this post was submitted on 18 Feb 2025
132 points (98.5% liked)
Asklemmy
45240 readers
1064 users here now
A loosely moderated place to ask open-ended questions
Search asklemmy ๐
If your post meets the following criteria, it's welcome here!
- Open-ended question
- Not offensive: at this point, we do not have the bandwidth to moderate overtly political discussions. Assume best intent and be excellent to each other.
- Not regarding using or support for Lemmy: context, see the list of support communities and tools for finding communities below
- Not ad nauseam inducing: please make sure it is a question that would be new to most members
- An actual topic of discussion
Looking for support?
Looking for a community?
- Lemmyverse: community search
- sub.rehab: maps old subreddits to fediverse options, marks official as such
- [email protected]: a community for finding communities
~Icon~ ~by~ ~@Double_[email protected]~
founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
It's about 50k active users. Communities are generally less important than instances.
MAUs are users that post or comment right? Or does voting also make you a MAU?
The number is correct according to the existing crawlers. Also i wonder if lemmy users are slightly more active on average than reddit users.
For more numbers https://fedidb.org/software/lemmy
I know I engage way more on lemmy than I ever did on reddit. I think I posted more on here in the first year then I did the whole 11 years on reddit. Lemmy reminds me more of the old forum days than reddit or Digg. I wish lemmy would have followed the forum model more with an instantce having just 2 to 3 communities all around similar theme like how the star trek instance does it vs everyone trying to be an mini reddit. Also I know it's ironic me saying that with my account being from .world
Yep, I agree, that's why I generally enioy Hexbear more than other instances. Having a theme and a specialty helps flavor your experience in unique ways.
There are a few servers like this and people are aware of the centralization dangers of .world. Its hard work to keep a system like this from turning to shit.
trying to do my part; always on the lookout for non {dot}world communities to comment in.
Yeah imagine what lemmy would look like if reddit or Digg were not a thing and it went from forums directly to lemmy. The network would be so even and the the instance would tell you kind of what communities are there just by the name.
It's not really what you're looking for but I noticed recently that NodeBB (forum software) supports the fediverse. I actually found my lemmy user on it which I thought was super neat
A while ago, I made a post saying things very similar to your first two sentences.
I definitely am far more active here than I was on Reddit. It's less intimidating here because of a smaller audience. Also, on Reddit, I'd often get negative responses if any at all. The crowd here is much friendlier; once or twice people have lashed out in response to something I said, but mostly people have been kind even if they apparently disagreed with my message.
Well also on reddit there was a lot of Psyops shit going on with accounts being puppeted. By one org or another to manipulate the discussion. Reddit is a bigger target for that kind of shit. Lemmy gets the benefit like Linux used to have of being too small on the desktop side to be a target for the most part.
Unsure on the specifics of how MAU is decided.
As far as I know, from when this was discussed after the first Reddit exodus, only commenting and posting makes you an active user. So the number is somewhat deceivingly small, as the vast majority on platforms like this are lurkers who maybe post/comment every once in a while at most.
It was changed in 19.0 and now votes also count towards MAU https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/pull/4235
Oh, thanks for the info, that is great to know!
Ah, gotcha.
Oh wow, if thats the case then I have overestimated the numbers by alot. Seems like we're still in the nichest of the niche
It's much bigger than it used to be, and is relatively stable now.
Mastodon is the biggest fediverse platform and that has just short of 900k MAU (monthly active users) with around 8M registered users.
In terms of non activity pub but federated protocols, matrix is probably the biggest with a user count in the hundreds of millions. They also market very well to goverments and the public sector tho so they get lots of users from massive deployments with millions of users on one server.
People say this, but I've been on Lemmy and Mastodon for about 1.5 years and Lemmy feels a lot more engaging than Masto. My posts there get one or two likes and boosts, while posts and comments here regularly get dozens if not hundreds of upvotes. I think Blue Sky is eating their lunch right now.
Microblogging is about individuals while lemmy is about topics.
With the former, unless you involve algorithmic recommendations or recommendation lists like bluesky, its going to be a lot of work for users to get a nice feed from just following individual people.
With the latter, the things i mentioned are basically built into the system so its easier to get a lively experience even with much fewer users.
My experience goes against this position.
Between quite a few really active users and the ability to follow hashtags I have had a very active timeline almost since day 1 in Mastodon.
To put it in comparison, I find it hard to keep up with the Masto timeline while my 6-hour best sorting starts quickly showing a ton of doubles (wouldn't it be great if we could somehow make them go away? )
In Thunder you can at least disable showing crossposts which should remove a lot of duplicates.
You can be +1. ;)
Keep in mind that these are active users, many networks with huge numbers have registered accounts, but most have no activity.
In any case, be the change you want to see, help the network grow by providing content and activity, you will always be welcomed.
Can you ELI5 for me why Instances are more important than communities?
Doesn't matter as much for lemm.ee as it's more of a utility than an instance, but I see instances more like traditional "subreddits" and comms within them as "hashtags" and categories. Hexbear's "games" comm is very different from Lemmy.mls, as an example.
If I could change one thing about lemmy. I kind of wish communities worked like channels in IRC. When servers are federated if I go to #games on my server and you go to #games on your server. It does it's best to show the same content. So the instance is real but the community is vitrual abstracted by the protocol.
I feel like doing that automatically would just encourage instances to defederate if their larger communities didn't like the cut of another instance's jib. The culture clash would be harder to tolerate if content were mixed by default like that.
Maybe an easier way for end users to do it themselves? Like making a feed of multiple communities under one topic.
So, more like servers on discord?
Yep! Great example.
I just created [email protected] but not taking signups so you have to use an account from a federated instance.
Quality > quantity. Lemmy still has some trolls and the usual misunderstandings, but people are here bc they want to be, not bc its the only option
I agree! I definitely prefer Lemmy over Reddit, for sure.