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.
I appreciate your punnage (if that’s the right word)
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.
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 feel like I want to contribute, I just haven’t found the right community yet…
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
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
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
Yeah technique is really important too.
I wasn’t fixated on size when I met your mom
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
Yep, I used to be on r/diyhotas and that was already a niche within the HOTAS niche within the simulator game niche 😂
While I was also part of some niche communities back in the Reddit days, thanks to Lemmy, I switched to Linux and have found interesting new websites, tools and apps. So I’d say overall it’s a net positive.
1.5 million is almost entirely Mastodon users which have no clue how Lemmy’s commenting culture works so rarely contribute in a way that makes sense to both the Mastodon commenter and the Lemmy comenter/poster at the same time.
Lemmy has ~20k ish actively commenting accounts.
For now.
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.
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”.
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
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.
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.
Mastodon is by the biggest contributor to Fediverse as a whole. Has been adopted by tons of Orgs like EU, W3C, Verge, Flipboard, etc.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
I’d like to see the breakout in the Fediverse for Mastodon vs. all others.
Thales was kind enough to provide a link:
What is a misskey?
cooler mastodon
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.
WE’RE ON THE RADAR, BOYS!
LET’S GOOOOOO!
TO THE ATMOSPHEEEEEERE!
And girls
WE’RE ON THE RADAR, LEMMINGS!
Baby steps are better than no steps for sure
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.
I’m so sorry, I can’t imagine how you bear it
Same. It’s amazing how much time I have when the algorithm isn’t shoving me endless content, trying to keep me engaged.
Really shows how everyone has been addicted to social media, myself included.
Quality > quantity.
The masses have been duped into forgetting that.
You can show more ads with more quantity, any ad driven platform will trend that way.
Well you know, “quantity has a quality all its own”
When I saw that number I was pleasantly surprised.
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.
this was very comforting to read
Lately I’ve been seriously thinking about resurrecting my FidoNet node. It looks like FidoNet still exists!
Nice! I just played through Road To Gehenna and it really made me want to do a modern BBS equivalent.
FidoNet does still exist, but it’s commonly called “fight-o-net” for a reason, as there are… some characters there.
If you do resurrect your node, I’d suggest also picking up FSXnet, as it’s the second largest network, is better maintained, and has a no-politics-or-religion rule that makes it way more pleasant to be on.
Or, you know, you could call one of the BBSs out there, and make a sysop’s day by being a user, as non-sysop users are not super common, at this point. You can try my BBS at http://bbs.stormbbs.com or telnet://telnet.stormbbs.com, if you’d like to see FSXnet and FidoNet in their current lives.
But there are plenty of other BBSs out there, too, and my BBS is really only special because I have an ANSI calendar with a different graphic every day that I made 370-ish graphics for. It celebrates a holiday every day.
And if you’re wondering about BBS networks in general, I recently found out about https://clrghouz.bbs.dege.au/domain/list , which has way more info than I was expecting about what the available FTN networks look like.
I was an avid Reddit user but dropped it like a stone in the kerfuffle - it took a while but Lemmy has now replaced that 90%
I’d love to see a content propagation analysis.
My sense is that a ton of new memes are first shared on Lemmy then shared across to other social media.
…Ok, so the niche forums don’t have critical mass yet, and you’d have to post to some general thread to get any response - but all the cool and thoughtful people are here, so the level of general discourse is higher, I love it.
I hear this one loud and clear. I was on the internet in 95, and worked in SV for 20 years, and when I saw the small number for Lemmy in this graphic it made me happy.
Same. We don’t need to be 500m
There are dozens of us! Dozens!!
It does feel like a small pond, but it’s a nice one, with smart fish.
I must confess to missing the vastness of Reddit, but I’ll never go back. The company I keep here is better, by far.
And a how do you do to you too dear Doctor.
I’m trying fast-forward and imagine how we’ll end up also hating lemmy in the future.
The Germans have a word for us too!
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
I already saw this happening on Reddit. The largest subreddit were filled with generic posts. They got a lot of content, not necessarily good content. But there were plenty of small or medium sized subreddits that had much better content. The Fediverse feels like it is missing the big subreddits. It also feels too small to have the small niche subreddits. What is here in terms of content feels more like a few medium sized subreddits.
Just responding to what you say about generic, but lately when I lurk reddit the only stuff I see is REALLY generic Relationship stuff (front page without log in o/c) and recycled OAF memes.
This is a good point. My interactions with the Fediverse over the last few months has been sublime. Maybe users here are just proportionally more active?
Numbers are nice, but they’re not everything. Yeah, we could onboard 2 billion lurkers, but how would that improve anything?
You’re unlikely to be in conversation with hundreds of millions of people at a time; or even thousands of people. Conversations happen with just a handful of people. So those platforms with billions of people perhaps allow for some ultra-niche subgroups, but otherwise are just providing a lot of low-value noise with the additional people.
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
It was ruined long before he touched it
It just made it worse faster
Twitter’s best days were about 10 years prior to Elon buying it
deleted by creator
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.
IMHO, the other part of the problem is that spicy hot-takes quickly get engagement from other users and bubble up to the top. And a lot of those spicy comments are trash, but not in violation of rules, so mods leave them up.
You can see that clearly with both Twitter and reddit. There is no worse feeling than spending time to write something with thought only to not have anyone interact with these posts at all, while tired one-liner and ragebait gets a ton of likes and comments.
However, Lemmy’s algorithm doesn’t really punish writing long form contents the same way reddit does from my experience, so I feel more free to take a little bit longer to write out my thoughts here compared to elsewhere.
One way I thought of to encourage long form content and high quality, is to limit the number of short form content from users.
I imagined every week users would be granted 14 comments that are limited to 250 characters and unlimited long form content. You could also grant more short form comments with every long form comment or with every new oc post.
The only issue would be that long form does not mean high quality and with chatgpt it’ll be easy to create long form posts. Maybe an AI system that evaluates the quality of the post could work but then gaming the system would happen.
Just a thought I had, the numbers about the length and amount of posts could be optimized or use an AI
I like that you’re describing an anti-Twitter, where people have to express themselves in over 250 characters, rather than under 140 or 280.
Just saw a meme the other day about how the old mantra “Don’t feed the troll” seems to have fallen by the wayside and about 90% of the issues on the internet right now are caused by that.
This is a big thing killing my interaction with Lemmy as well. I want to like it, but I drop into a discussion thread and the top-engaged/boosted comments are spicy and almost designed to promote maximum anger. And I feel like, “Do I really, really want to spend significant time writing out a deeper comment to engage with this community…?”
great comment!
i tend to agree. i think the fediverse is probably the best model moving forward. it is a challenging problem!
‘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.
Since when does “plastic and fake” means it’s not social media?
yes but it doesn’t always feel like it.
LinkedIn feels like Uncanny Valley social media.
Like there are Alternates there trying to imitate human interactions.
Life is plastic, it’s fantastic.
All Social Media = Plastic and Fake.
Flood it with memes
I mean it’s a far better place to network and interact with professional statuses and companies than other social networks. I like the Fediverse but I also have a work related presence on LinkedIn.
Let’s not pretend that the degenerate comment section in YouTube is peak high society though.
Or really any place where strangers mostly zing each other. It’s just like the opposite extreme of linked in
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 feel like tgere was an exodus recently because Isaw more interaction with posts.
Some AskLemmy posts had >200 comments.
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 not the size of the fanbase, but the quality of its media and the community of its users.
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
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.
💙💜💖
