Are there really almost 2m Lemmy users?

Daz@lemmy.ml to Lemmy@lemmy.ml – 37 points –

From https://fediverse.observer/stats

Which seems to not at all come close to representing what you might actually see on Lemmy, not that Lemmy is tiny either.

Has there been any attempt to measure the total active Lemmy userbase? This would depend on the definition of Active but any working definition would be more useful than counting account creation. Something like "posted at least once this quarter".

9

The 2m there is extremely inflated to to bot sign up spam. Back when instances were getting set up in the reddit migration there was some people that started mass signing up accounts on instances with weak security. Fediverse observer doesnt care about any of that and just shows user accounts regardless of what happens on the instance

Fedidb has a much more accurate count at ~ 400k https://fedidb.org/software/lemmy since they exclude these bot spammed instances. They also have a monthly active user count (~ 38k) based on what instances report for that stat

Check fedidb.org for accurate results.

That site says about 38k monthly active users. I'm not sure if people who only vote are counted in that number (vote-only users is actually a significant chunk).

Its based on what instances report. So instances on 0.19 or above would factor in votes into that number. Ones that arent would not (so the number has a combination of both cases)

Lemmy.world is still not on 0.19 so it might be missing a big chunk there 😅

Yeah theyre still by far #1 in terms of MAU even when not taking into account votes while everyone else is so might bump it up by another 10k

That is for the fediverse overall. Most of that comes from Mastodon. I personally have a little more faith in fedidb.org and their numbers. Also, worth noting the criteria for active users on Lemmy was recently changed to include votes, whereas before it only counted comments and posts.