work with that. I know it's not going to stay that number but it's seriously enough for anyone, except some soul-less megacotp ofc.
Yay! I love it!
Also I am very much impressed how much content this small number of users can generate.
Bots, lots of bots xD
But I thought that was the excuse we were using for why Reddit still has lots of users?
Not attacking you, just pointing out the ludicrousness of everyone saying that all of Reddits accounts are bots when Lemmy is full of them as well.
99% of posts on Lemmy only ever see a comment from that annoying arse tldr bot.
That bot alone is probably the most active Lemmy account around.
I turned off the ability to see bot accounts in my lemmy setting and it has vastly improved my experience
Do you do this through the webpage or through an app?
I did it on the web page
So I go to lemm.ee the website then go to all my account settings from (I think) that little hamburger menu
then where there’s all the checkboxes one will say “show bot accounts” and just uncheck that
I browse exclusively on mobile and both on Avelon and Memmy I haven’t seen bot posts. Comments it’s a coin flip imo
It's not the size of the fanbase, but the quality of its media and the community of its users.
TBF explodingheads and lemmygrad exist.
Can't wait until the ability to block instances is introduced.
I personally believe that communites such as lemmygrad and people like the main developer are driving people away from lemmy
It's nuts how a difference of hundreds of millions of people doesn't actually feel like a ton more people or provide any better quality except in some niche spots
I already saw this happening on Reddit. The largest subreddit were filled with generic posts. They got a lot of content, not necessarily good content. But there were plenty of small or medium sized subreddits that had much better content. The Fediverse feels like it is missing the big subreddits. It also feels too small to have the small niche subreddits. What is here in terms of content feels more like a few medium sized subreddits.
Just responding to what you say about generic, but lately when I lurk reddit the only stuff I see is REALLY generic Relationship stuff (front page without log in o/c) and recycled OAF memes.
This is a good point. My interactions with the Fediverse over the last few months has been sublime. Maybe users here are just proportionally more active?
Numbers are nice, but they're not everything. Yeah, we could onboard 2 billion lurkers, but how would that improve anything?
You're unlikely to be in conversation with hundreds of millions of people at a time; or even thousands of people. Conversations happen with just a handful of people. So those platforms with billions of people perhaps allow for some ultra-niche subgroups, but otherwise are just providing a lot of low-value noise with the additional people.
we really need to stop calling it formerly Twitter and just call it Shitter.
he ruined the platform, the people can ruin a name
Xitter
It was ruined long before he touched it
It just made it worse faster
Twitter's best days were about 10 years prior to Elon buying it
Why this many people use Snapchat is incomprehensible
There are so many good messenger apps and all of them, Snapchat's giant userbase remains
I use it for the same reason I use anything, the people I talk with are there. I already drew a hard line in the sand with some devices and Windows.
Hell, why do this many people use LinkedIn? The whole platform was built off of scraping Windows user's address books without permission, sending unsolicited emails to all of those contacts using the name of that user, and pretending like they were such a great platform that of course your friends are inviting you to also join. And I'm pretty sure they still use this practice today because I continue to get emails from people who have no idea why their name is being attached to the spam I receive.
LinkedIn is very useful for job searching and networking. I don't post on there, but it was key to getting several job offers.
I'm not aware of any other professional social networks.
LinkedIn is a “need” for the ones wanting a job and trying to tell their new job /company is the best. Once these needs are satisfied they forget about it and only come back when the need arises again.
I’m in IT management at my company, the general management and HR folks basically require anyone in a leadership position to have a filled out LinkedIn profile with it linked to your Office account so it shows up in your outlook card and linked in your signature. So we look “professional and tech-driven” since all social media is lumped in with the tech industry for some reason
I really hate it but I still have active group chats that I haven't had luck getting elsewhere. I get the impression it's the same for most people because I haven't heard anyone say anything positive about it in years
Different generations choosing different platforms I guess: >40 using facebook and <25 joined Snapchat.
Don't know why you got downvoted. There is absolutely an "age" component to why people use a certain platform.
Social platforms have enormous retention leverage also. Once all your friends are there...
The age component is absolutely a reason and so is the leverage of the community and friends like you said. No doubt about it. It’s herd mentality and FOMO. Finally it is also how easy to get in and stay sucked in. These other platforms have the dopamine trigger game figured out on their apps. Fediverse doesn’t have that so much, other than the organic “did someone reply to me?” feeling. If you don’t engage then fediverse is not pulling you in.
Ngl FB Messenger is way better than Snapchat.
