- cross-posted to:
- meta@lemmy.whynotdrs.org
- cross-posted to:
- meta@lemmy.whynotdrs.org
cross-posted from: https://lemmy.whynotdrs.org/post/494473
Compared against the predominant incumbent social media platforms, the fediverse is very small.
information sources:
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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.
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.
Removed by mod
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…
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.
I appreciate your punnage (if that’s the right word)
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 
Yeah technique is really important too.
So is my wife
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.
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
If anything, smaller might be better in this case. We kind of have an idea of the type of demography we have here, with Reddit you could be arguing with a 9-year old in every other thread and you wouldn’t even know.
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.
The Fediverse is going to get a lot bigger once Meta turns on federation for Threads.
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How? XMPP still works anyway.
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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.
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.
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.
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.
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
nearly every person that creates a lemmy account, is active
This is false. There’s about a 10:1 ratio of Lemmy accounts registered to lemmy accounts posting comments.
I have five lemmy accounts and only post from two. That checks out.
A couple of years ago I ended up in the 1% because of one single thing I posted 2 weeks after I signed up purely to generate some rage because so many subs needed minimum karma… Can completely attest to this.
I suppose this is related to your “users are inactive” point but I also feel like it’s more common on Reddit to have multiple/alt accounts. Hell, in my time on Reddit I think I made 7+ accounts.
Why? I feel like that would be more common on Lemmy than anything. There is an actual point in using different instances here, I don’t see any point whatsoever on Reddit.
To keep your interests separate, to prevent doxing, to break up your post history, etc.
Fair, but these are all perfectly valid reasons to do so on Lemmy as well, so I still think it makes more sense to do so here than on Reddit.
I think Xitter has it’s fair share of bots…
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.
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.
I’m trying fast-forward and imagine how we’ll end up also hating lemmy in the future.
And a how do you do to you too dear Doctor.
The Germans have a word for us too!
Fuck Spez… amirite ? Guys?
If you’ve been to Reddit since the API meltdown, it’s pretty clear that large sections of it were fucked by angry moderators, and still remain that way. I don’t think the fediverse was ready to take over, but Reddit very clearly has fewer people working for them for free.
Specifically, there are several subreddits where they used to be strict about submissions, and now they let anything mildly related in.
I’m honestly pretty surprised that they still haven’t recovered. At this point, I’m hoping that their mediocrity will continue to push people away until Lemmy can catch up.
I think the struggle is that we still need to build more tools for the fediverse ecosystem. I’ve been building Lemmy frontends but it’s a big lift to make a world class experience for users, moderators, instance owners, etc.
Progress is being made, but I agree that Lemmy was not prepped for the wave of Reddit users.
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
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
Why this many people use Snapchat is incomprehensible
There are so many good messenger apps and all of them, Snapchat’s giant userbase remains
I use it for the same reason I use anything, the people I talk with are there. I already drew a hard line in the sand with some devices and Windows.
Snapchat is a line I drew. It’s probably my single least favourite messaging option
Honestly, I prefer it over a few of the others. That doesn’t make it good though. I’d much prefer to get everyone I know on to something more open and free like Matrix, wire, etc.
Hell, why do this many people use LinkedIn? The whole platform was built off of scraping Windows user’s address books without permission, sending unsolicited emails to all of those contacts using the name of that user, and pretending like they were such a great platform that of course your friends are inviting you to also join. And I’m pretty sure they still use this practice today because I continue to get emails from people who have no idea why their name is being attached to the spam I receive.
LinkedIn is very useful for job searching and networking. I don’t post on there, but it was key to getting several job offers.
I’m not aware of any other professional social networks.
I guess it just annoys me that they built a product on incredibly shady practices and have somehow managed to wedge themselves in to the business world under the guise of being “legitimate”. Trusting anything on their site, to me, feels as risky as trusting anything you see on Yelp – sure a real person might have posted the review, or maybe the business paid their blackmail tax to not get de-listed, but how many better opportunities are not being shown because the company deleted all their positive reviews?
I mean, sure, it’s not good if they did sketchy stuff to bootstrap their network. I hadn’t heard there before but I wouldn’t be surprised.
But I don’t think it’s really the same as Yelp. Or at least not how I use it. Trust isn’t really a factor. I don’t use LinkedIn to review a company. I don’t look at their soulless posts about how great their team is. I use it to see “do I know anyone who works at this place that has an opening I want?” Then when I see my old friend is a manager there, I shoot him a message (possibly not even via LinkedIn if it’s someone I know well) and ask if it’s someplace I would want to work at. There’s not really a lot of room for fake in that process.
Also sometimes recruiters just message me. Some of them suck but that’s not really particular to LinkedIn.
You’re not thinking of Glassdoor, are you? Because that’s more like yelp and I don’t especially trust the positive reviews on there.
I don’t really want to go to bat for Microsoft though. I’d be happier if there was a better professional network out there. But, you know, capitalist hellscape.
LinkedIn is a “need” for the ones wanting a job and trying to tell their new job /company is the best. Once these needs are satisfied they forget about it and only come back when the need arises again.
I’m in IT management at my company, the general management and HR folks basically require anyone in a leadership position to have a filled out LinkedIn profile with it linked to your Office account so it shows up in your outlook card and linked in your signature. So we look “professional and tech-driven” since all social media is lumped in with the tech industry for some reason
Different generations choosing different platforms I guess: >40 using facebook and <25 joined Snapchat.
Don’t know why you got downvoted. There is absolutely an “age” component to why people use a certain platform.
Social platforms have enormous retention leverage also. Once all your friends are there…
The age component is absolutely a reason and so is the leverage of the community and friends like you said. No doubt about it. It’s herd mentality and FOMO. Finally it is also how easy to get in and stay sucked in. These other platforms have the dopamine trigger game figured out on their apps. Fediverse doesn’t have that so much, other than the organic “did someone reply to me?” feeling. If you don’t engage then fediverse is not pulling you in.
Ngl FB Messenger is way better than Snapchat.
I don’t like Meta but at least the app feels like it isn’t making its users even more ADHD by the minute
I really hate it but I still have active group chats that I haven’t had luck getting elsewhere. I get the impression it’s the same for most people because I haven’t heard anyone say anything positive about it in years
‘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.
All Social Media = Plastic and Fake.
Life is plastic, it’s fantastic.
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.
Flood it with memes
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
