Happy 10 million! According to FediDB, we have hit 10 million users across the Fediverse!

mesamune@lemmy.world to Technology@lemmy.world – 1925 points –
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Where they at tho?

We all know there’s barely enough people here. It’s not unusable, but there are so few people it’s always the same users posting and commenting, and it can be a bit dead occasionally.

I’m committed to the fediverse, but we could do with another big push from people dumping Reddit. Part of that would also rely on us (🫵) not being obnoxious towards the potential new users 👀

I think a lot of the refugees from Reddit are lurkers.

I heard it's something like 90% of people lurk, 10% of people comment, 1% of people post. So you need a pretty substantial population just to have enough posts and comments for the lurkers to still hang around.

It's also why it was particularly dumb of Reddit to piss off their 1% and 10%.

When I was a kid in the 70s, a lurker was a turd that had failed to flush away properly. As in : "Dad left a big beefy lurker in the toilet again." How language changes.

It's just a bad habit for me really. I'm so used to reddit immediately slaughtering anyone who doesn't conform with the hivemind even though Lemmy isn't like that

Yep, I’m part of the problem. Was super active on Reddit, dumped them, then just don’t really have the energy of fucks anymore to create content or comment really; it’s a shame…

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They're on Mastodon and Misskey for the most part.

Wait what's Misskey?

It’s a Mastodon type microblogging service but I think I read it’s popular in Japan and South Korea.

Just how many are there for micro blogging? I saw pleroma and akkoma too.

There must be a dozen or so Misskey forks. I know of Sharkey, Firefish, and Iceshrimp.

On this end we also have Lemmy, Kbin, Mbin, Piefed, and I think one or two more

Basically bloated mastodon

There are a lot of forks of Misskey which are more popular in the "West". I recommend you to have a look at Firefish, Iceshrimp, Catodon or Sharkey. Firefish used to gain a lot of traction but there was some personal drama going on with the original maintainer, causing the project to feel unmaintained for a while. Luckily the do have a new maintainer now. Anyway partially due to this problem some folk like the former community manager created a new fork Catodon. Iceshrimp also another direct fork of Firefish. So a bit of trivia from the FOSS Mastodon world. In the you might as well just use Mastodon if you are fine with the UI. But I love that we have so much variety in the FOSS ActivityPub World.

Lemmy is only 4% of the fediverse by user %. Most of the fediverse is Mastodon.

I don't get why people like the microblig format. It's so terrible for anything more than snarky quips.

I've got a mastodon account. The people I follow don't mark snarky quips. Instead, they post updates of things they are making (music, games, and comics mostly); and they share photos that they've taken, and links and comments to news that they find interesting. Compared to Lemmy, it's more personal, because when you respond you are talking directly to a person that you are likely to talk to again.

Mastodon doesn't use a personalised algorithm. So your home feed will only show hashtags and people that you follow. (There is an 'explore' feed for seeing other stuff that might be 'trending' or whatever.) So if you are seeing too many snarky quips - just unfollow the person making them.

they post updates of things they are making (music, games, and comics mostly); and they share photos that they've taken, and links and comments to news that they find interesting. Compared to Lemmy, it's more personal, because when you respond you are talking directly to a person that you are likely to talk to again.

You can do all that same stuff on Lemmy/reddit, except the comments are actually organized and readable. Trying to read a continuous comment thread on Twitter is such a pain.

It's great for space news. Just wish that would move off X

For years Reddit and Twitter were coexisting peacefully and it should be clear for everyone by now that each format has its pros and cons and they are used for different purposes. Was is a bit interesting though is that the active users gap between Mastodon and Lemmy seems to be much higher than it was/is with the corporate originals.

A lot of the thousands of Reddit comments per post were variations of ‘this!’ or inane joke responses, and I don’t miss that at all. It’s not the quantity, but the quality, and I’ve found discussions here to be more like Reddit’s early days when comment threads were more worthwhile.

But if you’re looking for the Reddit experience, I’ll help:

Came here to say this.

Not sure why you’re getting downvoted.

Username checks out

This deserves more upvotes.

I’d give you gold if I could.

Shots fired.

Nailed it.

You. I like you.

Tree fiddy.

You had one job.

That’s enough internet for today.

Happy cake day! 🎂

I have the weirdest boner right now.

Directions unclear.

Banana for scale.

5/7 with rice.

Mom’s spaghetti.

I laughed harder than I should have.

Sauce?

Someone give this man gold.

Circlejerk is leaking.

This was not my proudest fap.

What did I just read?

Risky click.

( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)

(☞゚∀゚)☞

(ಠ_ಠ)

¯_(ツ)_/¯

You dropped this: \

Woosh!

This is why we can’t have nice things.

You comment is absolutely hilarious. I never realized how much of reddit consists of these empty shells.

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I don't mind the idea of seeing the same user around. Feels more community centered

Isn't the stat that like 95% of users only lurk? You're measuring this by posters, not users, if you're going by who you see post and comment.

Shut up jerk. I’m very welcoming to new users. Old users on the other hand…

As per the website there are around 900 active users servers on lemmy I recently joined the fediverse both lemmy and mastodon and tbh lemmy is more active. Mastodon is just an echo chamber only bots are reposting from reddit and twitter.

Depends. Bronies post stuff on mastodon. But there is group of servers(with mastodon.art) that block some brony instances.

I bet half of them are Facebook's Threads.

I'm just kind of over social media. I gave this a try but I realised* I'm *the problem, not Reddit

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Everyone wishing for more users might be wishing on a cursed monkey paw. I don’t know what the sweet spot number of active users is — I want more so we can have contributors to niche communities — but there’s a tipping point. You want your favorite bar/restaurant/message boards to be popular but not too popular.

Personally I think it's more important to break big-tech's hold on online communication. Every single user who leaves a centralized platform to join the Fediverse is a win in my books! Another thing is that we never had a mainstream decentralized, nonprofit and non-algorithmic social network before afaik, I'm actually not sure if the climate will evolve like it did with the other networks.

I guess I just don't have faith in the majority's conversation. Once you have a lot of dumb people, all the content starts devolving. Especially the comments.

As a dumb myself, it's a difficult problem that I don't have an answer to.

But maybe it's a net positive. Don't spend all day on one platform. And the dumb jokes are nice for being less serious all the time. As long as there is still good conversation

Bro, we've had like 3 dozen memes at the top about Taylor Swift's airplane just in the last week. We are not exactly avoiding what I just complained about. So I guess it'll be okay

Once you have a lot of dumb people, all the content starts devolving. Especially the comments.

As long as the influx of dumb users is matched by a sufficient influx of less-dumb users to help grow niche communities, I think it might be fine. I rarely browsed the large 1M+ subreddits, and mostly stuck to the subs with a few thousand users.

Honestly I feel like the proportion of dumb people here is ever so slightly worse than it was on reddit. It feels like people here are always missing the point of everything, not getting simple jokes, arguing about dumb stuff...

Yeah, even more than on reddit.

Honestly, I’m scared of what will come of it. Lemmy is fragile and the lessons of yesteryear don’t apply thanks to AI and evolving spam methods. That said, I’m still cautiously optimistic about the future of lemmy.

I don't get the hate against algorithms, they're just a tool, can be good and bad

I'm referring to recommendation algorithms, the bad thing about them is that they can be used to manipulate people. Algorithms in general are fine of course.

recommendation algorithms are fine too, the problem with modern social media is algorithms tuned for engagement.

And which algorithms would that be?

Whatever algorithms youtube, tiktok, instagram etc. use to drive engagement. They don't have any names that I'm aware of

The problematic ones for that are mostly recommendation algorithms afaik, but there are others like gamification ofc. You can call them engagement algorithms if you want to be a bit more broad. But that's what I mean when I criticize "algorithmic" platforms, and I think that's what most people mean when they talk about algorithms in this context.

I still can’t believe we haven’t seen a @whitehouse.gov.social or whatever spring up. Why in the world would they not want to control their social media presence in house? Why allow Twitter that luxury?

If they went cold turkey on Twitter and set up @potus@whitehouse.social the posts would still end up on Twitter because people would cross post them (just like we see Twitter posts on Masto or lemmy).

At least some EU governments have started making their own accounts.

I emailed my region’s national weather service and asked that they join Mastodon and the meteorologist said they wanted to but there’s an approval process for communications and it takes awhile to add new services.

I’m basically completely off X (and haven’t had a Facebook account for years) but during a recent storm, I made a new Twitter account that just follows local government accounts. It’s annoying that the fastest way to find out about flooded roads and stuff is X and I really hope that changes soon.

I emailed my region’s national weather service and asked that they join Mastodon

Thank you for doing that!

Good meteorologist

I follow a couple of not stations that have a Masto presence, but I get where you are coming from.

Hopefully the tide will shift more this year.

I know that some people are upset about Threads federating, but I feel like some people may never end up on Masto but could have a Threads account. A local weather station, for example. But if you could simply subscribe to them via Masto without ever making a Threads account that’d be great. And the weather station gets to serve more people (the “normies” — for lack of a better word — on Threads and the nerds on Masto).