I don’t like Meta but at least the app feels like it isn’t making its users even more ADHD by the minute
There is an interesting, and almost universal phenomenon on reddit that every time a subreddit gets past about 40,000 subscribers, the discussion quality immediately drops off a cliff, unless extremely harsh moderation policies are implemented to explicitly weed out low effort content which brings its own set of problems.
My theory on why this occurs is the scaling power of moderation. I think you computer people are probably very familiar with the concept of scalability, and that size is its own challenge at the hyperscale. So for a centralized system like Twitter or Instagram or Facebook, moderation can only scale vertically, so a huge moderation team is needed to contend with the scale of these platforms alone, which also forces the need of personalized recommendation algorithms to promote this that are actually interesting to individual users.
Reddit was able to partially avoid this phenomenon with the subreddit system, which means everyone was able to effectively manage their own, smaller subgroups who shares common interest without intervention from the site admin/mods to achieve a form of pseudo-horizontal scaling. You can also see the success of that with Facebook Groups, which are one of the few reasons why people still use Facebook for social media even though they do not want to interact with the current Facebook audience.
Lemmy, and the rest of the fediverse platforms would suffer the problems even less, as now every group admin can now be completely independent from one another, which means that real horizontal scaling can be achieved and hopefully preserving the discussion quality to a degree as it grows.
IMHO, the other part of the problem is that spicy hot-takes quickly get engagement from other users and bubble up to the top. And a lot of those spicy comments are trash, but not in violation of rules, so mods leave them up.
You can see that clearly with both Twitter and reddit. There is no worse feeling than spending time to write something with thought only to not have anyone interact with these posts at all, while tired one-liner and ragebait gets a ton of likes and comments.
However, Lemmy's algorithm doesn't really punish writing long form contents the same way reddit does from my experience, so I feel more free to take a little bit longer to write out my thoughts here compared to elsewhere.
One way I thought of to encourage long form content and high quality, is to limit the number of short form content from users.
I imagined every week users would be granted 14 comments that are limited to 250 characters and unlimited long form content. You could also grant more short form comments with every long form comment or with every new oc post.
The only issue would be that long form does not mean high quality and with chatgpt it'll be easy to create long form posts. Maybe an AI system that evaluates the quality of the post could work but then gaming the system would happen.
Just a thought I had, the numbers about the length and amount of posts could be optimized or use an AI
I like that you're describing an anti-Twitter, where people have to express themselves in over 250 characters, rather than under 140 or 280.
Just saw a meme the other day about how the old mantra "Don't feed the troll" seems to have fallen by the wayside and about 90% of the issues on the internet right now are caused by that.
This is a big thing killing my interaction with Lemmy as well. I want to like it, but I drop into a discussion thread and the top-engaged/boosted comments are spicy and almost designed to promote maximum anger. And I feel like, "Do I really, really want to spend significant time writing out a deeper comment to engage with this community...?"
great comment!
i tend to agree. i think the fediverse is probably the best model moving forward. it is a challenging problem!
'LinkedIn'
LinkedIn is as much Social Media as talking with your manager is Socializing.
It's really plastic and fake feeling there, more so than anywhere else.
Since when does "plastic and fake" means it's not social media?
yes but it doesn't always feel like it.
LinkedIn feels like Uncanny Valley social media.
Like there are Alternates there trying to imitate human interactions.
Life is plastic, it's fantastic.
All Social Media = Plastic and Fake.
Flood it with memes
I mean it's a far better place to network and interact with professional statuses and companies than other social networks. I like the Fediverse but I also have a work related presence on LinkedIn.
Let's not pretend that the degenerate comment section in YouTube is peak high society though.
Or really any place where strangers mostly zing each other. It's just like the opposite extreme of linked in
I think this is great. It might be 1/1000th of these other systems, but I think the fediverse is at a tipping point where I'm not seeing the same things every day. I don't think critical mass needs to be a ranked competition.
I feel like tgere was an exodus recently because Isaw more interaction with posts.
Some AskLemmy posts had >200 comments.
I'm surprised Reddit is bigger than Xitter. Is that mostly because people have been leaving the Musk project in recent years?
As far as I'm aware, twitter has actually been a lot smaller in terms of users than you might imagine from its influence.
It has a relatively low number of active users, but the fact it's designed to be a centralised public forum (rather than users being selective who can follow them like Facebook) means it is/was very attractive for businesses, celebrities and politicians.
