Current breakdown at the time of this post sorted by the number of monthly active users:
- lemmy.world: 101,013 total users / 27,472 active users
- lemmy.ml: 41,972 total users / 4,905 active users
- beehaw.org: 12,270 total users / 4,178 active users
- sh.itjust.works: 17,509 total users / 3,381 active users
- feddit.de: 8,675 total users / 2,935 active users
- lemm.ee: 10,348 total users / 2,751 active users
- lemmynsfw.com: 22,967 total users / 2,310 active users
- lemmy.fmhy.ml: 8,777 total users / 1,704 active users
- lemmy.ca: 5,072 total users / 1,656 active users
- programming.dev: 5,058 total users / 1,242 active users
I think I can confidently say now that this is a legit Reddit alternative
That’s pretty cool.
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.
We’re doing great though! Good trajectory.
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.
Yeah as long as we have an active enough community here it doesn’t matter what goes on at reddit.
It kinda does in that when things worsen, more people come to Lemmy, but I agree that Lemmy’s success doesn’t depend on reddit’s demise.
It should behave as a viable and threatening adversary for reddit. As long as reddit carries on doing as it does and lemmy’s communities carry on building, we’re winning by blocking Reddit’s monopoly on mainstream forum-type social media.
I guess what I’m saying is: Lemmy won’t kill reddit, reddit will kill reddit.
Yea, but that is how most large organizations fail. Just by sheer inertia they continue to exist. Digg failed because of Digg, not because of Reddit.
Exactly. I don’t want or need to build another McDonalds or Starbucks; I just want to go to the Mom and Pop down the road without worrying if they’ll tank.
Great analogy
This is exactly it
I agree. Just give me some decent posts and discussion. For niche things I can go to a big platform with all the users. For my daily browsing, I appreciate a small but active community.
That actually tracks, since lemmy is supposedly populated mostly by “older nerdy males”. I mean they have a point, the quality of discussion is definitely better – for now. That could end with an Endless September event.
Exactly. Well said. We have all the time in the world to grow. What we needed was a good start, and we got it. Just keep creating content, volunteer to mod somewhere, and don’t look back.
What it really needed was a good app.
It’s still glitchy though… like on memmy, if you swipe too far to downvote, and go back, the color for upvote is still the downvote color
I tried a few different apps but I settled on just using the mobile website on my phone. The interface is solid even there, which I think is a great feat.
I’ve only just been able to log into this account using private mode, I only just realised that emptying the cache would’ve worked or something - but the weird thing is my account wasn’t working on mobile apps either so I didn’t think to empty cache on desktop…
Sync for Lemmy can’t come soon enough.
I agree, reddit got too big to be fun. That said lemmy still needs to get bigger in order for communities to actually thrive.
I disagree. What made Reddit for me is that there were so many people on it, than any niche hobby had it’s own space.
Sure the main big subreddits were shit shows, but the hobby subreddits were great! Something that still isn’t a thing for Lemmy. Specialization.
I still find myself checking Reddit out for subreddits on specific niche games for example.
Like there is literally a subreddit for almost anything. Robot vacuums. Sins of a Solar Empire. Crusader kings. Fish tanks. MotoGP.
Things that probably will take a while to get running on Lemmy.
Right now Lemmy is too “general” for me to really have a feed of things I actually care about.
You’re right, Reddit has a lot of established communities. But if you were going to start a new community? I think it’s all downhill from here.
The niche hobby subreddits and the small games ones are still king on Reddit, in my observation.
The 40k community is pretty solid here and growing
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.
Agreed on the need to adjust mindset. Initially I behaved similarly to how I did on that other site until I realized that Lemmy is different and that’s ok. It’s a lot smaller and federation has its advantages and drawbacks and we’ll see it in action soon enough. Many seek the comfort of the familiar and are not always finding it. Start by appreciating the hard work that has allowed many of us to transition here quite easily. Take a deep breath, look around and realize that we are now playing a different game.
Yeah. It is kind of weird at first. You and I have PRSD - Post Reddit Stress Disorder.