Why .social? Why not .us?

Just as an example, really.

A lot of Masto servers I’ve seen have use the .social extension. I feel like it does lend itself to letting people know what to expect when seeing a handle that ends with .social. It’s maybe an easy connection to make that that’s some sort of social media entity.

They certainly don’t have to use that type of url, but I think it’d be cool and it makes sense for what it is.

I’ve thought that news stations should do the same, too. Like an @news@cnn.social would be cool and have built in verification simply because they could lock down its users to only approved people so you’d know that @wolf@cnn.social is definitely Wolf Blitzer. No need for checkmarks.

I have no idea who Wolf Blitzer is, but for example there are social.network.europa.eu, social.bund.de and social.kernel.org. So US can use social.gov.us

Oh yeah. Making a subdomain like that also works. And maybe is even easier for existing domains.

And you don't even pay for subdomains

They really went for a double subdomain and network.europa.eu is not even a thing. Also it's insufficiently Latin. curia.europa.eu and consilium.europa.eu is proper, europarl.europa.eu already makes much less sense it should be senatus.europa.eu.

That's how registrars start cranking up the renewal price for .social domains.

#strongerICANN

ICANN's renewal fee is $0.18

.us is sketchy AF. They should use something.gov.

.gov domain should be either abolished or allowed for use by any governments. Of course US is sketchy AF.

That would be confusing. I want to be able to tell govt.nz apart from the US one.

I think their preference is to have US government under .gov.us

.gov is allowed for use by any governments that invented the internet.

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This is why I believe in some geo-located communities.
It's easier to find common ground when you're complaining about the same weather.
And then when you're interacting with the wider communities, your host community can give context to your way of thinking.

Grow more, then we can moderate the desired communities of interest so everyone will be happy.

I was on reddit for I think about 15 years. Around 30,000,000 users seemed pretty damned nice.

The unwashed masses (like myself) will eventually change Lemmy. I don’t think it will ruin it completely because the best part about having hundreds of millions of lemmings is the niche communities.

The main instances and communities are going to get shot to hell though. I’ve accepted that.

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For anyone who needs a reminder: user account ≠ human individual user. There are no bot/captcha protections nor IP restrictions on Lemmy. I'd say we have less than 1 million actual human individual users.

I'm sure people have multiple accounts too, I have more than one.

I have three, this is the most reliable

I have two, but only because I got annoyed with seeing an a login screen any time I clicked on a kbin comment.

Not that it matters since kbin doesn't show context anyway.

Shouldn't have bothered.

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I think it's grown quite a bit though. Lots more posts, votes, conversation.

Facts, having been here since the API shit went down, i have seen a LOT more engagement on the platform compared to july 2023

I remember checking out Lemmy in December 2022, it was barely even a proof of concept. Now it's a whole ecosystem.

it's incredible how far it has gotten in a short time. And while commercial platforms will only get worse with time, open source platforms will only get better. Growth might not always be a linear process, but I'm feeling optimistic. :)

I would imagine that if bots accounted for so much traffic, we would see more steep vertical growth in numbers

There are indeed many Lemmy instances that have captcha protection, it's really up to the instance admins if they want to protect or not. Many of those "spam" instances do get quickly defederated by the serious ones.

Yes, but I don't think it matters. It's not hyper specialized yet, but the initial problem of "there are no users" is gone. I don't think anything can stop the fediverse now. The protocol is just too useful to not support.

Hopefully nothing can stop the fediverse but I am not convinced a company like Meta can’t embrace, extend and extinguish it.

A lot (if not all) Fedi users have multiple accounts on various instances and platforms, so that also inflates the figure

if not all

I don't, so that's at least one person who doesn't have multiple accounts

what makes you think this is true or that those alts are significant?

There is likely a large amount of people with both a mastodon and a Lemmy account, just to name some.

Because you pretty much need a seperate Lemmy, Kbin and Mastodon account. I've heard that it's somehow possible to see Lemmy posts from Mastodon, but I haven't really been able to understand it. Apparently, it's janky as hell, but I wouldn't know, as I just have 3 accounts I use, one for each 'service'.

Since I moved during the Reddit fiasco when servers were overloaded and didn't know what I was doing I just hopped from instance to instance. So now I have at least 7 dead accounts that are still probably counted in the 'users' statistic.