Also that -- thanks in large part to movements like the Arab Spring using Twitter to organize and publicize -- it became the go-to social media for reporters. The news -> celebrity -> news cycle closes itself nicely there, making it very difficult for either group to go anywhere else.
Can we please try to deadname Twitter harder? As a person who had an x in their name, it’s really annoying to have some dickhead copyright it
Does that mean you changed your name?
Since you posted it in a selfhosting community, this is the feeling I get:
Quick, everyone get more friends and grow that family!
more =/= better quality, if anything this might suggest the opposite.
LinkedIn has over a billion users. I got a t-shirt for it.
I'm surprised it's considered social media. I only go there looking for work. Sure there are some posts that are social. But seems mostly geared to getting jobs and networking from a business perspective.
I'd argue that Twitch and Youtube are less a social media than LinkedIn. Twitch/Youtube is video streaming with interactive chat. That's it.
That's just my definition though. Yours may vary.
I see your point. The difference for me is the substance of the content. If the site was geared towards just something it's just a website. But it having content about anything makes it kind of social to me. I hear you though. I see where many of these don't fit into social media.
It's cozy here :)
Your father smells of elderberries.
Why bluesky and threads should embrace ActivityPub.
Social media is splintering - accelerated by the fall of Twitter. It's not 2010 and a social media network is never going to be what twitter was in 2010. They'll might as well develop social media that can talk to other networks
Bluesky are never going to embrace ActivityPub... They've got their own separate federation protocol.
Yes, but I'm hoping they'll ever find a way to bridge both or change their mind.
Is this right?
Twitter and LinkedIn don’t match the Wiki data and should be inverted, and is the Wiki link correct pointing to 2021?
Hmm… could this be why I like it better?
Edit: Also, what is active users? I’m “active” on Facebook about once a month, yet on lemmy at least an hour a day. One is more active than the other depending on the threshold.
Most platforms use "monthly active users", which means a user is considered active if they use it at least once per month. If you look at articles comparing the number of users across several platforms, they'll almost always be using monthly active users.
The larger platforms like Facebook provide daily active users as well. Facebook has around 3 million monthly active users and around 2 billion daily active users.
Who doesn't like an underdog? 😤
Haha, now show us a map of the size of different stars compared to Sol (ours, in the local solar system).
Sometimes the small stars and communites are the most important. ;)
For the biggest ones: How many of those active users are bots, advertisers, and scammers? I'd guess about half on Facebook.
Also, is it considered "active" if you have a dormant account but have the app installed on your phone and it still watches what you're doing? What if you only use it to communicate with family because it's the only internet they understand?
Further, what about duplicate accounts or "secretive" secondary accounts so you can click on the depraved stuff you like without that showing in your public feed?
I feel like the real numbers for the big ones are massively inflated by issues like these.
The Fediverse is small enough to as of yet not be affected. Once it gets large enough, it will have all of this, too.
For sure.
with respect to bots, as of this time I don't think it's a problem that can be fully solved, although I do think over a long enough timeline the fediverse is probably the best suited to handle that problem.
I wanted to see a visualization of the relative size comparison, so I used the data that was available on Wikipedia, but this data is approximate at best.
The Fediverse is by design affected by inflated numbers. If one user uses three different services, the user is counted three times. However, for the Fediverse it doesn't really matter - that number of total users is just as irrelevant like the total number of used email addresses.
Same with reddit. Almost everyone has throwaway accounts there.
Almost all platforms use "monthly active users" - anyone that uses it at least once per month is considered an active user. If you have an app installed but don't use it, it doesn't count. Some platforms also provide a daily active users metric.
I like to imagine a little escape pod coming out of the Reddit bubble and drifting in to the Lemmy dot representing my migration.
Praying that our mothership would just blow up already.
Damn, if only Spez didn't have fucked up Reddit. I even wanted to invest in that IPO, but now I'm not going to.
I'm surprised Snapchat is that popular. It's not something I hear about too much anymore.
it's one of the only commonly known messaging platform to most people that:
1: isn't owned by a company that many people hate, even if they don't know much about it.
2: isn't platform locked and doesn't discriminate.
3: doesn't require money or verification to use.
i can see how it's kinda settled out this way. whatsapp never caught on in the u.s. because everyone here was happy with sms and mms when the rest of the world was picking up Whatsapp. from what i understand that's literally just because texting was cheap in the u.s.. now people want more than mms, but apple is being apple about it so we need a third party app. by this point Whatsapp is owned by Facebook and the "privacy" of it is openly mocked by the average non tech person. everyone hates Facebook so the idea of willingly adopting another Facebook messenger that you're not already on seems crazy. anyone that would accept that is just going to use Facebook messenger instead. anyone that wouldn't will find something better.
