cross-posted from: https://lemmy.whynotdrs.org/post/494473
Compared against the predominant incumbent social media platforms, the fediverse is very small.
information sources:
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. ;)
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.
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.
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.
Bride protocols?
New Lemmy Post: Relative size comparison of social media platforms (December 2023) (https://lemmy.world/post/9401671)
Tagging: #SelfHosted(Replying in the OP of this thread (NOT THIS BOT!) will appear as a comment in the lemmy discussion.)
I am a FOSS bot. Check my README: https://github.com/db0/lemmy-tagginator/blob/main/README.md
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.
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.
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
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.
we really need to stop calling it formerly Twitter and just call it Shitter.
he ruined the platform, the people can ruin a name
deleted by creator
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
Xitter
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.
Lemmy needs is it’s own version of place
We actually already did! !canvas@toast.ooo
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
You got to think at least 2/3 of Reddit is Bots right
We’re on the map!
Since you posted it in a selfhosting community, this is the feeling I get:
Is userbase proportional to area or radius?
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.
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.
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?
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.
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…
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.
hell yeah
