according to reddit they had 918 million Monthly Active Users (MAU) in 2022, then they stopped reporting it for I assume stock reasons 🤷♀️. Anyways, I’m not trying to be super specific so I’ll go with 1 billion since it’s 4 years out of date anyways.
The widely shared number for Lemmy MAU is ~40,000. I’ve heard this shared for many years and I wasn’t sure if it was accurate anymore. The actual numbers are easy to find so I added all of the totals from piefed statistics page for Lemmy + Piefed + Mbin.
It turned out to be 40,272. guess the number was correct after all!
https://piefed.social/statistics?software=Lemmy
so that’s 1,000,000,000 vs 40,000
that’s 0.004%! I lowkey forgot how big reddit is.
EDIT: for all the people saying my data is inaccurate, I know. There’s many factors that offset the accurate statistics of what a ‘user’ is. I’ll list a few, including some nobody else has considered
- reddits estimate includes bot accounts
- lemmys estimate includes bot accounts
- reddit estimate includes alt accounts
- lemmys estimate includes alt accounts (arguably moreso than reddit due to ppl having accounts on multiple instances)
- reddits estimate includes signed out accounts, lemmys does not
- VPN / dynamic routers can largely bias reddits number
- one last small factor, reddits data is 4 years out of date
I’m literally a college dropout because I’m bad at math, I just looked up numbers and divided them.
instead of constantly winging about data inaccuracies how about yall do something about it. comment a more accurate estimation and I’ll edit my posts title and give credit. stupid smelly nerds
Top comments before I actually read them all are quibbling about how the Reddit number refers to “accounts” rather than people, which is valid,
but let’s be real: not so valid as to move the needle on that ratio very much.
I think the lesson here, is in just how few users are actually needed, in order to have a community that works.
People have this tunnel vision now, that sites like Twitter, which briefly became global information infrastructure and an arbiter of legitimacy, were somehow an inherent good, which has been ruined by Musk et al. I think it was already quite horrible, for our discourse, our culture, our ability to discuss things with nuance, and the fact that the whole world got locked into it has created a permanent albatross around our necks, as we struggle to reestablish a society of laws and science.
40k is probably about as many users as a site or network can have, with very tight controls on bots to be sure, before things get bad. The people who talk about the whole world moving to the Fedi as a “new twitter” free of capitalism, are really lacking imagination in how good the internet could be.