10 days after 3rd party reddit app shutdown, Lemmy's top 10 instances combine for a thriving userbase of 234,000

Current breakdown at the time of this post sorted by the number of monthly active users:

  1. lemmy.world: 101,013 total users / 27,472 active users
  2. lemmy.ml: 41,972 total users / 4,905 active users
  3. beehaw.org: 12,270 total users / 4,178 active users
  4. sh.itjust.works: 17,509 total users / 3,381 active users
  5. feddit.de: 8,675 total users / 2,935 active users
  6. lemm.ee: 10,348 total users / 2,751 active users
  7. lemmynsfw.com: 22,967 total users / 2,310 active users
  8. lemmy.fmhy.ml: 8,777 total users / 1,704 active users
  9. lemmy.ca: 5,072 total users / 1,656 active users
  10. programming.dev: 5,058 total users / 1,242 active users

Source: the-federation.info/platform/73

xantoxis,

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.

dudebro,

I make new reddit accounts everyday.

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

Fuck reddit.

bettyspaghetti,
bettyspaghetti avatar

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

Docus,

Or dropshippers. Or karmawhores

pensivepangolin,

Or my personal favorite: karmawhoring bots reposting content stolen from other peoples’ OnlyFans accounts.

bettyspaghetti,
bettyspaghetti avatar

Right lmao. And to what end? Are people making money off of it? Or is this truly karma whoring at its most basic level?

Kindbudnuggz,

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.

CarbonIceDragon,
@CarbonIceDragon@pawb.social avatar

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.

Archer,

We’ll get another flood of people once they finally axe old.reddit

Domille,

and nsfw content

S_204,

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.

electrogamerman,

Hello… beep boop

c2h6,

Nobody’s ever gonna have an accurate answer.

mrmanager,
@mrmanager@lemmy.today avatar

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.

wwaxwork,

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

CoffeeDart,

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

wwaxwork,

It would provide more insight than comparing their current figures. When Uber started, if you compared the number of people that got taxis in those first months to Ubers numbers you’d have bet on Uber to be out of business in months.

eran_morad,

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

Zerlyna,
@Zerlyna@lemmy.world avatar

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

xantoxis,

Quite–that’s why active is a better metric. And as others have stated, metrics maybe don’t even matter; or they misrepresent.

My point was only for those who want to know the fate it Lemmy as it compares to Reddit: Reddit doesn’t care right now. They’re not going to feel the pain of the bleed for quite a while yet

mayo,

I think the stat is actually 430M monthly active users. www.businessofapps.com/data/reddit-statistics/

It’s nuts.

ReallyKinda,

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.

Xeelee,
Xeelee avatar

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.

MicroWave, (edited )
@MicroWave@lemmy.world avatar

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.

magnetosphere, (edited )
magnetosphere avatar

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.

Nowyn,

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.

miles, (edited )

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.

magnetosphere,
magnetosphere avatar

Yeah. It is kind of weird at first. You and I have PRSD - Post Reddit Stress Disorder.

Rakn,

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.

magnetosphere,
magnetosphere avatar

That’s a reasonable point.

biddy,

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.

Magiwarriorx,

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.

scarabic,

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.

rm_dash_r_star,
@rm_dash_r_star@lemm.ee avatar

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.

pensivepangolin,

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.

rm_dash_r_star,
@rm_dash_r_star@lemm.ee avatar

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?

pensivepangolin,

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!

rm_dash_r_star,
@rm_dash_r_star@lemm.ee avatar

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.

Wooly,

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.

xpinchx,

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.

TheSpookiestUser,
@TheSpookiestUser@lemmy.world avatar

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.

Lemmylefty,
@Lemmylefty@lemmy.world avatar

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.

knova,

Great analogy

TheRedBadger,

This is exactly it

relative_iterator,
@relative_iterator@sh.itjust.works avatar

Yeah as long as we have an active enough community here it doesn’t matter what goes on at reddit.

_haha_oh_wow_,
@_haha_oh_wow_@sh.itjust.works avatar

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.

Historical_General,

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.

_haha_oh_wow_,
@_haha_oh_wow_@sh.itjust.works avatar

I guess what I’m saying is: Lemmy won’t kill reddit, reddit will kill reddit.

earosner,

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.

DanTheMan827, (edited )

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

TheSpookiestUser,
@TheSpookiestUser@lemmy.world avatar

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.

Historical_General, (edited )

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.

scarabic,

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.

c2h6,

I agree, reddit got too big to be fun. That said lemmy still needs to get bigger in order for communities to actually thrive.

varzaman,

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.

axus,

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.

Tarsn,

The 40k community is pretty solid here and growing

deranger,

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.

ghostBones,

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.

False,

How many if you include kbin?

MicroWave,
@MicroWave@lemmy.world avatar

Kbin adds another 63k.

Tygr,

Impressive

Moohamin12,

But remember too some people have multiple accounts and are active across at least 2.

I have 4 on lemmy and 1 on kbin and I have posted on all 5 in the past week.

Hextic,

Came here right after Joey stopped working. Gave official app one good spin before deleting: virtually unusable.

sounddrill,

I’m told it has improved greatly in these months but who’d want to use reddit now? Lol

Even then, it will never come close to something like infinity

Bdi89,

I’m one of those! Literally just joined for my first comment. :)

MargotRobbie,
@MargotRobbie@lemmy.world avatar

And to think you thought you needed a John Oliver AMA. John Oliver don’t have anything on me.

