Current breakdown at the time of this post sorted by the number of monthly active users:
- lemmy.world: 101,013 total users / 27,472 active users
- lemmy.ml: 41,972 total users / 4,905 active users
- beehaw.org: 12,270 total users / 4,178 active users
- sh.itjust.works: 17,509 total users / 3,381 active users
- feddit.de: 8,675 total users / 2,935 active users
- lemm.ee: 10,348 total users / 2,751 active users
- lemmynsfw.com: 22,967 total users / 2,310 active users
- lemmy.fmhy.ml: 8,777 total users / 1,704 active users
- lemmy.ca: 5,072 total users / 1,656 active users
- programming.dev: 5,058 total users / 1,242 active users
I think that Lemmy does need more of the right exposure.
If you search for any Lemmy content on Google or Duck-Duck-Go, you don’t get any good results. This is probably because most people use Apps or secure browsers that don’t allow tracking.
Maybe Duck-Duck-Go need to have a !bang search modifier for Lemmy. https://duckduckgo.com/bangs
Maybe Duck-Duck-Go need to have a !bang search modifier for Lemmy. https://duckduckgo.com/bangs
Most likely not feasible, because what the bangs do is passing
site:domain.comto the search result. As you know, Lemmy does not have a singular domain name so this won’t work for it. As a matter of fact, there is a bang for Mastodon, but it only searches the biggest instance, mastodon.social.
That’s pretty cool.
I’m truly not being a negative nancy but the last time I checked reddit had 400M user accounts. We should be comparing active user numbers, but either way, this is a drop in the bucket and reddit rightly does not consider Lemmy a threat to its supremacy at this point.
We’re doing great though! Good trajectory.
I don’t need Lemmy to compete with or kill Reddit. All I wanted was any one platform to get enough of an influx of users to be self-sustaining even after the outrage started to die down, which appears to have been successful.
Yeah as long as we have an active enough community here it doesn’t matter what goes on at reddit.
It kinda does in that when things worsen, more people come to Lemmy, but I agree that Lemmy’s success doesn’t depend on reddit’s demise.
It should behave as a viable and threatening adversary for reddit. As long as reddit carries on doing as it does and lemmy’s communities carry on building, we’re winning by blocking Reddit’s monopoly on mainstream forum-type social media.
I guess what I’m saying is: Lemmy won’t kill reddit, reddit will kill reddit.
Exactly. I don’t want or need to build another McDonalds or Starbucks; I just want to go to the Mom and Pop down the road without worrying if they’ll tank.
Great analogy
This is exactly it
Exactly. Well said. We have all the time in the world to grow. What we needed was a good start, and we got it. Just keep creating content, volunteer to mod somewhere, and don’t look back.
I agree. Just give me some decent posts and discussion. For niche things I can go to a big platform with all the users. For my daily browsing, I appreciate a small but active community.
That actually tracks, since lemmy is supposedly populated mostly by “older nerdy males”. I mean they have a point, the quality of discussion is definitely better – for now. That could end with an Endless September event.
I agree, reddit got too big to be fun. That said lemmy still needs to get bigger in order for communities to actually thrive.
I disagree. What made Reddit for me is that there were so many people on it, than any niche hobby had it’s own space.
Sure the main big subreddits were shit shows, but the hobby subreddits were great! Something that still isn’t a thing for Lemmy. Specialization.
I still find myself checking Reddit out for subreddits on specific niche games for example.
Like there is literally a subreddit for almost anything. Robot vacuums. Sins of a Solar Empire. Crusader kings. Fish tanks. MotoGP.
Things that probably will take a while to get running on Lemmy.
Right now Lemmy is too “general” for me to really have a feed of things I actually care about.
The niche hobby subreddits and the small games ones are still king on Reddit, in my observation.
What it really needed was a good app.
It’s still glitchy though… like on memmy, if you swipe too far to downvote, and go back, the color for upvote is still the downvote color
I tried a few different apps but I settled on just using the mobile website on my phone. The interface is solid even there, which I think is a great feat.
I’ve only just been able to log into this account using private mode, I only just realised that emptying the cache would’ve worked or something - but the weird thing is my account wasn’t working on mobile apps either so I didn’t think to empty cache on desktop…
Sync for Lemmy can’t come soon enough.
