Relative size comparison of social media platforms (December 2023)
cross-posted from: https://lemmy.whynotdrs.org/post/494473
Compared against the predominant incumbent social media platforms, the fediverse is very small.
information sources:
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As always, you guys are way too fixated on size.
Thing is, you have to measure from the user base on the underside, this graphic obviously uses the wrong method.
Meh. Not like there are shareholders to appraise of growth…
Here too there are misconceptions!
What's important are the hard numbers, soft metrics like user count are misleading! Some may look large at first, but hardly grow with higher engagement, while in others engagement greatly increases the size.
True. Related to that I wish there were more engagement on lemmy. Most of the posts in my stream have zero replies or 1 and it’s the bot. But let’s keep smaller numbers - quality over quantity.
We’re not filtering for quality vs quantity at the moment, more people isn’t going to change anything for the worse there.
True, it’s not at all stage where it’s likely to be a problem. The army of very old persons isn’t at the door just yet ;-)
I feel like I want to contribute, I just haven’t found the right community yet…
Same for me. I started to chit chat a bit here and there just to have some more activity but I miss a community I like to be part of.
I appreciate your punnage (if that's the right word)
Lemmy alone creates more content that I care about. This is fine.
Not always
Lemmy still doesn’t create enough content that I want
But I try to use lemmy more anyways
Hopefully more people will use lemmy more
It's not the size of the ship, it's the motion of the ocean.
Yeah, and let me tell you… Facebook’s motion does nothin for me, as big as it is…
That’s true but it does take a long time to get to England in a row boat
Yes. Quality is the key thing about fediverse. Also - size doesn't mean everything. Black holes are small, but mighty. Lemmy sucks most of my spare time already.
My take away from this is lemmy is so good it’s actually a gravitational singularity pretending to be a social network 
Yeah technique is really important too.
So is my wife
I wasn't fixated on size when I met your mom
An elite 1.5 million.
I'm absolutely fine with 1.5 million. I enjoy lemmy much more than reddit. I feel like content and conversations here are better. None of the karma farming and corporate promotion disguised as natural content.
Although you're correct, I find fediverse lacking in the department of the more niche stuff, e.g. fandoms of specific games, communities by geo proximity, obscure hobbies.
But well, Reddit wasn't like this from the start and I hope the diversity and smaller communities will be here instead of there with time.
Former r/fountainpens Reddit refugee here, and I agree 1.5m users doesn't generate the kind of traffic for my hobby to figure in any sort of way. I miss the engagement
Yep, I used to be on r/diyhotas and that was already a niche within the HOTAS niche within the simulator game niche 😂
While I was also part of some niche communities back in the Reddit days, thanks to Lemmy, I switched to Linux and have found interesting new websites, tools and apps. So I'd say overall it's a net positive.
People need to realize that it's okay for smaller forums to exist. Imagine if we measured fucking teamspeak servers by numbers. Would be just as ridiculous
If anything, smaller might be better in this case. We kind of have an idea of the type of demography we have here, with Reddit you could be arguing with a 9-year old in every other thread and you wouldn’t even know.
1.5 million is almost entirely Mastodon users which have no clue how Lemmy's commenting culture works so rarely contribute in a way that makes sense to both the Mastodon commenter and the Lemmy comenter/poster at the same time.
Lemmy has ~20k ish actively commenting accounts.
For now.
I'm happy with this. I feel like Lemmy is an oasis of nerds in a social media world of toxic people obsessed with all the wrong things.
das ist richtig
Bep bup! German Bot here!
"Das ist richtig" means "That is true"
Like and follow this bot so its creator may someday claw themselves out of the joyless pit they have dug themselves.
Close! Richtig is the German word for "right", not true.
In Swedish, we have the word "riktig", but I guess that's a bit of a shifted cognate, since it means "real".
I'm surprised that the fediverse is as popular as it is, I would've guessed <500k. That's awesome. I'm also shocked that Threads is apparently that popular, I completely forgot it existed immediately after it launched. I also didn't know that Snapchat still existed, so maybe I'm just out of touch on social media stuff.
Facebook forgot it existed too, they just recently made it possible to delete threads accounts without deleting Instagram
Meta realized the same thing we all realized when we came here: userbase entrenchment is significantly more difficult to overcome nowadays than it was back in the 2000s when Facebook managed to pull everyone over from Myspace.
Legitimately, it seems like the average user nowadays is so hellbent against even a modicum of inconvenience or a slightly less populated environment that they will accept literally anything. The big tech and social media platforms couldn't shake off users if they tried anymore. They can do every every shitty, anti-user, anti-consumer thing under the sun and users will bitch about it, but never, ever try an alternative.
And that's why these companies and their devs don't listen to feedback anymore. Why bother?
This is just factually untrue with the numbers lemmy by itself has being having. Not to say anything of Mastodon and et al. There wouldn't be a mass exodus of highly engaged folks from reddit to lemmy if users just didn't move anymore. Threads got big but then instantly deflated to a much lower number immediately.
Active accounts on Lemmy instances is in the tens of thousands. I like it for the most part, but it's not really a significant part of the 1.5 million in the graphic.