Coming from the non-profit world, it is never that easy. Even when there is no one officially making any money, there are people who will see it as a way to make some bank. There is also a drawback in that not making money can and will affect the amount of time people can put in unless there is a fair way to get them compensation. Volunteering also brings a huge amount of interpersonal and inter-organizational drama. That is why grassroots organizations and movements have a habit of fracturing into smaller groups.
At the same time, there is power in goodwill and being non-profit. You just really need to be careful in vetting your instance and keep an eye on issues in a way people not used to this type of world are not familiar with.
But I wouldn’t be here if I didn’t have a belief that it could be successful enough as a community. I also wouldn’t have been working in the NGO world for the past decade if I didn’t believe in that. But let’s not have too rosy glasses on. Growing slowly will also give this community a chance to work out the kinks and not die in a blaze of fire.
I personally don’t derive any value from high quality conversations about topics I don’t care about. That’s why I need these millions of users, so that there are people I can talk with. About topics I care about. I’m willing to go on a limb here an say that your interests and mine don’t fully align.
That’s a reasonable point.
In the case of social network like this, bigger generally is better for the users. The thing that made Reddit great was that whatever your niece interest, there was a community of thousands of other interested people. There was so much information and advice on whatever obscure topic.
There’s a reason why there’s only around 10 really popular social networks and it’s certainly not that those platforms are any good. The network effect is important.
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.
Exactly. I don’t give a fuck about Reddit any more. I’d rather be in a niche community with (some) quality content than on some huge site with mainly reposts. We’re not in competition with Reddit. Were trying to be a better alternative.
so, like, 500,000 after deducting OF thots?
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 did rm -r * / the first time I ever jailbroke an iPhone by spazzing and hitting enter before I’d finished typing the full command. (I’m terrible at mobile typing.) I’ll never forget the full body sweat that put me in immediately.
Did that once many years ago on a Linux system, wanted to delete a directory tree, but I was logged in as root and didn’t realize I was at the root prompt. Wiped out the whole drive. Not a big deal since it was just a test install so I was being careless anyway.
Back then Linux didn’t protect root from making stupid mistakes. I think now you need another switch to actually delete the root directory. I’ve since gone to using FreeBSD mainly and I haven’t tried it there, but I think at root as root you can still wipe the drive with that command. FreeBSD is less idiot proof than Linux. I think iOS is based on BSD Unix, isn’t it?
Woof. I’m glad I’m not the only one that’s done these things!
I want to say that you’re right, but I’m not NEARLY as familiar with *BSD or it’s history as I am with Linux. My understanding, though, is that iOS/macOS are based upon Darwin, and that Darwin derives a fairly significant portion of its code base from BSD. So, in part I believe the answer is yes.
As a total side note: do you have a recommendation for a good BSD derivative distribution to try? I’ve tried probably 15 Linux distros, but never made it to BSD-world!
do you have a recommendation for a good BSD derivative distribution to try?
The thing about BSD is it’s fully POSIX compliant which can be good and bad. The good is it’s highly consistent in terms of architecture and how things operate. The bad is standards constraints can limit flexibility. Linux is somewhat POSIX compliant, but has a tendency to go off the rails at times. In any case if you’re comfortable with Linux you’ll be comfortable with BSD right out of the gate.
Linux can suffer a lot from fragmentation due it’s market bazaar style development. FreeBSD is run by a single entity responsible for design top to bottom. There’s been some big changes to Linux in modern times I don’t really care for (such as systemd). With BSD you always know what to expect. You won’t get blindsided by some off the wall change in architecture or design which happens a lot with Linux.
There’s a number of BSD distributions that are open source and free. The main open source BSD distros are FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD, and DragonFly BSD. FreeBSD is most popular and is designed to be good all around. It’s probably going to have the best device support, but other BSDs can have other strengths. For example DragonFly BSD is stronger for desktop use.
Honestly the best application for BSD is in a sever or development environment. Linux is more advanced when it comes to support for desktop use. Though I think BSD provides a much cleaner and consistent operating system as it conforms to specific standards. You can get it to work well for desktop use with a little extra work and preselection of compatible hardware.
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.
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.
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.
The other thing is, how many of those 400M accounts are bots?
Or dropshippers. Or karmawhores
Or my personal favorite: karmawhoring bots reposting content stolen from other peoples’ OnlyFans accounts.
