this post was submitted on 10 Dec 2023
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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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[–] [email protected] 304 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) (7 children)

As always, you guys are way too fixated on size.

[–] [email protected] 77 points 11 months ago (1 children)

Thing is, you have to measure from the user base on the underside, this graphic obviously uses the wrong method.

[–] [email protected] 47 points 11 months ago (1 children)

Meh. Not like there are shareholders to appraise of growth…

[–] [email protected] 31 points 11 months ago (6 children)

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.

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[–] [email protected] 60 points 11 months ago (1 children)

Lemmy alone creates more content that I care about. This is fine.

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[–] [email protected] 28 points 11 months ago (2 children)

It's not the size of the ship, it's the motion of the ocean.

[–] [email protected] 20 points 11 months ago

Yeah, and let me tell you… Facebook’s motion does nothin for me, as big as it is…

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[–] [email protected] 22 points 11 months ago (1 children)

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.

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[–] rustydrd 153 points 11 months ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 85 points 11 months ago (4 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 58 points 11 months ago (3 children)

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.

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[–] [email protected] 27 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) (1 children)

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

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[–] [email protected] 112 points 11 months ago (4 children)

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.

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[–] [email protected] 95 points 11 months ago (27 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 35 points 11 months ago (4 children)

Facebook forgot it existed too, they just recently made it possible to delete threads accounts without deleting Instagram

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[–] [email protected] 61 points 11 months ago (5 children)
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[–] [email protected] 61 points 11 months ago (3 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 51 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago)

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.

[–] [email protected] 43 points 11 months ago (8 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 23 points 11 months ago

The 90-9-1 rule, 1% of users create content, for 9% of users to interact with (upvote, comment, whatever), while 90% exclusively lurk

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[–] [email protected] 52 points 11 months ago (5 children)

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?

[–] [email protected] 33 points 11 months ago (3 children)

Not being able to scroll recycled content all day has been hugely detrimental to me. I’ve actually started reading books again. BOOKS.

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[–] [email protected] 48 points 11 months ago

Wow, the Fediverse is actually visible :0

[–] [email protected] 43 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) (7 children)

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.

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[–] casualhippo 42 points 11 months ago (5 children)

There are dozens of us! Dozens!!

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[–] [email protected] 38 points 11 months ago (8 children)

Fuck Spez.. amirite ? Guys?

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[–] [email protected] 38 points 11 months ago (6 children)

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!

[–] [email protected] 21 points 11 months ago (7 children)

Also I am very much impressed how much content this small number of users can generate.

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[–] [email protected] 37 points 11 months ago (3 children)

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

[–] [email protected] 18 points 11 months ago (1 children)

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.

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[–] [email protected] 33 points 11 months ago (4 children)

we really need to stop calling it formerly Twitter and just call it Shitter.

he ruined the platform, the people can ruin a name

[–] [email protected] 22 points 11 months ago
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[–] [email protected] 27 points 11 months ago (14 children)

Why this many people use Snapchat is incomprehensible

There are so many good messenger apps and all of them, Snapchat's giant userbase remains

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[–] [email protected] 26 points 11 months ago (7 children)

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.

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[–] [email protected] 25 points 11 months ago (6 children)

'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.

[–] [email protected] 20 points 11 months ago (1 children)

Since when does "plastic and fake" means it's not social media?

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[–] [email protected] 24 points 11 months ago (1 children)

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.

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[–] MartinXYZ 23 points 11 months ago (1 children)

I'm surprised Reddit is bigger than Xitter. Is that mostly because people have been leaving the Musk project in recent years?

[–] [email protected] 26 points 11 months ago (1 children)

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.

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[–] [email protected] 22 points 11 months ago (3 children)

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

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[–] [email protected] 21 points 11 months ago (1 children)

Since you posted it in a selfhosting community, this is the feeling I get:

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[–] [email protected] 21 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago)

more =/= better quality, if anything this might suggest the opposite.

[–] csm10495 20 points 11 months ago (3 children)

LinkedIn has over a billion users. I got a t-shirt for it.

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[–] [email protected] 19 points 11 months ago (4 children)

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

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[–] Naz 19 points 11 months ago

Haha, now show us a map of the size of different stars compared to Sol (ours, in the local solar system).

Sometimes the small stars and communites are the most important. ;)

[–] [email protected] 19 points 11 months ago (1 children)
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[–] [email protected] 18 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) (3 children)

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.

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[–] [email protected] 18 points 11 months ago

Who doesn't like an underdog? 😤

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