Threads was built on top of Instagram infra (essentially Instagram but for text posts) so it's not surprising the two accounts were intertwined. Would have made it easy to roll out an MVP (minimum viable product) when there was a need for it, and quickly iterate on it after launch. The original launch didn't even include a web version as it wasn't finished yet.
I’d like to see the breakout in the Fediverse for Mastodon vs. all others.
Thales was kind enough to provide a link:
What is a misskey?
Japanese fedi server
cooler mastodon
Peertube is bigger than I thought!
https://fedidb.org
Thanks!
I'm surpsied Kbin is so low.
The project still lacks an API meaning there’s no mobile apps, so I imagine that hinders adoption.
I’m actually not, I was really excited for Kbin during the migration and just got on .world until it was more fleshed out. But 6 months later I think it missed the first boat out of Reddit and may not catch on now
Mastodon is by the biggest contributor to Fediverse as a whole. Has been adopted by tons of Orgs like EU, W3C, Verge, Flipboard, etc.
I'm just curious what you thought might have happened to Snapchat? What app took its place in your estimation?
I think I got Snapchat and Vine mixed up or combined in my head. I've never used either one, I thought it shut down years ago, but what I'm remembering is Vine shutting down.
Vine was basically TikTok with shorter videos. I feel like it was a bit ahead of its time - phone cameras weren't as good when it launched, and a lot of people didn't have enough data to watch a feed full of videos.
The fact that I regularly recognize my fellow Lemmings by username makes it feel small, but its not too hard to find a community full of strangers either.
Didn't FB use some shady practice to make their users fall into Threads without noticing?
I think this was a misunderstanding of a bit of shitty functionality in threads. If you had Instagram and made a linked threads account, you would see follow suggestions for people who hadn't made an account yet. It was basically "if this person makes a threads account I want to be following them". I don't believe it meant those suggested people had a shadow account or anything like that though. Still sketchy and probably drove inorganic growth, but I believe the number of users is counting the number of people opting into opening an account.
It's just naturally going to be incredibly high, because so many people use Instagram and would've been exposed.
The Fediverse is going to get a lot bigger once Meta turns on federation for Threads.
How? XMPP still works anyway.
i use it. conversations is a p good android app and it's in the f-droid repo. disroot runs an xmpp service and if you're cool, they'll give you an account.
Well, what do you really mean?
I'm not the person you asked, but I've heard an argument that goes like this: Evil Company will "embrace" something, then "extend" it in a way that only works with Evil Company's product, then "extinguish" that thing by making Evil Company's approach incompatible with it. A discussion is provided here: https://ploum.net/2023-06-23-how-to-kill-decentralised-networks.html
Yeah, but I don't know if that really applies to XMPP. Google turned on XMPP federation for seven years and then turned it off. The article basically admits that it's counterfactual to say that XMPP would have wider adoption or be more developed today if Google never did that.
I think a more significant concern would be if Meta hires away Fediverse developers, but that is separate from them just turning on federation.
There's no way reddit has more "real" users than Twitter // X. Maybe with bots but half the shit on reddit is a Twitter screen cap or repost.
That's a strange read on Reddit. I've heard people say this before, and it's baffling.
Reddit is, and always has been, a link aggregator first and foremost. Of course it's reposts and screenshots of others sites. That's kind of the point. To bring you Twitter so you don't have to actually be on twitter.
Not to mention a supermajority of reddit users are inactive. Recap has shown that even with minimal activity, you end up in the top 1% of reddit users.
That means reddit has roughly 5 million active users. Meanwhile nearly every person that creates a lemmy account, is active too.
The 90-9-1 rule, 1% of users create content, for 9% of users to interact with (upvote, comment, whatever), while 90% exclusively lurk
This is false. There's about a 10:1 ratio of Lemmy accounts registered to lemmy accounts posting comments.
I have five lemmy accounts and only post from two. That checks out.
A couple of years ago I ended up in the 1% because of one single thing I posted 2 weeks after I signed up purely to generate some rage because so many subs needed minimum karma... Can completely attest to this.
I suppose this is related to your “users are inactive” point but I also feel like it’s more common on Reddit to have multiple/alt accounts. Hell, in my time on Reddit I think I made 7+ accounts.
Why? I feel like that would be more common on Lemmy than anything. There is an actual point in using different instances here, I don't see any point whatsoever on Reddit.
To keep your interests separate, to prevent doxing, to break up your post history, etc.
Fair, but these are all perfectly valid reasons to do so on Lemmy as well, so I still think it makes more sense to do so here than on Reddit.
I think Xitter has it's fair share of bots...
LET'S GOOOOOO!
TO THE ATMOSPHEEEEEERE!And girls
WE'RE ON THE RADAR, LEMMINGS!
Baby steps are better than no steps for sure
So Facebook is:
Boring Full of bots Soulless
An we are:
Real people mostly Engaged A cute little dot!
Like someone said, 1,5M people are enough for me, specially if they are mostly active and it seems they are. Are they stats for mean user activity?
Not being able to scroll recycled content all day has been hugely detrimental to me. I’ve actually started reading books again. BOOKS.
I’m so sorry, I can’t imagine how you bear it
Same. It’s amazing how much time I have when the algorithm isn’t shoving me endless content, trying to keep me engaged.