It’s a hard habit to break, because we’ve been trained to think this way for years, but try to remember: we don’t need to attract millions of users to be valuable. This isn’t a commercial enterprise. We don’t sell advertising. We don’t measure success by the number of eyeballs we can promise paying customers.
What matters now is the quality of conversation. In fact, that’s the ONLY measure of any consequence. It’s strange, because in the past, someone’s often tried to use services like this as a way to make money, or as a way to make something else they were selling more attractive. We expected it. It was always in the back of our heads. It even got to the point that if a company did something that wasn’t an effort to increase profitability, we criticized them. Generosity, real generosity, was alien to us.
It’s hard to wrap your head around the idea that people volunteer their time and money to build and maintain the fediverse, simply because they want us to be able to communicate. That’s it. There’s no hidden agenda. There’s no quest for profit at our expense.
I’m perfectly fine with the fediverse growing slowly. I don’t want it to be strained beyond what the mods can handle. Bigger isn’t necessarily better.
Coming from the non-profit world, it is never that easy. Even when there is no one officially making any money, there are people who will see it as a way to make some bank. There is also a drawback in that not making money can and will affect the amount of time people can put in unless there is a fair way to get them compensation. Volunteering also brings a huge amount of interpersonal and inter-organizational drama. That is why grassroots organizations and movements have a habit of fracturing into smaller groups.
At the same time, there is power in goodwill and being non-profit. You just really need to be careful in vetting your instance and keep an eye on issues in a way people not used to this type of world are not familiar with.
But I wouldn’t be here if I didn’t have a belief that it could be successful enough as a community. I also wouldn’t have been working in the NGO world for the past decade if I didn’t believe in that. But let’s not have too rosy glasses on. Growing slowly will also give this community a chance to work out the kinks and not die in a blaze of fire.
In the case of social network like this, bigger generally is better for the users. The thing that made Reddit great was that whatever your niece interest, there was a community of thousands of other interested people. There was so much information and advice on whatever obscure topic.
There’s a reason why there’s only around 10 really popular social networks and it’s certainly not that those platforms are any good. The network effect is important.
I personally don’t derive any value from high quality conversations about topics I don’t care about. That’s why I need these millions of users, so that there are people I can talk with. About topics I care about. I’m willing to go on a limb here an say that your interests and mine don’t fully align.
That’s a reasonable point.
Personally I don’t care if I’m talking to millions of people vs hundreds of thousands as long as there are enough people to make it feel alive and like a community.
Exactly. I don’t give a fuck about Reddit any more. I’d rather be in a niche community with (some) quality content than on some huge site with mainly reposts. We’re not in competition with Reddit. Were trying to be a better alternative.
On a user-driven platform, not all users are created equal. Lurkers bring little to no value to the platform beyond clicks. There might be a huge engagement difference on a per user basis.
Moreover… I just want my niche communities to be active. We will never have Reddit’s archive of content, but we can get to a point where the Lemmy’s corpus of knowledge grows to at the same rate as Reddit’s. I don’t know how many users it’ll take to achieve that; 500k? 1m? 2m? 10m? No one knows that number, but to me that is the number to beat.
Some thoughts on that, Reddit has half a billion monthly active users. Lemmy has about 50k monthly active users. That’s .01% or one ten thousandth. We won’t be displacing Reddit anytime soon, but then we don’t want to. That’s the main problem with Reddit, it’s too damn big and too damn corporate. The main thing is Lemmy sees enough growth to stay relevant and viable. It doesn’t have to compete with anyone.
I did rm -r * / the first time I ever jailbroke an iPhone by spazzing and hitting enter before I’d finished typing the full command. (I’m terrible at mobile typing.) I’ll never forget the full body sweat that put me in immediately.
Did that once many years ago on a Linux system, wanted to delete a directory tree, but I was logged in as root and didn’t realize I was at the root prompt. Wiped out the whole drive. Not a big deal since it was just a test install so I was being careless anyway.
