according to reddit they had 918 million Monthly Active Users (MAU) in 2022, then they stopped reporting it for I assume stock reasons 🤷‍♀️. Anyways, I'm not trying to be super specific so I'll go with 1 billion since it's 4 years out of date anyways.

The widely shared number for Lemmy MAU is ~40,000. I've heard this shared for many years and I wasn't sure if it was accurate anymore. The actual numbers are easy to find so I added all of the totals from piefed statistics page for Lemmy + Piefed + Mbin.

It turned out to be 40,272. guess the number was correct after all!

https://piefed.social/statistics?software=Lemmy

so that's 1,000,000,000 vs 40,000

that's 0.004%! I lowkey forgot how big reddit is.

EDIT: for all the people saying my data is inaccurate, I know. There's many factors that offset the accurate statistics of what a 'user' is. I'll list a few, including some nobody else has considered

  • reddits estimate includes bot accounts
  • lemmys estimate includes bot accounts
  • reddit estimate includes alt accounts
  • lemmys estimate includes alt accounts (arguably moreso than reddit due to ppl having accounts on multiple instances)
  • reddits estimate includes signed out accounts, lemmys does not
  • VPN / dynamic routers can largely bias reddits number
  • one last small factor, reddits data is 4 years out of date

I'm literally a college dropout because I'm bad at math, I just looked up numbers and divided them.

instead of constantly winging about data inaccuracies how about yall do something about it. comment a more accurate estimation and I'll edit my posts title and give credit. stupid smelly nerds

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[–] 7 points 3 hours ago*

Lemmy cannot be part of that same cycle because it has no owner. Those other services turning to shit coincided with them getting big, but it was not the direct cause. Those sites got big because they had a desirable service and an acceptable monetization model. Once they get big, the owner invariably turns the monetization screws more and more until it triggers an exodus big enough to effectively kill the service.

Lemmy can't do that because its just a foss self-hosted software program that a bunch of private individuals and groups are hosting and inviting us to join, with barely extant trivial barriers to migrating your account and history to another copy of Lemmy on some other guy's server.

The quality may diminish as the lowest common denominator deteriorates, but there can't really ever be monetization that is at all onerous or everyone will likely bail to a neighboring instance overnight.

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