Really shows how everyone has been addicted to social media, myself included.
Quality > quantity.
The masses have been duped into forgetting that.
You can show more ads with more quantity, any ad driven platform will trend that way.
Well you know, "quantity has a quality all its own"
When I saw that number I was pleasantly surprised.
Wow, the Fediverse is actually visible :0
I wonder how long it'll take before we finally collectively reject the SV ethos that size is the only metric that matters and success is only achieved via monopoly...
There was a time when Usenet and BBBses and IRC was tiny and yet people still found value through community in those places.
Maybe, and I know this is a wild idea, platforms don't have to include every human on the planet to be meaningful, relevant, or valuable.
There are dozens of us! Dozens!!
It does feel like a small pond, but it’s a nice one, with smart fish.
I must confess to missing the vastness of Reddit, but I'll never go back. The company I keep here is better, by far.
I'm trying fast-forward and imagine how we'll end up also hating lemmy in the future.
And a how do you do to you too dear Doctor.
The Germans have a word for us too!
Fuck Spez.. amirite ? Guys?
If you've been to Reddit since the API meltdown, it's pretty clear that large sections of it were fucked by angry moderators, and still remain that way. I don't think the fediverse was ready to take over, but Reddit very clearly has fewer people working for them for free.
Specifically, there are several subreddits where they used to be strict about submissions, and now they let anything mildly related in.
I'm honestly pretty surprised that they still haven't recovered. At this point, I'm hoping that their mediocrity will continue to push people away until Lemmy can catch up.
I think the struggle is that we still need to build more tools for the fediverse ecosystem. I've been building Lemmy frontends but it's a big lift to make a world class experience for users, moderators, instance owners, etc.
Progress is being made, but I agree that Lemmy was not prepped for the wave of Reddit users.
With the way this graph is looking spez is pounding your ass to the bone and is about to give you an aneurysm. fuck spez has been given an entirely new meaning
Not really. Here's some statistics from reddit itself.
If you even have minimal activity, according to reddit recap you'll be in the top 1% of reddit users for that year. With that one can conclude that reddits true userbase, can not exceed 5 million.
Reddit in its usercount counts all accounts, including banned ones that have long been replaced by ban evasion accounts. This and the sites old age leads to grossly inflated numbers.
Want even more damning numbers for reddit? Well the maximum participation for r/Place (read, everyone who even as much as viewed the event. Not even participating.) Was 1.9 million. Considering how intensly it was promoted it is likely people would have clicked on the giant banner notification. That means out of the less than 5 million active users, 3.1 million didn't even glance at the giant event that has been promoted with massive popups, banners and shiny symbols over the reddit page.
1.9 million users is still one hell of a userbase more than lemmy will ever see maybe if some major events happen such as reddits rules getting stricter or mods getting more heavy on the ban hammer then we may see some more users join lemmy
I think you're selling freedom short, yeah convenience and momentum are hard to beat but Lemmy is where the open source Devs are and the first adopters, I think we're gonna go see a lot of interesting things emerge here which will draw a lot of users into trying it out - especially if all the other social media sites are closing their doors to people without accounts from viewing information.
What Lemmy needs is it's own version of place, not the same thing but things that are fun and novel and community building. The basic stuff is still getting finalized but as things get established we'll see plenty of tools made to help moderation, to enable new features and useful ways of interacting with information. Hopefully some fun games and toys too.
I've got a lot of work to do on my main project at the moment but I've also got a lot of ideas for Lemmy stuff I want to play with when I've got the time, I'm sure theres a lot of other people cooking up ideas and watching things develop and stabilize waiting for the right time.
We actually already did! ![email protected]
I'd love to see some similar community projects.
Maybe it's worth moving to a bigger instance. I could see something like this gaining a large amount of momentum if it visible to a larger audience
I know it's not the full truth(maybe?) but I feel like we're not attracting the worst kind.
And you know what?
One and a half million people, I can work with that. I know it's not going to stay that number but it's seriously enough for anyone, except some soul-less megacotp ofc.
Yay! I love it!
Also I am very much impressed how much content this small number of users can generate.
Bots, lots of bots xD
But I thought that was the excuse we were using for why Reddit still has lots of users?
Not attacking you, just pointing out the ludicrousness of everyone saying that all of Reddits accounts are bots when Lemmy is full of them as well.
99% of posts on Lemmy only ever see a comment from that annoying arse tldr bot.
That bot alone is probably the most active Lemmy account around.
I turned off the ability to see bot accounts in my lemmy setting and it has vastly improved my experience
Do you do this through the webpage or through an app?
I did it on the web page
So I go to lemm.ee the website then go to all my account settings from (I think) that little hamburger menu
then where there’s all the checkboxes one will say “show bot accounts” and just uncheck that
I browse exclusively on mobile and both on Avelon and Memmy I haven’t seen bot posts. Comments it’s a coin flip imo
It's not the size of the fanbase, but the quality of its media and the community of its users.
TBF explodingheads and lemmygrad exist.
I personally believe that communites such as lemmygrad and people like the main developer are driving people away from lemmy
Can't wait until the ability to block instances is introduced.
me too! 💜
It's like that saying "better be alone than badly accompanied" (mieux vaut être seul que mal accompagné).
