cross-posted from: https://lemmy.whynotdrs.org/post/494473
Compared against the predominant incumbent social media platforms, the fediverse is very small.
information sources:
3 billion monthly active users? Bull. Bots maybe.
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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”.
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.
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And girls
WE’RE ON THE RADAR, LEMMINGS!
Baby steps are better than no steps for sure
LET’S GOOOOOO!
TO THE ATMOSPHEEEEEERE!
Slowly and steadily. This platform has potential.
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.
We’re on the map!
Good.
New Lemmy Post: Relative size comparison of social media platforms (December 2023) (https://lemmy.world/post/9401671)
Tagging: #SelfHosted(Replying in the OP of this thread (NOT THIS BOT!) will appear as a comment in the lemmy discussion.)
I am a FOSS bot. Check my README: https://github.com/db0/lemmy-tagginator/blob/main/README.md
hell yeah
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!
me too! 💜
It’s like that saying “better be alone than badly accompanied” (mieux vaut être seul que mal accompagné).
If alone is lingering with 1.5 million people who share at least something with you… I’m okay with that.
💙💜💖
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
I agree
This
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.
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?
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.
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.
True. Some probably have many alternative or throwaways…
As always, you guys are way too fixated on size.
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
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 
So is my wife
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.
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.
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 appreciate your punnage (if that’s the right word)
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…
That’s true but it does take a long time to get to England in a row boat
I wasn’t fixated on size when I met your mom
Yeah technique is really important too.
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.
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 Fediverse is going to get a lot bigger once Meta turns on federation for Threads.
Or it’ll kill it!
RIP XMPP
How? XMPP still works anyway.
Oh yeah it works so I guess by that metric it’s not dead
Of course, silly me
Well, what do you really mean?
I’m not the person you asked, but I’ve heard an argument that goes like this: Evil Company will “embrace” something, then “extend” it in a way that only works with Evil Company’s product, then “extinguish” that thing by making Evil Company’s approach incompatible with it. A discussion is provided here: https://ploum.net/2023-06-23-how-to-kill-decentralised-networks.html
Yeah, but I don’t know if that really applies to XMPP. Google turned on XMPP federation for seven years and then turned it off. The article basically admits that it’s counterfactual to say that XMPP would have wider adoption or be more developed today if Google never did that.
I think a more significant concern would be if Meta hires away Fediverse developers, but that is separate from them just turning on federation.
i use it. conversations is a p good android app and it’s in the f-droid repo. disroot runs an xmpp service and if you’re cool, they’ll give you an account.
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.
Vine was basically TikTok with shorter videos. I feel like it was a bit ahead of its time - phone cameras weren’t as good when it launched, and a lot of people didn’t have enough data to watch a feed full of videos.
I’d like to see the breakout in the Fediverse for Mastodon vs. all others.
Thanks!
I’m surpsied Kbin is so low.
The project still lacks an API meaning there’s no mobile apps, so I imagine that hinders adoption.
I’m actually not, I was really excited for Kbin during the migration and just got on .world until it was more fleshed out. But 6 months later I think it missed the first boat out of Reddit and may not catch on now
Thales was kind enough to provide a link:
What is a misskey?
Japanese fedi server
cooler mastodon
Peertube is bigger than I thought!
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.
Facebook forgot it existed too, they just recently made it possible to delete threads accounts without deleting Instagram
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.
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?
This is just factually untrue with the numbers lemmy by itself has being having. Not to say anything of Mastodon and et al. There wouldn’t be a mass exodus of highly engaged folks from reddit to lemmy if users just didn’t move anymore. Threads got big but then instantly deflated to a much lower number immediately.
Active accounts on Lemmy instances is in the tens of thousands. I like it for the most part, but it’s not really a significant part of the 1.5 million in the graphic.
Didn’t FB use some shady practice to make their users fall into Threads without noticing?
I think this was a misunderstanding of a bit of shitty functionality in threads. If you had Instagram and made a linked threads account, you would see follow suggestions for people who hadn’t made an account yet. It was basically “if this person makes a threads account I want to be following them”. I don’t believe it meant those suggested people had a shadow account or anything like that though. Still sketchy and probably drove inorganic growth, but I believe the number of users is counting the number of people opting into opening an account.
It’s just naturally going to be incredibly high, because so many people use Instagram and would’ve been exposed.