I'd say one person counting for ~10 is significant, and I doubt I'm alone, even if I am an outlier with my instance-hopping

Lemmy and Kbin should be pretty interoperable, but Lemmy and Mastodon don't federate particularly well, or at least, the user experience of federation is not great. The formats are just very different since Mastodon doesn't have much of a concept of groups or communities and doesn't have post titles and so on.

But you can follow Lemmy communities from Mastodon and posts to the community will show up in your Mastodon feed, and you can boost, favorite (upvote), and comment on the post.

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Monthly Active Users are unfortunately down for the past several months in a row. Something more needs to happen.

The comparison of users to active monthly users sounds about right .... 10 million users with about 1 million active monthly users

The usual ratio of lurkers to creators .. 10 to 1 ... the majority of everyone just browses no matter which platform it is ... it's the same in any social circle since the dawn of time ... there's only a small group of creators and everyone else just like to watch / read / listen

Not everyone is interesting enough to have stuff worth posting.

That's what everyone would like us to believe. Everyone has a unique story and background and to me they are all interesting.

It's just that we are all conditioned to think that we are not worthy enough to share our stories. If we believe we aren't worthy ... then we are not. But the opposite is also true, if we believe we are good enough and that our stories are worthy, then they take on a life of their own and become important.

I always enjoy quoting George Carlin because he was a proponent of the power of belief ... society and the individuals in that society believe whatever they want to believe

"I have as much power as the pope ... I just don't have as many people who believe it" - George Carlin

If people are genuinely interested, I had a startle getting my ID renewed today. Security at the courthouse had to hang onto my keys since I forgot to take a key knife off my ring. All went well, but the cops giving me the sink eye for a moment was uncomfortable. At least they didn't make fun of the anime waifu on the keyring.

It’s interesting to see how big the Elon musk twitter takeover affected these numbers. The Reddit exodus is so tiny in comparison. Worth noting that the numbers kept going up after that.

Clicking through to the additional statistics is really interesting. The equivalent graph for Monthly Active Users shows a big bump in June/July 2023. That lines up with the reddit event, iirc. If those causality assumptions are accurate, it's neat how the numbers for total users is more affected by Twitter, but the numbers for active users is more affected by Reddit.

EDIT: nevermind, I didn't realize the timelines were different. The big Twitter exodus isn't actually in the second graph, so they can't be compared. It probably had a bigger impact there as well.

I wonder how they compare in percentage of initial population.

I can't use the "there are dozens of us" joke anymore??

Soon we might even outnumber the Chinese and Israeli funded bots.

The porn bots have far and away the most rapidly growing ranks in the lemmyverse, for the record.

I blocked an ai porn community and that one little girl fetish community and now porn doesn't even show up on the first 5 or 6 pages of the instance I'm using. Whoever is operating the porn bots needs to expand their tastes, start sending the snu snu images.

Soon we might even outnumber the Chinese

I don't see what sort of skin you have in this game that you need to insinuate that bot networks aren't involved. The frequency of overly generic contextless pro-Jinping comments as well as the rate of upvotes and downvotes in some posts is not very human.

There is legion of us

Congratulations Lemmy we are now statistically significant 🥹

Ah… I see.

Well hopefully democracy doesn’t die in the shadows.

Perhaps we get 5-6 more folks after Thursday’s IPO announcement ;-)

Like most of us, I'd love to see more active users. But the limited quantity is of much better quality here. Reddit is a cesspool of cliques and groupthink.

I've always been a lurker, don't talk much even un real life. But here I've been trying to be active. Even if it with something not relevant such as this comment right here

It's appreciated! It can take a while for folks to find us and get comfortable. Adding more comments helps.

But the limited quantity is of much better quality here.

I would respectfully disagree with that.

There's not enough people with different perspectives, that are respectful to each other, currently.

The 'sample size' needs to get bigger, having too few or too many will produce worth quality.

Are they active users?

Nope, that's gotta just be registered users. We're kidding ourselves and don't even have 200k active users

*update: this is just Lemmy users, but OP was talking about all of the fediverse *

source

That is just lemmy.

Shit. I misread. OP's image is for the whole fediverse... 🤦‍♂️

But still...no way that's active users

Yeah, how many random accounts were made just by this most recent incident of spam across the fediverse? If there was a new account made for each of those spam posts? Not even talking about alt or abandoned accounts. These numbers are gonna be off because of that stuff, right?

Are they bots pretending to be people?

On the internet, nobody knows you're a dog.

Yep. But, it can still be pretty ruff, when someone mentions that my posts about squirrels are arf-putting.