If alone is lingering with 1.5 million people who share at least something with you... I'm okay with that.
💙💜💖
It's nuts how a difference of hundreds of millions of people doesn't actually feel like a ton more people or provide any better quality except in some niche spots
we really need to stop calling it formerly Twitter and just call it Shitter.
he ruined the platform, the people can ruin a name
Xitter
It was ruined long before he touched it
It just made it worse faster
Twitter's best days were about 10 years prior to Elon buying it
Why this many people use Snapchat is incomprehensible
There are so many good messenger apps and all of them, Snapchat's giant userbase remains
I use it for the same reason I use anything, the people I talk with are there. I already drew a hard line in the sand with some devices and Windows.
Snapchat is a line I drew. It’s probably my single least favourite messaging option
Honestly, I prefer it over a few of the others. That doesn't make it good though. I'd much prefer to get everyone I know on to something more open and free like Matrix, wire, etc.
Hell, why do this many people use LinkedIn? The whole platform was built off of scraping Windows user's address books without permission, sending unsolicited emails to all of those contacts using the name of that user, and pretending like they were such a great platform that of course your friends are inviting you to also join. And I'm pretty sure they still use this practice today because I continue to get emails from people who have no idea why their name is being attached to the spam I receive.
LinkedIn is a “need” for the ones wanting a job and trying to tell their new job /company is the best. Once these needs are satisfied they forget about it and only come back when the need arises again.
LinkedIn is very useful for job searching and networking. I don't post on there, but it was key to getting several job offers.
I'm not aware of any other professional social networks.
I guess it just annoys me that they built a product on incredibly shady practices and have somehow managed to wedge themselves in to the business world under the guise of being "legitimate". Trusting anything on their site, to me, feels as risky as trusting anything you see on Yelp -- sure a real person might have posted the review, or maybe the business paid their blackmail tax to not get de-listed, but how many better opportunities are not being shown because the company deleted all their positive reviews?
I mean, sure, it's not good if they did sketchy stuff to bootstrap their network. I hadn't heard there before but I wouldn't be surprised.
But I don't think it's really the same as Yelp. Or at least not how I use it. Trust isn't really a factor. I don't use LinkedIn to review a company. I don't look at their soulless posts about how great their team is. I use it to see "do I know anyone who works at this place that has an opening I want?" Then when I see my old friend is a manager there, I shoot him a message (possibly not even via LinkedIn if it's someone I know well) and ask if it's someplace I would want to work at. There's not really a lot of room for fake in that process.
Also sometimes recruiters just message me. Some of them suck but that's not really particular to LinkedIn.
You're not thinking of Glassdoor, are you? Because that's more like yelp and I don't especially trust the positive reviews on there.
I don't really want to go to bat for Microsoft though. I'd be happier if there was a better professional network out there. But, you know, capitalist hellscape.
I’m in IT management at my company, the general management and HR folks basically require anyone in a leadership position to have a filled out LinkedIn profile with it linked to your Office account so it shows up in your outlook card and linked in your signature. So we look “professional and tech-driven” since all social media is lumped in with the tech industry for some reason
I really hate it but I still have active group chats that I haven't had luck getting elsewhere. I get the impression it's the same for most people because I haven't heard anyone say anything positive about it in years
Different generations choosing different platforms I guess: >40 using facebook and <25 joined Snapchat.
Don't know why you got downvoted. There is absolutely an "age" component to why people use a certain platform.
Social platforms have enormous retention leverage also. Once all your friends are there...
The age component is absolutely a reason and so is the leverage of the community and friends like you said. No doubt about it. It’s herd mentality and FOMO. Finally it is also how easy to get in and stay sucked in. These other platforms have the dopamine trigger game figured out on their apps. Fediverse doesn’t have that so much, other than the organic “did someone reply to me?” feeling. If you don’t engage then fediverse is not pulling you in.
Ngl FB Messenger is way better than Snapchat.
I don’t like Meta but at least the app feels like it isn’t making its users even more ADHD by the minute
There is an interesting, and almost universal phenomenon on reddit that every time a subreddit gets past about 40,000 subscribers, the discussion quality immediately drops off a cliff, unless extremely harsh moderation policies are implemented to explicitly weed out low effort content which brings its own set of problems.
My theory on why this occurs is the scaling power of moderation. I think you computer people are probably very familiar with the concept of scalability, and that size is its own challenge at the hyperscale. So for a centralized system like Twitter or Instagram or Facebook, moderation can only scale vertically, so a huge moderation team is needed to contend with the scale of these platforms alone, which also forces the need of personalized recommendation algorithms to promote this that are actually interesting to individual users.
Reddit was able to partially avoid this phenomenon with the subreddit system, which means everyone was able to effectively manage their own, smaller subgroups who shares common interest without intervention from the site admin/mods to achieve a form of pseudo-horizontal scaling. You can also see the success of that with Facebook Groups, which are one of the few reasons why people still use Facebook for social media even though they do not want to interact with the current Facebook audience.