Back then Linux didn’t protect root from making stupid mistakes. I think now you need another switch to actually delete the root directory. I’ve since gone to using FreeBSD mainly and I haven’t tried it there, but I think at root as root you can still wipe the drive with that command. FreeBSD is less idiot proof than Linux. I think iOS is based on BSD Unix, isn’t it?
Woof. I’m glad I’m not the only one that’s done these things!
I want to say that you’re right, but I’m not NEARLY as familiar with *BSD or it’s history as I am with Linux. My understanding, though, is that iOS/macOS are based upon Darwin, and that Darwin derives a fairly significant portion of its code base from BSD. So, in part I believe the answer is yes.
As a total side note: do you have a recommendation for a good BSD derivative distribution to try? I’ve tried probably 15 Linux distros, but never made it to BSD-world!
do you have a recommendation for a good BSD derivative distribution to try?
The thing about BSD is it’s fully POSIX compliant which can be good and bad. The good is it’s highly consistent in terms of architecture and how things operate. The bad is standards constraints can limit flexibility. Linux is somewhat POSIX compliant, but has a tendency to go off the rails at times. In any case if you’re comfortable with Linux you’ll be comfortable with BSD right out of the gate.
Linux can suffer a lot from fragmentation due it’s market bazaar style development. FreeBSD is run by a single entity responsible for design top to bottom. There’s been some big changes to Linux in modern times I don’t really care for (such as systemd). With BSD you always know what to expect. You won’t get blindsided by some off the wall change in architecture or design which happens a lot with Linux.
There’s a number of BSD distributions that are open source and free. The main open source BSD distros are FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD, and DragonFly BSD. FreeBSD is most popular and is designed to be good all around. It’s probably going to have the best device support, but other BSDs can have other strengths. For example DragonFly BSD is stronger for desktop use.
Honestly the best application for BSD is in a sever or development environment. Linux is more advanced when it comes to support for desktop use. Though I think BSD provides a much cleaner and consistent operating system as it conforms to specific standards. You can get it to work well for desktop use with a little extra work and preselection of compatible hardware.
The other thing is, how many of those 400M accounts are bots?
Or dropshippers. Or karmawhores
Or my personal favorite: karmawhoring bots reposting content stolen from other peoples’ OnlyFans accounts.
Right lmao. And to what end? Are people making money off of it? Or is this truly karma whoring at its most basic level?
Have to agree with others, we don’t want the majority from reddit here. They helped to turn reddit into crap.
I would rather see this be like the Linux community. Just a few percent of users, but all very motivated and interested in Linux.
so, like, 500,000 after deducting OF thots?
I went back onto Reddit today and like 20 posts in popular had 5k+ comments. I really miss the variety but, we’ll get there.
On a good day maybe 500 of those are quality comments and the rest are bots, emojis, trolling, or general meme/shit post comments.
I get what you mean though.
I think I can confidently say now that this is a legit Reddit alternative
I’m happy to see someone say that. Just made my account a minute ago
I confidently deleted my 33k karma, 12 year old reddit account yesterday. I agree.
Mr big shot over here. I don’t think I ever looked at my karma over there
I took note of it before I left. Other people mentioned it. I didn’t think it would be as big as it was. Kinda cool. Never cared about it enough to check.
Quickly approaching the same amount of new content created. Better memes too
I think, because it’s a new platform that most of us want to see succeed, everyone is far more active to ensure the communities get established. If there’s a couple of days without a post in one of the 3d printing communities I subscribe to, someone will post a random print they find useful or ask a question about a new filament to keep it active. This low stress discussion is great.
The 3d printing community on that other site ais great, but sometimes it feels like posts don’t gain traction unless it’s on a 1 cubic meter Voron that can print PEEK (translation: very expensive/unique). On the Lemmy communities, there’s more discussions on Enders and Anycubics (translation: most common budget printers).
Yeah I’ve genuinely not missed it, been just over two weeks and I’ve been having so much fun here I haven’t once found myself at a loose end wondering whats happening on Reddit
Which is surprising considering i still run quite a few subs I started and mod a few medium sized ones, when I get back home in a couple of weeks I’ll convert my bots to message me via lemmy instead and I really don’t think I’ll be going back
Hello fellow programming.dev lemmings!
Sorry dude, you’ll have to subtract one unfortunately. I created a NSFW account to have two different home feeds.