This is probably more appropriate for c/fediverse

You'll have to specify which server because lemmy still cannot show all posts on all server in /c/fediverse

In my opinion the biggest problem on lemmy

That's pretty awesome! It will be interesting to see if we get a noticeable influx with all the moronic moves reddit is making. Here's hoping!

Wouldn't count on it. I was curious what people saying about the IPO news and checked comments. "Where will we go now?“ comes up quite often and very few people even mention Lemmy, at least in the post I looked at.

And I don't think that's bad, I'd rather like users who want to be here and not getting pushed here.

If not Lemmy, what else? Last summer I looked around and Lemmy seemed to be by far the largest that wasn’t on a single topic (ex, Hacker news)

There are a bunch of alternatives like Tildes and Raddle, but they are tiny in comparison. Lemmy is the place to be if you want a reddit-style platform.

I think the reason Lemmy took off is because it's decentralized and a single person or corporation can't easily enshittify it to make stonks go up before jumping ship with their golden parachute. Tildes being invite only also really killed any chance of really growing imo. It was the same mistake Google+ made. I never really heard of any of the alternatives other than kbin since they didn't have the same voice as lemmy and kbin had in the whole reddit API enshitification and death of 3rd party clients

May I suggest Kbin (or Mbin).
It is compatible to Lemmys posts and voting and has also Microblogging.

Kbin doesn’t seem like it’s going anywhere. The repos are dead (one commit in the last two months, written in php which is not promising for new contributors), there’s really only one instance of it, and I don’t know of any communities hosted there. There’s also no app support, which is crucial for me to actually use the platform. The concept is good so I’d love to see it continue, but I also wouldn’t invest anything in the platform at this time.

Kbin is developed by mostly one person, so yes, it progresses quite slowly.
But there is also Mbin with many improvements and much more active development.

I'm fully with you, that an API is still missing and would love to see it implemented in the future.

Even if it never gets any bigger than what we have now, thats fine. Personally, im finding people to be much nicer here.

Agreed. I don't want lemmy to turn into reddit, but we could do with more users for sure. I am guilty of not posting / commenting much.

That’s one change I’m making from my Reddit days. For a community to succeed it has to build, and I’ve already found some cool people!

As reddit refugee the biggest plus of lemmy is the ease in which it feels. Almost like visiting Canada from the States... But the longer you stay the difference are clearer.

Ive had to change my habits, I was a lurker on reddit and realize abunch of lurkers moved over and are just looking for traction ans information. I now receive just about all of the news I was learning from reddit and the last push is engagement.

The other added bonus is commenting here is not commenting on reddit. Ppl are interested in a dialogue even if they disagree with your point. This will be what saves lemmy.

Im finding more people are engaged here. On reddit, often times my messages get no responses. On lemmy, Ill at least get something.

So now we have more users than the entire population of the United Arab Emirates (according to worldometers.info), and we could potentially reach the population of Tajikistan soon enough.

Yakyakistan

I had no idea this was a My Little Pony thing (never was a massive fan of the franchise)

Then you haven't seen fan-made HoI4 mod Equestria at War. In that mod there is even country Stalliongrad with ponies like Caramel Marks and Fire Angel.

Yeah!

Time to crack open each other's skulls and feast on the goo inside!

Welp. I sure didn't win that betting pool.

I'm gonna feel really silly if anyone finds out my best guess was like, maybe, 1500.

Doesnt feel like it. None of the posts here gets more than 2k upvotes so I doubt if we have 10 million users. Probably it might be Facebook app users which are defederated?

This is for the fediverse as a whole, not just Lemmy. If you click through, there's a pie chart that shows the vast majority of users are on Mastodon. Lemmy only accounts for about 4% of these numbers.

I thought lemmy was very big compared to mastadon because of the reddit api thing. Damn. I tried mastadon once but the moderation was very weird.

that makes sense but 10mil users is hard to believe lol. I tried pixelfed and didn't get any likes on the pics I uploaded, same pic on Instagram fetched 300+ likes.

Looks like Pixelfed is about 2%. Try Mastodon, I guess - it's listed as 72%.

EDIT: lol, I just did a quick search - apparently Instagram's monthly active user count is over two Billion. With a 'B'. Even with 10 million, it wouldn't compare.

Wow mastodon looks promising. Almost feels better than twitter. Thanks for recommending mastodon.

There's still a 'hot' sorting problem. Popular posts don't appear on it, it's much too bias to new. So lots of things don't get the chance to be upvoted.

Just need some extroverts and we'll be fine.

Healthy grows is exponential. This seems like a growing number of registered accounts, and the number of active users is probably somewhat stable.