Lemmy, and the rest of the fediverse platforms would suffer the problems even less, as now every group admin can now be completely independent from one another, which means that real horizontal scaling can be achieved and hopefully preserving the discussion quality to a degree as it grows.
'LinkedIn'
LinkedIn is as much Social Media as talking with your manager is Socializing.
It's really plastic and fake feeling there, more so than anywhere else.
I think this is great. It might be 1/1000th of these other systems, but I think the fediverse is at a tipping point where I'm not seeing the same things every day. I don't think critical mass needs to be a ranked competition.
I'm surprised Reddit is bigger than Xitter. Is that mostly because people have been leaving the Musk project in recent years?
As far as I'm aware, twitter has actually been a lot smaller in terms of users than you might imagine from its influence.
It has a relatively low number of active users, but the fact it's designed to be a centralised public forum (rather than users being selective who can follow them like Facebook) means it is/was very attractive for businesses, celebrities and politicians.
Also that -- thanks in large part to movements like the Arab Spring using Twitter to organize and publicize -- it became the go-to social media for reporters. The news -> celebrity -> news cycle closes itself nicely there, making it very difficult for either group to go anywhere else.
Can we please try to deadname Twitter harder? As a person who had an x in their name, it’s really annoying to have some dickhead copyright it
Does that mean you changed your name?
I started lurking twitter somewhat regularly only after the reddit meltdown, and I'm already got so used to X that I instinctively type X into the address bar and press enter to go there. The problem is, it takes me to xvideos.com instead...
more =/= better quality, if anything this might suggest the opposite.
Since you posted it in a selfhosting community, this is the feeling I get:
LinkedIn has over a billion users. I got a t-shirt for it.
I'm surprised it's considered social media. I only go there looking for work. Sure there are some posts that are social. But seems mostly geared to getting jobs and networking from a business perspective.
I'd argue that Twitch and Youtube are less a social media than LinkedIn. Twitch/Youtube is video streaming with interactive chat. That's it.
That's just my definition though. Yours may vary.
I see your point. The difference for me is the substance of the content. If the site was geared towards just something it's just a website. But it having content about anything makes it kind of social to me. I hear you though. I see where many of these don't fit into social media.
Why bluesky and threads should embrace ActivityPub.
Social media is splintering - accelerated by the fall of Twitter. It's not 2010 and a social media network is never going to be what twitter was in 2010. They'll might as well develop social media that can talk to other networks
Bluesky are never going to embrace ActivityPub... They've got their own separate federation protocol.
Bride protocols?
Yes, but I'm hoping they'll ever find a way to bridge both or change their mind.
Their protocol (called the "Authenticated Transfer Protocol" or "AT Protocol" for short) fixes some issues that ActivityPub has.
For example, you can use your own domain name as your handle, even if you're not hosting the server yourself. This makes your username portable - you can move to a different server but keep the same username. You just need to update some DNS records. It's not possible to move server but keep the same username with ActivityPub, since your username is always at the server's domain name.
What I'm hoping is that the developers of ActivityPub take some ideas onboard, but it'll be hard given the current design of the protocol. Maybe we'll get a new version of ActivityPub one day.
It's cozy here :)
Hmm… could this be why I like it better?
Edit: Also, what is active users? I’m “active” on Facebook about once a month, yet on lemmy at least an hour a day. One is more active than the other depending on the threshold.
Most platforms use "monthly active users", which means a user is considered active if they use it at least once per month. If you look at articles comparing the number of users across several platforms, they'll almost always be using monthly active users.
The larger platforms like Facebook provide daily active users as well. Facebook has around 3 million monthly active users and around 2 billion daily active users.
So those are two separate categories - daily and monthly? I would assume the daily would be counted with the monthly, and that the daily would be a lower number.
That's right :)
What I meant is that some companies will release both the monthly and daily numbers, while others will only release the monthly numbers. If you look at the slides from Meta's earnings reports (available here: https://investor.fb.com/investor-events/), there's separate slides for monthly and daily active users, broken down by region (US and Canada, Asia-Pacific, Europe, and the rest of the world).
Unfortunately Twitter no longer has to release this data since it's not a public company any more after Musk bought it. Every publicly-traded company releases this data since investors need to know how things are going.
Who doesn't like an underdog? 😤
Is this right?
Twitter and LinkedIn don’t match the Wiki data and should be inverted, and is the Wiki link correct pointing to 2021?
No way Twitter has 930 million users. It's around 300-400 million as far as I know:
Yup, it says 390 million for Twitter, you might have mixed it up with LinkedIn's 930 million.
I dunno man. The Wiki link provided says LinkedIn is heaps less than Twitter, but this dude’s bubbles say the opposite.
Not arguing. Just confused.
Numbers that say Twitter is larger than LinkedIn are either wrong or very old.
For the biggest ones: How many of those active users are bots, advertisers, and scammers? I'd guess about half on Facebook.
Also, is it considered "active" if you have a dormant account but have the app installed on your phone and it still watches what you're doing? What if you only use it to communicate with family because it's the only internet they understand?
Further, what about duplicate accounts or "secretive" secondary accounts so you can click on the depraved stuff you like without that showing in your public feed?
I feel like the real numbers for the big ones are massively inflated by issues like these.