Right lmao. And to what end? Are people making money off of it? Or is this truly karma whoring at its most basic level?
A fuckton. Also I created over 10 accounts over the years as I left reddit and came back. So I know that number is bloated af.
I had 3 Reddit accounts and I can’t be the only one with multiples.
I think the stat is actually 430M monthly active users. https://www.businessofapps.com/data/reddit-statistics/
It’s nuts.
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.
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.
On a good day maybe 500 of those are quality comments and the rest are bots, emojis, trolling, or general meme/shit post comments.
I get what you mean though.
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.
We’ll get another flood of people once they finally axe old.reddit
and nsfw content
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.
Nobody’s ever gonna have an accurate answer.
How many did they have when they were the age Lemmy is now?
I kinda don’t agree that that would provide any valuable insight unless you factor in the ease of access to the internet and speeds and availability of smartphones and computers across the world back when reddit was in its infancy
I make new reddit accounts everyday.
I’m working on a bot that makes them for me and manipulates votes.
Fuck reddit.
I wonder how many of these are unique? I’m sure that many, like myself, have created accounts on more than 1 instance.
Everybody needs at least two. One for regular interaction, and another for porn. I mean for science.
“culture”
Culture and science.
I feel called out.
Research!
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.
Why did they do that?
As a protective measure when lemmy.world got exploited.
Perhaps an unpopular opinion, but that’s looking to have been a prudent option if they wanted to avoid bad actors at all costs.
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.
I think that Lemmy does need more of the right exposure.
If you search for any Lemmy content on Google or Duck-Duck-Go, you don’t get any good results. This is probably because most people use Apps or secure browsers that don’t allow tracking.
Maybe Duck-Duck-Go need to have a !bang search modifier for Lemmy. https://duckduckgo.com/bangs
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.comto 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.
Doing course correction in fixing social media is a long game. It’ll take a while, and there’ll be turbulence, but this is a great start
great. slowly transitioning into Lemmy from now on becuz fuck reddit
and I mean, why not?
fuck reddit, and any corporation that takes advantages of its users like reddit.
We are the ones who give you value, not vica versa. Their IPO depends on how many users they have. Not on the capabilities of your app. And they treated it vica versa.
From then I just made my parade for pro-privacy and for pro-anticorp that takes advantage of its users, deleted my META account thus my Instagram, Messenger etc. My Discord. I dont care anymore. Even if I dont have now I will find someday other options. Better or not, they are options. And Lemmy seems a very good one, even better I would say, just not as user friendly - yet. (Not that reddit’s app was good but we all knew that we had to use apollo/boost anyway)
In looking for a replacement for Reddit, I came across this. I’m hopefully optimistic. The last straw for me in a long list of issues that I have with Reddit came yesterday. Lemmy has a long way to go, but I’m moving away from Reddit and will become active here.
What happened yesterday?
Perma banned from r/Libertarian and a 3 day site suspension for saying “The cop would have had to shoot me too after that. Gun or no gun, I would have beat him within an inch of his life until I succumb to my wounds. My dogs are part of my family.” In response to a posted video of an Ohio LEO shooting and killing a Golden Retriever in front of her owner, while smiling and wagging its tail. Absolutely horrific watch.
ETA: I still can’t get the images from this video out of my head. If you love animals, do not watch it, it will only anger you and upset you for days. I meant what I said and to be banned by a Libertarian sub for saying it was a kick in the balls.
Perma banned from r/Libertarian
Oh, the irony
And that’s why it was the nail in the coffin.
“I dunno this seems pretty intense for – wait, protecting your family? Your pets?! They did what to that dog?! Nevermind then, this isn’t intense enough.”
My mental processing of your comment as I read more and more
Yeah, it does seem intense without context. What’s worse is that you’re just reading a description, whereas they (the mods) saw the video.
It makes total sense to me after reading the whole comment. I’d have the same reaction
I have high hopes for Lemmy, but I don’t think that having a lot of users is going to be a super positive thing in the long term. It’d be great if it could feel like younger Reddit for longer than younger Reddit did, you know? Stay at least a little under the radar.
I’m just looking forward to the meme subreddits becoming less outdated. Feels like 2017 in here
I actually appreciate the nostalgia
What’s a number you’re comfortable with?