Apologies for the inconvenience.
Ummm. I have a friend that has a 2nd NSFW account too.
You and I must have the same friend ;)
“Of course I know him, he’s me”
You and me both brother… Plus my dumbass might have made one user for pornlemmy and and other for lemmynsfw. I need to be learned
“I need to be punished”
More than just, I have accounts on 3 of those 10.
Why? There’s porn and general stuff. And this dichotomy is beautiful. Like yin and yang.
I created my lemmy.world account first, but I like the site name for sh.itjust.works so I have one there too.
Make that 233 999 and one duplicate account by @Jay@sh.itjust.works
Plus100.000 from threads which is part of the fediverse (maybe)
Threads isn’t federated yet, and this is just counting lemmy numbers anyway.
I know, I was just taking a piss of threads. I had to uninstall it cause it was clogging my phone, not joking. It’s true shit code
Doing course correction in fixing social media is a long game. It’ll take a while, and there’ll be turbulence, but this is a great start
And to think you thought you needed a John Oliver AMA. John Oliver don’t have anything on me.
“Barbie”, only in theaters July 21st.
Margot, you are the best novelty account.
I don’t know what you’re talking about, I’m just here to promote “Barbie”.
A quarter million users and that’s not even with all the different instances.
Very cool. Just remember folks, don’t forget to diversify and decentralize! These other instances have some interesting posts and conversations, and by spreading out we make sure no single instance or community can break the fediverse.
A lot of them also restrict content. There are disadvantages to joining smaller instances, depending on the philosophy of the person who runs the instance. There’s even an instance that does not allow communities to be created on its own instance. It will accept applications from people who wish to create one, but they mostly reject applications on their own whim. I think the future of Lemmy as a Reddit alternative will rely on larger, freer instances to be supported well so they have room for growth and change. I have my personal preferences. I don’t want content from exploding-heads, but I also want to see the content I want to see. Some smaller instances are restricting that content, almost seeming to be like cults in the making. There are small instances from which it is impossible to find and subscribe to communities from lemmy.world. You have to search for them on a larger instance, then copy and paste in the address bar in your browser. I imagine on a dedicated phone app that would not be possible. So, you can advocate for “spreading out” all you want. In the end, if the goal is to have a strong alternative to Reddit, spreading out is kind of pointless for a lot of users.
I think there are some good reasons for servers restricting content. programming.dev is one of the biggest examples of this by not allowing users to create communities, however if you wish to moderate a community or ask for someone else to moderate one, and it falls within the interests of the server, there is a good chance it will be created. It might be obvious with that server, but it is almost all content relating to software development. It doesn’t really make sense to create a community of cooking recipes there, especially since several others exist within other servers. The biggest advantage to this in my opinion is that there aren’t dozens of empty communities. If you look at some of the bigger servers that allow users to create their own, there are tons of communities with 0 posts. I think its good that some servers out there allow users to create any community, but it makes sense for many servers to not.
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I wasn’t trying to create an argument, just pointing out not all of those instances are bad. No I didn’t assume that was all of what you meant. To me, it seemed like you didn’t understand the goal of instances like programming.dev. I try to keep in mind that many people are still brand new to Lemmy and wanted to offer counterpoints to your original comment. I wasn’t trying to nitpick your comment, sorry if you got the wrong idea.
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Not to be the fly in the ointment, but you can’t really just add those up and expect that number to be accurate if we’re trying to look at unique users within the fediverse. If I had to hazard a guess, a not-so-insignificant chunk of those probably overlap (i.e. users who have made multiple accounts across several instances). I have made an account across lemmy.world, lemmy.ml, kbin and fedia just as backups in case one instance fails. I might be an extreme case having 4, but pretty sure it’s becoming increasingly common for people to have at least 2 accounts (1 on a different instance).
With this same logic in mind, I’d assume almost the entire population of lemmynsfw should be disregarded from this count, which is almost certainly majority comprised of people’s porn alts that they want to keep separate from their main accounts.
If anything, I’m betting the population of lemmynsfw is more representative of the number of unique accounts across all instances since there’s really no point in creating more than one porn account.
Hey, I resemble that remark…
Yeah, you’re not wrong. Too bad we don’t have unique user data to know for sure.