The Fediverse is small enough to as of yet not be affected. Once it gets large enough, it will have all of this, too.
For sure.
with respect to bots, as of this time I don't think it's a problem that can be fully solved, although I do think over a long enough timeline the fediverse is probably the best suited to handle that problem.
I wanted to see a visualization of the relative size comparison, so I used the data that was available on Wikipedia, but this data is approximate at best.
The Fediverse is by design affected by inflated numbers. If one user uses three different services, the user is counted three times. However, for the Fediverse it doesn't really matter - that number of total users is just as irrelevant like the total number of used email addresses.
Same with reddit. Almost everyone has throwaway accounts there.
True. Some probably have many alternative or throwaways...
Almost all platforms use "monthly active users" - anyone that uses it at least once per month is considered an active user. If you have an app installed but don't use it, it doesn't count. Some platforms also provide a daily active users metric.
Haha, now show us a map of the size of different stars compared to Sol (ours, in the local solar system).
Sometimes the small stars and communites are the most important. ;)
I'm surprised Snapchat is that popular. It's not something I hear about too much anymore.
Damn, if only Spez didn't have fucked up Reddit. I even wanted to invest in that IPO, but now I'm not going to.
I like to imagine a little escape pod coming out of the Reddit bubble and drifting in to the Lemmy dot representing my migration.
Praying that our mothership would just blow up already.
There's some merit to whether those daily active accounts are people, and the quality of the folks engaged as those accounts.
Twitter has more users, and a lot of static too, like people posting pictures of their paninis. I'm also sure there's a large percentage of automated/bot accounts on Twitter; they're active, but not posting anything you'll care about. Same goes for Facebook and Reddit.... There's more but I'll stop there. I'm sure you all get the picture.
Fact is, you can have 5 billion daily active user accounts, and still have very little content anyone cares about. A nontrivial number of posts are news updates either from media outlets or business accounts/companies that are simply a mass posted and shortened version of some PR message or something with a link to the information. Simply bringing the information to people where they are, no matter how few on Twitter or FB are actually reading what they post.
I feel like Lemmy has a lot of content because the majority of accounts are real people, so there's a better capability for discussion. It may be fewer overall people, by comparison, but it is, in many ways, more valuable and entertaining.
IDK, I'm just some guy.
I see a lot of posts that are bot reposts with zero engagement. Maybe I need to find a better instance.
start blocking users and communities you don't care about, or you can auto-ignore bot users in your profile; both options should help you out quickly.
My friends hate the need to do this. It does just take a second to click into community / instance and block it and you won't be bothered again but a lot of people can't be bothered with that one second even and would rather have something simpler unfortunately
I'm on Lemmy.ca, and the "all" view shows all kinds of various instances. Most commonly Lemmy.world but others too.
It's all federated. Unless your instance is defederated then you should have access to everything that Lemmy has to offer. You just need to find how to access it.
Seriously, who on earth uses facebook? Lol
The only website on this graphic that has some actual value (apart from the fediverse of course) is youtube.
Look we are on the map!
You got to think at least 2/3 of Reddit is Bots right
LET'S GOOO
Happy to be part of the top 1% in this case.
Damn! I didn't know so many people still use Facebook. But it still doesn't sound right. I definitely don't feel like 37.5% of Earth's population uses Facebook.
I would have loved to see the parts that are not under the US-American influence. What are Asian, African or South Americans using?
Facebook, mostly. For China it's WeChat.
Not actually the region you asked about, but wykop.pl is actually larger in Poland, than Reddit.
What a lovely site! NSFW/not safe for egalitarians
Tell me that’s like the Truth Social of Poland and only reflective of the extreme right (preferably lie if it’s not)
ETA: this was the fourth hottest(?) post under “Excavation Hits” (Apple Safari translation). It’s not just them happening to share data… one top comment is the N word spelled using the phonetic alphabet, come on.
For China:
Thanks for the information!
I don't know what makes you think South Americans are not under US influence cause I can tell you things in Brazil look exactly the same: Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, TikTok, Twitter... well, Whatsapp is also absurdly popular around here but I don't think it qualifies.
Sure, that formulation was not very good. But you get the idea. There is not only the "western" social media world. But what does it look like? I have no clue about what people use in Africa for example.
What's app is also Facebook.
So facebook, threads, What'sapp, Instagram are all FB owned lol. They need to be broken up for being that huge.
Something like WhatsApp >> Youtube > Instagram > TikTok > Telegram > Facebook > Reddit > Twitter, with some variations and local additions from country to country.
I would say a good billion of Facebook users are either highly inactive, actually inactivated but Facebook is still counting them, scammers and porn bots, and dead people. Many people made an account in like 2011 and promptly forgot their password and never logged in again I'm sure. And lord knows Facebook isn't honest about anything.
I'm surprised Twitter is so comparatively small but it's also a weird site in that you literally talk into a void, at least Facebook you know your uncle is reading your post or whatever.
Surprised to see LinkedIn's 930 million MAU! I might have heard someone mention it irl like 2 times my whole life? But maybe that's cuz I'm not in the job market yet.
It has different aspects to it. Big part of it is job hunters i believe, but i use it mostly for promotion of my research, discussion with other researchers, policy discussions and following conferences / webinars and news about climate related stuff. I use it daily.