Snapchat has no big controversies. no one knows who owns them. they don't really try to be more than a messaging platform. i can see why people would uncritically choose it as their default. i bet it's big among the kids who don't play that whole blue bubble iphone supremacy game, but don't use discord either. so i guess the non nerdy kids that aren't elitist dicks. that's who I'd guess uses it amongst the youth these days.
edit: before the suggestions come, I know these aren't good solutions. I'm just theorizing why. getting my friends on matrix as best i can...
And here I am, using Google messages, Facebook messenger, Whatsapp and line. And teams and discord. And steam chat.
Oof
It's the WhatsApp equivalent in the US tbh. People ask for each other's Snapchat instead of numbers sometimes these days
It seems a lot of kids these days in the US use it
Everyone at my work uses Snapchat regularly. I was pretty surprised to hear them all mentioning it as I hadn't really heard of it in years. They're between the ages of 22-40s if that changes anything.
Seriously, who on earth uses facebook? Lol
The only website on this graphic that has some actual value (apart from the fediverse of course) is youtube.
My wife uses Facebook every day.
She’s a very family oriented person and she’s gonna be wherever they are.
She’s the kind of person who wakes up and calls her mom, then her grandma, then her sisters every single day. Hell, she even talks to her nephews every day and they’re toddlers.
There really isn’t anything that compares as far as that goes.
Me? I know it's the current hotness to not be on there, but I don't get sites like Instagram / TickTock / Snapchat where its just reacting to photos and images. I want words dammit.
Didn't Facebook build infrastructure and give out free phones in India and other developing nations to get them online? I'm sure it was more to harvest their data, but I'm sure that counts pretty solidly for them
They got a service provider to let its users browse Facebook for free, but that was banned a year later for being unfair. It's still a thing in other developing counties I guess.
LinkedIn is pretty useful fwiw
Me, tbh I don't like meta but the groups in facebooks is probably what keeps me there, for example there is a group about an anime and the guys there literally translate the new volumes of the novel months faster than other piracy sites, almost in the moment, there is also the memes and other posts that only appear around those groups. Not even reddit has that content, so what keeps me attached to facebook is mainly anime groups
I do.
Look we are on the map!
There's some merit to whether those daily active accounts are people, and the quality of the folks engaged as those accounts.
Twitter has more users, and a lot of static too, like people posting pictures of their paninis. I'm also sure there's a large percentage of automated/bot accounts on Twitter; they're active, but not posting anything you'll care about. Same goes for Facebook and Reddit.... There's more but I'll stop there. I'm sure you all get the picture.
Fact is, you can have 5 billion daily active user accounts, and still have very little content anyone cares about. A nontrivial number of posts are news updates either from media outlets or business accounts/companies that are simply a mass posted and shortened version of some PR message or something with a link to the information. Simply bringing the information to people where they are, no matter how few on Twitter or FB are actually reading what they post.
I feel like Lemmy has a lot of content because the majority of accounts are real people, so there's a better capability for discussion. It may be fewer overall people, by comparison, but it is, in many ways, more valuable and entertaining.
IDK, I'm just some guy.
I see a lot of posts that are bot reposts with zero engagement. Maybe I need to find a better instance.
start blocking users and communities you don't care about, or you can auto-ignore bot users in your profile; both options should help you out quickly.
My friends hate the need to do this. It does just take a second to click into community / instance and block it and you won't be bothered again but a lot of people can't be bothered with that one second even and would rather have something simpler unfortunately
I'm on Lemmy.ca, and the "all" view shows all kinds of various instances. Most commonly Lemmy.world but others too.
It's all federated. Unless your instance is defederated then you should have access to everything that Lemmy has to offer. You just need to find how to access it.
You got to think at least 2/3 of Reddit is Bots right
Same with Facebook, them or dead accounts
LET'S GOOO
yes, but slowly.
Happy to be part of the top 1% in this case.
Damn! I didn't know so many people still use Facebook. But it still doesn't sound right. I definitely don't feel like 37.5% of Earth's population uses Facebook.
yeah, there are quite a number of people who have multiple accounts. almost everyone I know does. same goes for whatsapp and instagram. it's still a massive number nonetheless
I would have loved to see the parts that are not under the US-American influence. What are Asian, African or South Americans using?
Facebook, mostly. For China it's WeChat.
