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.
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.
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
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
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.
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
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
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.
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.
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.
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
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
Why this many people use Snapchat is incomprehensible
There are so many good messenger apps and all of them, Snapchat's giant userbase remains
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.
'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.
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'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.
more =/= better quality, if anything this might suggest the opposite.
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
Since you posted it in a selfhosting community, this is the feeling I get:
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
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.
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.
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