Oh wow, I didn't know it's used for research and policy discussions as well! That's pretty neat.
Like most popular social media sites, you usually won't see very valuable discussion in the comments, at least in my experience. It's mostly for people to post news, research, and so on, and follow the big names or organizations in their field.
Most of the valuable information is diffused via posts but I do put a bit of time and effort into trying to filter out all the crap posts like memes, the faux inspirational stuff, self-aggrandizing nonsense, etc.
It's big for sales people too - I research who is the right person to contact at an organization, and also to find out what they've been up to lately that might be useful in a sales pitch.
I agree it's has the corporate and institutional side of tech news that Lemmy doesn't have.
I surprised Threads, LinkedIn and Snapchat have that many
Great graphic and thank you for sharing.
Now let's filter out bots, low quality trolls, NPCs, and content that isn't easily searchable. It's definitely an interesting diagram, and, though it is fascinating, I think its a 1 dimensional view of the social space.
I prefer to engage around ideas and topics, rather than specific users or content producers, so having a good search and topic based boards or groups immediately puts a site miles ahead for me. Reddit and Lemmy excel at this, but some of the others leave a lot to be desired. As someone who used FB to organize and manage a topic based social group in real life, with a Facebook group of 1000+ participants, FB has some good groups, but the interface is absolute rubbish and I would migrate to just about anything else if I could get people to move.
I guess my point is that we lump these together as "social media", but that's a broad category that holds some very distinct subcategories that excel at very different things.
To add to this, a supermajority of reddit users are inactive. Recap has shown that even with minimal activity, you end up in the top 1% of reddit users.
Based on that one can calculate that 99% (provably more but reddit recap doesn't go smaller than 1% on display) are inactive accounts, which means reddits true size lies at around 5 million or less. Less than 5 times Lemmy's size.
There's a reason why mentioning the word "Lemmy" on reddit gets you a shadowban now. Because they're legitimate competition.
Lemmy doesn't have 1.5 million active users; that's how many active users the Fediverse as a whole has; most of those are Mastodon users. Lemmy has around 32K active users. So if your 5 million number is right, Reddit is around 156 times larger than us.
What about Pinterest? Laugh all you want but they have more users than Twitter and healthy growth, to the point where they may eventually overtake Reddit.
God I hate Pinterest.
Not only do they steal pictures in bad quality from other sites and write their website in such a way to always come out on top of search results, it also takes multiple seconds to close the webpage.
: pours one out for every dude that had a GF that lost herself to a Pinterest Interest wall: (or vice versa)
man I wish they'd keep pintrest out of google image search. yeah I know I can manually exclude their url from search but why is it there in the first place lol useless for finding reference material
My wife uses Pinterest any time she needs a list with pictures - things like recipes (organized by type - dinner meals, breakfasts, cakes, etc), outfit/clothing ideas, inspiration for projects around the house, etc. I've got lists in Google Keep and links in Pinboard.in but she's a very visual thinker and prefers having pictures.
@dan @xX_fnord_Xx
I set up https://github.com/pinry/pinry for myself. Sadly there is no way I'll ever be and to get my wife to switch. A big part of the draw of Pinterest for her is that she can quickly pull in links from other people's Pinterest boards.
I'm in the 1%
🤨 when did Reddit overtake Twitter? Reddit used to be a niche destination that you’d barely see it in comparison to the other big name sites.
Reddit got more important once it Google ranked higher and the astroturfs found out, that people trust a review on Reddit inside a thread more, than multi million dollar marketing scam action, trying to game Google algorithm or other sites. The same will sooner or later happen to the fediverse if it ever grows. It's unavoidable, sadly.
Could counteract with some intense verification of personhood I suppose… dig into your network and see if you’re promoting your friends’ products too…
Can’t imagine how to preserve privacy yet eliminate fraud really. Paid reviewers like Consumer Reports? Random sample surveys?
What do you mean by "dead accounts"? On any given platform, there's a LOT of lurkers, and they count as active users because they're using the platform. Only a small portion of users comment, and an even smaller portion actually post content.
What was twitter at pre elonification?
Growing per Statista
I'd be interested to see how different it would look if we only counted average active daily users
Facebook has like many thousands or even hundreds of thousands really dead accounts ( of dead people ), some of those accounts are just Oculus accounts as they got forced to create a facebook account, but i think those are very low in the hundreds or with low probability in the thousands.
LinkedIn isnt really a social network for me, its rather you state your past work and current work only then to get invited to 6 sessions of coding reviews.
Twitch is a entertainment platform ( like youtube ), not social media.
Slowly and steadily. This platform has potential.
Surprised a boring platform like LinkedIn has that many users.
For most it's a CV hosting platform and nothing else.
Just don't tell their investors who are clearly pushing to make it a social media hub.
Edit: it's the second-to-last place I would ever consider for that purpose. Right after Venmo.
Fuck LinkedIn. It's just gross, my feed is just full of shilling.
Linked in is simultaneously the most useful and useless social media platform.
On one hand, you can use it to get jobs, and keep a line of contact with former/present colleagues in a professional setting (as opposed to Facebook or remembering to write down their personal email address).