Not actually the region you asked about, but wykop.pl is actually larger in Poland, than Reddit.
For China:
Something like WhatsApp >> Youtube > Instagram > TikTok > Telegram > Facebook > Reddit > Twitter, with some variations and local additions from country to country.
I would say a good billion of Facebook users are either highly inactive, actually inactivated but Facebook is still counting them, scammers and porn bots, and dead people. Many people made an account in like 2011 and promptly forgot their password and never logged in again I'm sure. And lord knows Facebook isn't honest about anything.
I'm surprised Twitter is so comparatively small but it's also a weird site in that you literally talk into a void, at least Facebook you know your uncle is reading your post or whatever.
jThe post says monthly active users..
I don't know if they still do, but Facebook used to count viewing a web page with a Facebook "like" button as being an active user
Ok my bad. But what do they count as activity would also be a good question. Posting? Just opening the app? What constitutes activity to Satan Zuckerberg? I wouldn't be surprised if just accidentally opening the app even if you're never posting or reading counts.
Monthly active (non-human?) users?
Since 2010 i've made three Facebook accounts, deleted one and never use the other two. Active users would be a more useful metric.
It's been commented on before that, for its size, Twitter has a disproportionate influence not just on the internet but even on politics. This is still the case today because no good alternatives have emerged for the mainstream yet.
What about Pinterest? Laugh all you want but they have more users than Twitter and healthy growth, to the point where they may eventually overtake Reddit.
God I hate Pinterest.
Not only do they steal pictures in bad quality from other sites and write their website in such a way to always come out on top of search results, it also takes multiple seconds to close the webpage.
: pours one out for every dude that had a GF that lost herself to a Pinterest Interest wall: (or vice versa)
man I wish they'd keep pintrest out of google image search. yeah I know I can manually exclude their url from search but why is it there in the first place lol useless for finding reference material
I surprised Threads, LinkedIn and Snapchat have that many
Surprised to see LinkedIn's 930 million MAU! I might have heard someone mention it irl like 2 times my whole life? But maybe that's cuz I'm not in the job market yet.
It has different aspects to it. Big part of it is job hunters i believe, but i use it mostly for promotion of my research, discussion with other researchers, policy discussions and following conferences / webinars and news about climate related stuff. I use it daily.
Oh wow, I didn't know it's used for research and policy discussions as well! That's pretty neat.
Like most popular social media sites, you usually won't see very valuable discussion in the comments, at least in my experience. It's mostly for people to post news, research, and so on, and follow the big names or organizations in their field.
Most of the valuable information is diffused via posts but I do put a bit of time and effort into trying to filter out all the crap posts like memes, the faux inspirational stuff, self-aggrandizing nonsense, etc.
It's big for sales people too - I research who is the right person to contact at an organization, and also to find out what they've been up to lately that might be useful in a sales pitch.
I agree it's has the corporate and institutional side of tech news that Lemmy doesn't have.
Great graphic and thank you for sharing.
Now let's filter out bots, low quality trolls, NPCs, and content that isn't easily searchable. It's definitely an interesting diagram, and, though it is fascinating, I think its a 1 dimensional view of the social space.
I prefer to engage around ideas and topics, rather than specific users or content producers, so having a good search and topic based boards or groups immediately puts a site miles ahead for me. Reddit and Lemmy excel at this, but some of the others leave a lot to be desired. As someone who used FB to organize and manage a topic based social group in real life, with a Facebook group of 1000+ participants, FB has some good groups, but the interface is absolute rubbish and I would migrate to just about anything else if I could get people to move.
I guess my point is that we lump these together as "social media", but that's a broad category that holds some very distinct subcategories that excel at very different things.
To add to this, a supermajority of reddit users are inactive. Recap has shown that even with minimal activity, you end up in the top 1% of reddit users.
Based on that one can calculate that 99% (provably more but reddit recap doesn't go smaller than 1% on display) are inactive accounts, which means reddits true size lies at around 5 million or less. Less than 5 times Lemmy's size.
There's a reason why mentioning the word "Lemmy" on reddit gets you a shadowban now. Because they're legitimate competition.
I'm in the 1%
I'd be interested to see how different it would look if we only counted average active daily users
Especially if there was an easy way to parse out all the bots.
Facebook has like many thousands or even hundreds of thousands really dead accounts ( of dead people ), some of those accounts are just Oculus accounts as they got forced to create a facebook account, but i think those are very low in the hundreds or with low probability in the thousands.
LinkedIn isnt really a social network for me, its rather you state your past work and current work only then to get invited to 6 sessions of coding reviews.
