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.

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.

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.

for me i’m over comparing to Reddit, I’m just looking for somewhere in a similar format but without a bunch of the issues that I can enjoy

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.

Even when considering accounts across all lemmy instances, it still only combines for a total of 2 million. But overall I’m optimistic about lemmy’s trajectory too.

The other thing is, how many of those 400M accounts are bots?

How many did they have when they were the age Lemmy is now?

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.

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 mean, it’s more of a threat than it was. In all likelihood, this won’t be the last time reddit does something to really anger it’s userbase. There is a much higher chance of people leaving in future incidents if there is an alternative platform with enough users to actually have the content people want.

No, what we should be comparing is Reddit year 1 numbers with these. They’ve had 20 years to grow organically. I bet Lemmy’s start would look a lot more promising than Reddit’s. And Reddit also had much larger competitors when it came out, if you recall.

so, like, 500,000 after deducting OF thots?

I had 3 Reddit accounts and I can’t be the only one with multiples.

Do we know how many of those accounts are bots? I’m curious because I definitely ended up interacting with many many bots recently on that site.

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.

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.

I make new reddit accounts everyday.

I’m working on a bot that makes them for me and manipulates votes.

Fuck reddit.

Ummm. I have a friend that has a 2nd NSFW account too.

Make that 233 999 and one duplicate account by @Jay@sh.itjust.works

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

Only two?

Is lemmynsfw down? I can’t log in with my alt account

I think it’s okay, since people on all platforms create multiple accounts and throwaways.

More than just, I have accounts on 3 of those 10.

Have a separate account on burggit.moe and lemmynsfw for this exact reason. Plus a lot of alt accounts on instances that are defederated (different usernames for each).

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.

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 I have two accounts. But that’s when lemme.world was kind of crashing because of that update, and I thought I was doing something wrong. So I went to a different instance.

I don’t know if this is counted but it’s also perfectly reasonable to have accounts on defederated instances. So if this is counted that might inflate the numbers a bit.

To be fair, I am sure many people also have multiple accounts on the same instance. I am not sure what is the proportion between people opening accounts for backup like you and people just wanting alt accounts.

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.

Quickly approaching the same amount of new content created. Better memes too

I confidently deleted my 33k karma, 12 year old reddit account yesterday. I agree.

I’m happy to see someone say that. Just made my account a minute ago

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

But I don’t wanna make that many alts…

Everybody needs at least two. One for regular interaction, and another for porn. I mean for science.

To be counted as active, you have to have commented or at least liked a post/comment, IIRC. So if you’re hopping around from one login to another within 24 hours and actively engaging on them then yes, you’d be counted more than once in these stats. If you’re just lurking, no.

I’m guessing most of the Beehaws at least have duplicates since they cut themselves off.

Yep, due to the uncertainty on the durability of instances, I have created my main user on a small instance to help the distribution but also backups on bigger ones.

( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)

There is some stuff like auto expanding content and not blurring NSFW content. Simple stuff. Hoping those features will make it back up into Lemmy soon.

I’m guessing it’s the patch they did to show NSFW content whether or not the NSFW checkbox is checked.

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.com to 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.

I’m surprised how lively it feels here. It’s amazing that it feels nearly as fell as reddit with not even 1% of the user base.

Diarrhea doesn’t always win.

Yep, reddit got too big for its own good.

Some of that prime, homegrown free range organic shit posting

The riches of dbzer0 shall remain hidden for now.

I’m liking the UI on their desktop site… I’m tempted to jump.