That’s why I sorted by active users (users who comment or post, not lurkers) instead to get a more accurate picture with the given data. For example, sh.itjust.works has more users than beehaw.org, but it’s ranked below beehaw because of fewer active users.
I think eventually instances with a lot of duplicate accounts will slowly fall out of the top rankings due to inactivity. That’s why I chose to look at just the top 10.
yeah same, i made an account on 3 instances, since i see some instances being trigger happy with defederating, its just not clear yet which instances will be the most free.
I have high hopes for Lemmy, but I don’t think that having a lot of users is going to be a super positive thing in the long term. It’d be great if it could feel like younger Reddit for longer than younger Reddit did, you know? Stay at least a little under the radar.
Reddit was and is impossibly easy to use. You visit the site and start scrolling. If and when you decide you want to participate you create and account and start doing so.
The barrier to entry on Lemmy is much higher. This will keep out many of the types of low effort users that would eventually turn this into reddit.
Maybe someday the fediverse will be as obvious to everyone as any other part of the internet but it’s definitely not right now and it will be awhile before it is.
It definitely took me a bit to wrap my head around the fediverse, but the presence of a “main” site (in this case, Lemmy.world, or in Mastodon’s Mastodon.social) has made it pretty easy for me. I hate that crypto nerds took “web3.0” because I think, in most ways, the true inter-operability of social networks is the next “web2.0”-tier step that the internet can take.
Yeah I very much agree.
I’m just looking forward to the meme subreddits becoming less outdated. Feels like 2017 in here
I actually appreciate the nostalgia
What’s a number you’re comfortable with?
I was expecting someone to say either the numbers 42 or 69.
this really is reddit
No, THIS! IS! SPARTA!
In looking for a replacement for Reddit, I came across this. I’m hopefully optimistic. The last straw for me in a long list of issues that I have with Reddit came yesterday. Lemmy has a long way to go, but I’m moving away from Reddit and will become active here.
What happened yesterday?
Perma banned from r/Libertarian and a 3 day site suspension for saying “The cop would have had to shoot me too after that. Gun or no gun, I would have beat him within an inch of his life until I succumb to my wounds. My dogs are part of my family.” In response to a posted video of an Ohio LEO shooting and killing a Golden Retriever in front of her owner, while smiling and wagging its tail. Absolutely horrific watch.
ETA: I still can’t get the images from this video out of my head. If you love animals, do not watch it, it will only anger you and upset you for days. I meant what I said and to be banned by a Libertarian sub for saying it was a kick in the balls.
Perma banned from r/Libertarian
Oh, the irony
And that’s why it was the nail in the coffin.
“I dunno this seems pretty intense for – wait, protecting your family? Your pets?! They did what to that dog?! Nevermind then, this isn’t intense enough.”
My mental processing of your comment as I read more and more
great. slowly transitioning into Lemmy from now on becuz fuck reddit
Of the top five, sh.itjust.works seems to be the best. Definitely the instance that I would recommend to new users.
I did try to start with that. My first experience was in may I think and ironically enough, it did not work back then. Probably improved a lot since then.
Why is that?
Well I would recommend it since it works, hence the name, shitjustworks lol.
In all seriousness, you can’t start a new platform and simultaneously expect to exclude large segments of potential users. Shitjustworks seems to toe the line better than other instances. They ban spam/bots while still allowing most content.
Generally, I recommend avoiding the top two instances if you are considering creating an account, and I would recommend avoiding beehaw for other reasons. So that leaves you at shitjustworks.
I’d second the recommendation to avoid BeeHaw. That’s where I started when I left Reddit. It’s not bad per se there. I wouldn’t say that they are rude or anything. The big problem is that they’ve decided to defederate from many other Lemmy instances.
In case anyone doesn’t understand federation, imagine if you signed up for an email address and then realized that, because the person running the email service decided so, you can’t email anyone at Gmail.com or Hotmail.com. If you have nobody you want to email there (no Lemmy communities you want to interact with there), then it’s not a problem. However, if you decide you really want to join a community there, it gets difficult.
I left BeeHaw and signed up for Lemmy.world.