Twitch is a entertainment platform ( like youtube ), not social media.
🤨 when did Reddit overtake Twitter? Reddit used to be a niche destination that you’d barely see it in comparison to the other big name sites.
What was twitter at pre elonification?
Growing per Statista
Is userbase proportional to area or radius?
it's area.
We’re on the map!
Slowly and steadily. This platform has potential.
Surprised a boring platform like LinkedIn has that many users.
For most it's a CV hosting platform and nothing else.
Fuck LinkedIn. It's just gross, my feed is just full of shilling.
It's pretty important career-wise, suggest this video if you're interested.
I, too, have a profile on LinkedIn, doesn't mean I use it more often than once a month or something, just to check up on notifications
Linked in is simultaneously the most useful and useless social media platform.
On one hand, you can use it to get jobs, and keep a line of contact with former/present colleagues in a professional setting (as opposed to Facebook or remembering to write down their personal email address).
On the other hand, you have the feed, which is full of the most stupid, banal, and preformative shit you'll ever see on social media, because it's all in the name of advancing your career in this superficial society of ours.
I hate it, but it has its uses.
hell yeah
Is YouTube a socmed site?
I would answer that with yes, because it has (video)posts, comments, likes, follows etc.
but i agree that it's an edge case, because many aren't using it like social media
It used to be a lot more. You were able to add friends, and video replies appeared at the bottom of the video. Old YouTube legit felt like a community of people.
Makes me wonder how they count "active users". Is watching a video active or just when you comment?
Does it allow you to be social and participate in conversations?
So yes.
The content (the videos) are also made by its users, that used to be one of the key features of social media back when the term first appeared.
I wonder how many users Matrix has?
Federated instances could be counted. Non-federated like govermental or company ones can't. So yeah, I would say 3.
Yes. Now, if we could implement an irl place without all those people as well, I think I'd like that. Everything contains idiots but I find the overall company around here at least somewhat filtered of them.
I think the people here tend to filter themselves better than places like reddit.
Having left somewhere else, they don't want the new place to suffer the same fate.
Why Facebook sucks. With those numbers you’re bound to have hundreds of millions of trolls and stochastic terrorists.
I don’t care how big or small it is, as long as it remains real.
I believe I’ve seen more organic conversation in the fediverse than I have on any other platform.
It’s either bots, ads or ad bots everywhere else.
Being tiny makes it less appealing to the megacorp cunts that would want to ruin it.
We can only imagine how the internet was to the natives before the eternal September.
if the fediverse gets to hundreds of millions of users, we'd better hope that we solve for moderation.
Don't think this is accurate. E.g how is LinkedIn bigger than Twitter?
Twitter has always been "small" but popular with people who work in the media, so you hear it mentioned on the same level as Facebook by those people, even though it's never been any where near the same size
LinkedIn is huge. Most office workers would have one
It's popular, just quiet.
So this is the Pluto of the internet?
To be honest, despite the smaller community, I feel more at home in the Fediverse than ever I did in those big, bloated, commercial communities.
Good.
Don't worry pretty soon Reddit will join us in being tiny.
So that's why Instagram is the way it is, i assumed it was fairly small but it has attracted a rather toxic userbase and i don't actually enjoy it anymore.
It used to be a place where i could share my joys and people with similar interests would follow me because they enjoy my joys too.
But now it's just tiktok, at least i assume seeing it's all reels and loud noises.
The comments under reels are more toxic than 10tons of nuclear waste
There seems to be an unwritten rule that once a video platform reaches a certain number of users, the comments become toxic.
Snap is still alive? I haven't heard name in quite a while.
Wow! Wonder if Facebook will dissapear as quickly as MySpace
Quickly? Granted, it was over a decade ago, but it took 6-8 years for Myspace to die proper , by my recollection.
I still wish I could bop over there and check in on bands that probably imploded a decade ago.
3 billion monthly active users? Bull. Bots maybe.
3 Billion Devices Run Java
I was reading the Wikipedia page linked just an hour ago.
and I was surprised to see over a billion daily users on Facebook. I used to think at best that'd be in millions.
I understand now that what do people mean when they day social media's amplification of a certain message can have great impact. I used to take it lightly, partly because I an totally detached to any of these big platforms.
and being on Lemmy is a wholly different experience.
You want to tell us something?
It’s our Pale Blue Dot
Honestly I wouldn't be surprised if there was more Fediverse users than listed.
@jersan the happiest little circle on the internet