2
7
I was expecting someone to say either the numbers 42 or 69.
this really is reddit
No, THIS! IS! SPARTA!
It’s inevitable with things on the internet. If Lemmy is successful, it will become like reddit too.
Somewhat but reddit drew a lot of people in with celebrities. The people attracted to celebrities and image heavy content will be more drawn to Threads instead of Lemmy. At least imho
You find Tildes image heavy compared to Lemmy? I have the opposite experience. Maybe I’m subscribed to some image heavy communities here?
Not sure why I said it that way, all I really meant was Instagram users
Yes and no…I am on lemmy.nz and browsing by local / subscribed eliminates all of the memes and bullshit.
I do browse by all every now and then…but it is not my preferred setting.
I think because of federation, even if lemmy blows up, smaller instances and communities will be able to exist still. Over on Mastodon, the big instances have grown up quite a bit, but there is also many thriving smaller communities that either aren’t federated with the big instances, or federated very selectively to curate the community they want.
Reddit was and is impossibly easy to use. You visit the site and start scrolling. If and when you decide you want to participate you create and account and start doing so.
The barrier to entry on Lemmy is much higher. This will keep out many of the types of low effort users that would eventually turn this into reddit.
Maybe someday the fediverse will be as obvious to everyone as any other part of the internet but it’s definitely not right now and it will be awhile before it is.
It definitely took me a bit to wrap my head around the fediverse, but the presence of a “main” site (in this case, Lemmy.world, or in Mastodon’s Mastodon.social) has made it pretty easy for me. I hate that crypto nerds took “web3.0” because I think, in most ways, the true inter-operability of social networks is the next “web2.0”-tier step that the internet can take.
Yeah I very much agree.
Sorry dude, you’ll have to subtract one unfortunately. I created a NSFW account to have two different home feeds.
Apologies for the inconvenience.
Ummm. I have a friend that has a 2nd NSFW account too.
You and I must have the same friend ;)
“Of course I know him, he’s me”
I though I was me? This is getting confusing.
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
“I need to be punished”
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).
Make that 233 999 and one duplicate account by @Jay@sh.itjust.works
Plus100.000 from threads which is part of the fediverse (maybe)
Threads isn’t federated yet, and this is just counting lemmy numbers anyway.
I know, I was just taking a piss of threads. I had to uninstall it cause it was clogging my phone, not joking. It’s true shit code
Only two?
That’s how it’s meant to be.
A master, and a baiter.
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.
Why? There’s porn and general stuff. And this dichotomy is beautiful. Like yin and yang.
I created my lemmy.world account first, but I like the site name for sh.itjust.works so I have one there too.
In my case:
feddit.de didn’t update and as soon as I switched to another account I couldn’t login again
So I created one on shitjustworks. (which ended up with the same problem, but I wouldn’t want to have a third sfw-account so I just waited until it resolved)
And I wouldn’t be surprised if there was another old account of mine on feddit.de from a time where lemmy was just this weird thing some people in r/berlin linked to
I’ll probably make a professional identity alongside my personal identity. So two total. Yeah.
Is lemmynsfw down? I can’t log in with my alt account
Do you have 2FA enabled on it?
Nope, works for me
A quarter million users and that’s not even with all the different instances.
Very cool. Just remember folks, don’t forget to diversify and decentralize! These other instances have some interesting posts and conversations, and by spreading out we make sure no single instance or community can break the fediverse.
Aww poor lemmy.dbzer0.com not top ten. 😭So close at #11 though!
Lemmy.nz here
I think it is cool that it is coming up on nearly 2 million across all ~1200 instances.
Call me when it’s 1,234,567.
But I don’t wanna make that many alts…
Yeah, me either.
Not to be the fly in the ointment, but you can’t really just add those up and expect that number to be accurate if we’re trying to look at unique users within the fediverse. If I had to hazard a guess, a not-so-insignificant chunk of those probably overlap (i.e. users who have made multiple accounts across several instances). I have made an account across lemmy.world, lemmy.ml, kbin and fedia just as backups in case one instance fails. I might be an extreme case having 4, but pretty sure it’s becoming increasingly common for people to have at least 2 accounts (1 on a different instance).
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.
