Or barely human?

Just like everything AI, that used to be an easier guess to make. Now...

Maybe a more accurate but still flawed method is to count how many active users over a certain number of years old. That does throw out new human users, and ignores bought old accounts, but it might weed some of the bots that get cycled around.

Probably that same percentage

the monthly active on lemmy is steadily going down yet the number of new users is rocketing up

who the fuck is that?

and without authentication by irl id we'll never know but i guess you be "muh privacy!!!!!"

Can confirm that Reddit is not well known outside of a minority of users in Central Europe. I would say this also goes for China/Russia (when they're actually able to access it) and i guess most of Africa, not only because of the language barrier. Reddit is very US-centric, and I'd say more than 300m worldwide is streching it.

Thanks for the gold, kind stranger

EdIT: Wow, this blew up!!!1

EDIT2: Omg, an upvote. I am touched. My thanks go out to my wonderful parents, my supportive spouse, my agent, my agent's agent, my second-favourite child, my therapist, my therapist's therapist, my high-school drama teacher who said I'd never amount to anything, the guy who held the door at the audition, my personal trainer whom I've never met, my dentist for the quiet moments, my accountant for the creative moments, my lawyer for the other creative moments, my neighbour's dog who barked encouragement at 03:00, my neighbour who owns the dog, the other neighbour who sold the dog to my neighbour, my mother's cousin's former roommate, my great-grandfather's horse, the horse's reluctant biographer, my childhood imaginary friend and his imaginary lawyer, my ex, my ex's new partner, my ex's new partner's ex, whoever left a half-eaten sandwich in the green room, the sandwich, the farmer who grew the wheat for the sandwich, the weather on the day the wheat was grown, the sun for showing up that day, the planet the sun lights up, my sourdough starter, Kevin, the other Kevin, the third Kevin who insists he's not a Kevin, my cat, my cat's imaginary rival, the vet who still won't return my calls, my Wi-Fi router for never giving up on me, the 14 % of the Wi-Fi signal that actually reached me, the man who invented the chair, the chair I'm sitting on right now, the tree that gave its life for the chair, the tree's family, the squirrel who stood by the tree, the squirrel's pension fund, the lady at the bus stop who nodded at me in 2009, the bus, the bus driver's mother, the pothole that built my character, the municipality that never fixed it, my left knee, my right knee for staying out of it, my append8x, which sadly could not be here tonight, my 3,412 followers, all four of them, my sleep paralysis demon for the stellar company, the voice in my head that said "go for it", the other voice that said "don't", the third voice that was just humming, my houseplant Gerald, Gerald's late predecessor, Gerald II, the mysterious stranger who once told me "nice shoes", the shoes, the cobbler of the shoes, the cobbler's cousin who dabbles in cheese, the cheese, the mould that made the cheese great, the lactose-intolerant colleague who still came to the cheese party, the alphabet for the letters, the number 7 for being consistently reliable, the number 8 for being a sideways infinity of encouragement, gravity for keeping me grounded, whoever invented Tuesdays, the Tuesday that changed everything, the stage, the floor under the stage, the Earth under the floor, the cosmic dust that made the Earth, the Big Bang for its explosive support, whatever came before the Big Bang for being so non-committal, my future self for pulling the strings, my past self for not stopping me, the multiverse versions of me who didn't win and who I hope are doing fine, the Academy, which I'm told is not who is giving me this award, the person who actually is giving me this award, the person who is confused why I'm still typing, the orchestra playing me off, the orchestra's union rep, the exit sign that has been glowing meaningfully at me for the last ten minutes, this guys dead wife, and finally, you, yes, you, for reading this entire list. You know who you are. I don't. But thank you.

Same but ive almost entirely abandoned some of those niche things bc their site is so awful.

Here, have my upvote. It’s worth 25,000.

This made me think of another way to evaluate the statistic. The posts on the front page of Reddit do not get 25000x more upvotes or comments than the front page of Lemmy. I think 1 billion sounds way too high. A big thing was mentioned in another comment, Lemmy only counts logged-in users that actually do actions (voting, posting, commenting), while Reddit is probably counting anonymous visitors.

Still, it's probably at least 5000x

I'm like 7 of those accounts on reddit.

The other 24,993 are all bots, I promise.

At least!

I think you're worth 25,001, for sure.

Exactly!

(Sent from my iBot account #71,902)

And how many accounts are just dormant for a decade or at least until some bot farm hacked it and repurposed it to do some Hasbara on your local community sub?

It's at least 2/3 bots. If not upwards of 80%.

Any subreddit that glorifies engagement above all else is just chock full of them. The relationship advice, the angry experiences, the politics, and all the nostalgia posting. It's all infected with bots.

I don't think it has all those users either, but the language argument doesn't hold water for me. The app has been auto-translating for a while now, and there's a large Spanish-speaking community that doesn't speak English. Even before that, I myself have Spanish as my primary language and used Reddit daily; the German community is huge, and others like Russia or Poland are also, to my knowledge, very large.

I don't think reddit had an age group, sure most people are probably in their 20s and 30s but there are plenty in their 60s and 70s too

Seems low tbh, I bet some just aren't subbed to that community

I think Reddit realized they had no real growth left a few years ago, when they started killing third-party clients.

I remember a few years ago, their year-in-review exposed the popularity of different subreddits by country, and a bunch of small local city subs in the US and Canada were most popular among Russians. Surprise, surprise.

that's why I used the 2022 number, the "projected" 2026 number is 1.5billion

I wish more folks understood that bigger isn't better.
People out there praying for the next eternal September.
I tell them. Now is the good times. Now is what you will lament missing later. Enjoy now.
Lemmy is great.

There are a decent number of dead and bot counts on Lemmy as well though.

The Fediverse is somewhat self-regulating in that area - instances enshittifying would lead to both defederation and a mass user exodus to non-enshittified instances.

Getting Mastodon users into the Threadiverse should be a bigger priority. I mean convincing them to @ Lemmy communities with their posts, or better ways to crosspost/boost their posts into a community

Indeed, 'tis a silly place.

Honestly? Cause much of the entirety of the US tech capitalist model is just digital feudalism.

Create a compelling reason to join your digital kingdom then when enough people move there you put up the enclosures and start profiting off exploiting your subjects and charging tolls to people wanting to access them.

And ideally enough of that peasantry remain dependent on your digital commons that realistically they can't leave.

The upside is that this process naturally lends itself toward enshitification over time. The downside is that unlike messageboards of old, social media deploys incredibly addictive algorithms to keep a core type of user engaged. And then those habits harden and leaving feels impossible.

Scruffy believes in this company.

Aaaah I look forward to being banned from here for having opinions that don't jive with the new crop of fanatical neckbeards hellbent on creating a space where nobody can talk to each other unless they pass their one-dimensional purity tests.

Oh shit that already happened!

You can't engineer away one inch penises online, it's not something online can do for them!