On the other hand, you have the feed, which is full of the most stupid, banal, and preformative shit you'll ever see on social media, because it's all in the name of advancing your career in this superficial society of ours.
I hate it, but it has its uses.
It's pretty important career-wise, suggest this video if you're interested.
I, too, have a profile on LinkedIn, doesn't mean I use it more often than once a month or something, just to check up on notifications
Is userbase proportional to area or radius?
Imagine a dot a little bigger than the Fediverse with 25 million
Why Facebook sucks. With those numbers you’re bound to have hundreds of millions of trolls and stochastic terrorists.
I wonder how many users Matrix has?
Federated instances could be counted. Non-federated like govermental or company ones can't. So yeah, I would say 3.
I think the people here tend to filter themselves better than places like reddit.
Having left somewhere else, they don't want the new place to suffer the same fate.
Is YouTube a socmed site?
I would answer that with yes, because it has (video)posts, comments, likes, follows etc.
but i agree that it's an edge case, because many aren't using it like social media
It used to be a lot more. You were able to add friends, and video replies appeared at the bottom of the video. Old YouTube legit felt like a community of people.
Makes me wonder how they count "active users". Is watching a video active or just when you comment?
Does it allow you to be social and participate in conversations?
So yes.
The content (the videos) are also made by its users, that used to be one of the key features of social media back when the term first appeared.
hell yeah
if the fediverse gets to hundreds of millions of users, we'd better hope that we solve for moderation.
Don't think this is accurate. E.g how is LinkedIn bigger than Twitter?
I don’t care how big or small it is, as long as it remains real.
I believe I’ve seen more organic conversation in the fediverse than I have on any other platform.
It’s either bots, ads or ad bots everywhere else.
Being tiny makes it less appealing to the megacorp cunts that would want to ruin it.
We can only imagine how the internet was to the natives before the eternal September.
Snap is still alive? I haven't heard name in quite a while.
What percent of humans use facebook! When take out children to young to use fb, people with out internet, what is the actual percent.
So this is the Pluto of the internet?
To be honest, despite the smaller community, I feel more at home in the Fediverse than ever I did in those big, bloated, commercial communities.
Don't worry pretty soon Reddit will join us in being tiny.
How many times do you plan to post this same damn comment?
They have a lot of users voting and viewing content though.
I like your optimism, but I'm not sure I share it. I suppose it depends on your definition of 'soon' and 'tiny'.
So that's why Instagram is the way it is, i assumed it was fairly small but it has attracted a rather toxic userbase and i don't actually enjoy it anymore.
It used to be a place where i could share my joys and people with similar interests would follow me because they enjoy my joys too.
But now it's just tiktok, at least i assume seeing it's all reels and loud noises.
The comments under reels are more toxic than 10tons of nuclear waste
There seems to be an unwritten rule that once a video platform reaches a certain number of users, the comments become toxic.
I was reading the Wikipedia page linked just an hour ago.
and I was surprised to see over a billion daily users on Facebook. I used to think at best that'd be in millions.
I understand now that what do people mean when they day social media's amplification of a certain message can have great impact. I used to take it lightly, partly because I an totally detached to any of these big platforms.
and being on Lemmy is a wholly different experience.
Good.
Wow! Wonder if Facebook will dissapear as quickly as MySpace
Quickly? Granted, it was over a decade ago, but it took 6-8 years for Myspace to die proper , by my recollection.
I still wish I could bop over there and check in on bands that probably imploded a decade ago.
Honestly I wouldn't be surprised if there was more Fediverse users than listed.
Neither would I - you can browse Lemmy (and mastodon I think) pretty extensively without logging in. I also think we are at the start of a long term transition towards decentralization of media generally.
In terms of content I like Lemmy. I do see how concentrated the user base is - but I don't see it getting smaller - if anything I see it growing slowly but surely. In addition to organic growth, there will probably be events that drive massive migration to the fediverse - like reddit's nonsense but from different or more diverse sources - some media attention or a major celebrity plug and things could get crazy pretty fast. The platform will probably need a lot of extra TLC to scale rapidly if that happens.
When you see the major media companies start to stand up Mastodon instances - which I also think is going to happen eventually - expansion of the fediverse seems all but inevitable. I would be interested to see what that chart looks like in 5, 10 years. There are plenty of ways for the fediverse to grow apart from more lemmy users signing up.
Honestly I think its a fairly healthy size right now. I don't know what the future holds but I know I'm much happier with the size now than I was 2-3 years ago.
You want to tell us something?
3 billion monthly active users? Bull. Bots maybe.
And no one is going to federate with them. They will destroy us and ruin everything.
it's bonkers not to federate with them just because you're gatekeeping - especially if you want the fediverse to grow into the mainstream
NTS
@jersan the happiest little circle on the internet
👍 🙏
Lets keep it that way?
Has it? I don't think Lemmy has proper moderation tools yet; nothing is stopping someone from spinning up a new instance and posting inappropriate content/images, which then gets replicated to other servers. I don't think there's a way for a user to block a whole instance, either.
I agree
This
New Lemmy Post: Relative size comparison of social media platforms (December 2023) (https://lemmy.world/post/9401671)
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