“Barbie”, only in theaters July 21st.

MicroWave,
@MicroWave@lemmy.world avatar

Margot, you are the best novelty account.

MargotRobbie,
@MargotRobbie@lemmy.world avatar

I don’t know what you’re talking about, I’m just here to promote “Barbie”.

WhoRoger,
@WhoRoger@lemmy.world avatar

Huh. It feels a lot livelier than that.

harry_h0udini911,

Glad, that Greedy man is zucking user base. Hehehe.

sennalonso1981,

Nice

ChexMax,

Testing

jmoriarty,

Also testing.

bladeiii,

Third test…

spiritedaway,

There’s a dedicated community you can use to do testing if needed !test

starman,
@starman@programming.dev avatar

Hello fellow programming.dev lemmings!

Salvo,
@Salvo@aussie.zone avatar

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. duckduckgo.com/bangs

nemesis_aorta,

Maybe Duck-Duck-Go need to have a !bang search modifier for Lemmy. 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.

bappity,
@bappity@lemmy.world avatar

let’s shoot for 300k!!!

hiramfromthechi,
@hiramfromthechi@lemmy.world avatar

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

absGeekNZ,
@absGeekNZ@lemmy.nz avatar

Lemmy.nz here

I think it is cool that it is coming up on nearly 2 million across all ~1200 instances.

sylverstream,

Kia ora from another lemmy.nz user :)

jarfil,

Some users have accounts on more than a single instance, some instances may be malicious, home to just spam/bot accounts.

Things are looking promising, but it’s still early.

BroccoliFarts,

This is my account on this instance. Jerboa search doesn’t give me a ton of communities when I’m logged into my main lemmy.zip account. And I haven’t figured out a way to load a community manually on mobile that allows me to subscribe with my .zip account, so I add subscriptions infrequently on my laptop.

hardypart,

That number contains a huge number of bots. The active users number is a much better way to track the growth of the Threadiverse.

troyunrau,
@troyunrau@lemmy.ca avatar

If you only include active last month, we are are at about 70k active users. Active meaning posted or commented.

If you assume 90% are lurking and not active, then that value can be as high as 700k. But likely 2M is off target.

absGeekNZ,
@absGeekNZ@lemmy.nz avatar

90-9-1 rule says that you may in fact be correct.

90% are probably lurkers. But there is a good argument to be made that a lot of the recent growth is from the 9% of contributors on Reddit, and some of the 1% also.

Currently I suspect that much less than 90% here are lurkers, but that should balance out over time just due to how social communities work.

troyunrau,
@troyunrau@lemmy.ca avatar

You’re likely correct on all of your assumptions, in my opinion :)

pandas,

@absGeekNZ @MicroWave very nice! also, greetings from mastodon!

MicroWave,
@MicroWave@lemmy.world avatar

So cool that you commented from mastodon.

pandas,

@MicroWave IKR! 😎I've also subscribed to all of my favorite lemmy/kbin subs and mags too on here, but my feed is a mess now haha 😅 . I think the coming mastodon updates will provide better interfaces for cross service usage. Can't wait for that feature-set to roll out 🤞!

MicroWave,
@MicroWave@lemmy.world avatar

That’s great! I should play around with subscribing to lemmy with my mastodon account.

pandas,

@MicroWave Definitely give it a try! Just don't go too wild with subs like I made the mistake of doing 🤣

sj_zero,

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.

FinalBoy1975,

A lot of them also restrict content. There are disadvantages to joining smaller instances, depending on the philosophy of the person who runs the instance. There’s even an instance that does not allow communities to be created on its own instance. It will accept applications from people who wish to create one, but they mostly reject applications on their own whim. I think the future of Lemmy as a Reddit alternative will rely on larger, freer instances to be supported well so they have room for growth and change. I have my personal preferences. I don’t want content from exploding-heads, but I also want to see the content I want to see. Some smaller instances are restricting that content, almost seeming to be like cults in the making. There are small instances from which it is impossible to find and subscribe to communities from lemmy.world. You have to search for them on a larger instance, then copy and paste in the address bar in your browser. I imagine on a dedicated phone app that would not be possible. So, you can advocate for “spreading out” all you want. In the end, if the goal is to have a strong alternative to Reddit, spreading out is kind of pointless for a lot of users.

DrSteveBrule,

I think there are some good reasons for servers restricting content. programming.dev is one of the biggest examples of this by not allowing users to create communities, however if you wish to moderate a community or ask for someone else to moderate one, and it falls within the interests of the server, there is a good chance it will be created. It might be obvious with that server, but it is almost all content relating to software development. It doesn’t really make sense to create a community of cooking recipes there, especially since several others exist within other servers. The biggest advantage to this in my opinion is that there aren’t dozens of empty communities. If you look at some of the bigger servers that allow users to create their own, there are tons of communities with 0 posts. I think its good that some servers out there allow users to create any community, but it makes sense for many servers to not.

FinalBoy1975,

deleted_by_author

    •
    DrSteveBrule,

    I wasn’t trying to create an argument, just pointing out not all of those instances are bad. No I didn’t assume that was all of what you meant. To me, it seemed like you didn’t understand the goal of instances like programming.dev. I try to keep in mind that many people are still brand new to Lemmy and wanted to offer counterpoints to your original comment. I wasn’t trying to nitpick your comment, sorry if you got the wrong idea.

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