I don’t understand the big push to defederate from other instances when individual users can block instances as they please.
Individuals can’t block whole instances yet (apart from via a browser extension), once that feature arrives there will be a lot less call for defederation I expect.
I didn’t know that. Thank you for clarifying.
I‘m all with you on the beehaw topic, but please keep in mind to recommend smaller instances to newbies, because that‘s what federation is all about. Aside from load distribution (lots of instances are run by individuals or groups on small(ish) machines), you can avoid being independent on single large entities keeping their uptime etc.
TLDR: recommend smaller instances for load distribution to get the best out of a federated world!
I wouldn’t recommend small instances to newbies. New users will likely use the All feed a lot, until they discover the communities they like. And on a small instance the All feed isn’t going to have as many communities in it. Also the experience of searching for communities is worse on a smaller instance.
I think these aren’t problems for experienced users but I don’t think we want to expose newbies to them if we can help it.
Why wouldn’t the All feed have as many communities on small instances? Does federation have to be ‘consensual’?
Also, I noticed I can reply to comments on this thread but not the post itself. Does this have to do with federation or is it a limitation of Jerboa or smthn?
(Also - TIL feddit.it is located in Finland!? 😅)
All is based on every community that someone subscribed to on an instance, so smaller instances generally have less communities.
Do you mean local communities? If not, I do not understand your statement.
Also: can you explain how searching for communities is worse on smaller instances than on large ones? That does not make sense to me and does not reflect my experience at all.I run my own instance and the one thing I will say is that I don’t see as much content browsing all on my own instance versus all on lemmy.world. Not sure why that is.
So the way Lemmy works is that a instance will only know about (and have the content of) a community if a user on that instance is subscribed to it. So when you browse All or search, only those communities that someone on the instance is subscribed to are included in the results. On a smaller instance that’s naturally going to be fewer communities.
Now if you search for a specific community by its URL that the instance doesn’t yet know about, it will actually go and fetch it for the first time. What this looks like to the user though is that the search shows no results, then suddenly 5-10 seconds later the results change and the community appears. Which is not a great UX for someone new. So again on an instance with more people it’s a lot more likely that someone else has already searched for and subscribed to what you’re looking for so that you don’t see that issue
Because that’s where the most active NCD community is.
I’m currently starting out on Lemmy.world, any reason to switch over?
Not really once you have an account. During the protest lemmy.world and ml were basically unusable though, but either they scaled or people left the servers.
Lemmy.nz here
I think it is cool that it is coming up on nearly 2 million across all ~1200 instances.
Kia ora from another lemmy.nz user :)
@absGeekNZ @MicroWave very nice! also, greetings from mastodon!
So cool that you commented from mastodon.
@MicroWave IKR! 😎I’ve also subscribed to all of my favorite lemmy/kbin subs and mags too on here, but my feed is a mess now haha 😅 . I think the coming mastodon updates will provide better interfaces for cross service usage. Can’t wait for that feature-set to roll out 🤞!
That’s great! I should play around with subscribing to lemmy with my mastodon account.
@MicroWave Definitely give it a try! Just don’t go too wild with subs like I made the mistake of doing 🤣
That number contains a huge number of bots. The active users number is a much better way to track the growth of the Threadiverse.
If you only include active last month, we are are at about 70k active users. Active meaning posted or commented.
If you assume 90% are lurking and not active, then that value can be as high as 700k. But likely 2M is off target.
90-9-1 rule says that you may in fact be correct.
90% are probably lurkers. But there is a good argument to be made that a lot of the recent growth is from the 9% of contributors on Reddit, and some of the 1% also.
Currently I suspect that much less than 90% here are lurkers, but that should balance out over time just due to how social communities work.
You’re likely correct on all of your assumptions, in my opinion :)
Some users have accounts on more than a single instance, some instances may be malicious, home to just spam/bot accounts.
Things are looking promising, but it’s still early.
This is my account on this instance. Jerboa search doesn’t give me a ton of communities when I’m logged into my main lemmy.zip account. And I haven’t figured out a way to load a community manually on mobile that allows me to subscribe with my .zip account, so I add subscriptions infrequently on my laptop.
I’m one of those! Literally just joined for my first comment. :)
