The groundwork made in the apps, frontends, tools and instances is finally paying off. The masses are noticing the value!
What happened 2023?
3rd party API restrictions as they ramped up for their IPO and the shitshow that ensued.
The other answers are correct, I just wanted to add that they’re talking about Reddit
The first time people actually joined lemmy, before then was probably like 1 instance with near-dead activity.
I remember there were reddit-likes too, they just didnt work with fediverse. And were mostly…well almost all were unsavory. Like they were ONLY populated with people reddit didnt want anymore. Communities with banned content. So not the greatest.
Im glad lemmy/piefed/kbin and all other activityhub/fediverse alternatives are out there.
I just want to point out that Kbin is no longer being worked on and Mbin forked from it and the work is continuing there under that name. The major instances switched over a while ago.
Noice, I wonder if Hexbear going down helped at all.
Tbh not a chance
I feel like people like you are the main reason people stay far away from fediverse. Ya’ll Tankies are just sick in the head, a cancer to communities.
I’m an anarchist… literally the opposite of a tankie…
You sat here and defended Hexbear. All Tankies are anarchists in the West, Authoritarians in the East.
Dude what I just said it probably didn’t have much to do with user count
Yeah, after I bashed Tankies whose absence makes the fediverse more palatable you said “Nuh Uh, no it doesn’t.”
That isn’t what happened.
you stated this probably had an impact on the number of users, I stated I doubt that, you have no idea what’s going on do you?
Why does an anarchist have communist as a username
Probably an Anarcho-Communist.
Wait until they figure out that anarchocapitalists aren’t anarchists
Wait until you figure out that user just defended Hexbear. It’s an astroturf, mate.
As someone fairly new to lemmy, I had to look into this drama with lemmy.world, lemmygrad and hexbear. It has definitely shed some light on who has the big stick and who likes to play police.
I did not defend hexbear, I just said they likely didn’t have much impact on user count… you sound like a conspiracy theorist
Ohno the astroturfing Tankies feelings got hurt because I pointed out what they literally just did.
I’m sorry. Will you forgive me?
Hey, where are you getting these stats from? I ask because FediDB is down.
Alternatively, https://lemmy.fediverse.observer/dailystats is still up
Nice!
They’re from https://join-lemmy.org/instances
Okay, for context, this means that Lemmy has gained 4.4K MAUs over last month.
Not bad.
We were hanging around 43k mau for the longest time.
I feel like as more people wake up to how social media is toxic and quite literally programming by the rich, they will seek out alternatives that are owned by the people.
This is how the Internet was intended to be.
This person fucks.
So, back in 2023 I discovered Lemmy, made an account, but after a bit quit again because I never checked it. I recently made an account again since Reddit has started getting really bad (tons of bots, tons of conservative posts on r/popular after the election, etc) and only recently started actually using said account.
I think using Lemmy requires a different strategy than using Reddit. On Reddit, if you wanted to subscribe to, say, a Linux discussion group, you would just go to r/linux, and there would be just 4 more even more niche subs you could join, like r/linux4noobs. On Lemmy, their are 6 main Linux groups and 14 niche Linux groups across several instances.
The first time I joined Lemmy, I subscribed to just one of these groups like I would on Reddit, but my feed didn’t have enough content so eventually I got bored. The second time around, I created I’ve just subscribed broadly to every community related to my interests, so I if I was interested in Linux I would subscribe to all 20 Linux communities.
I then hypothesized that if I did this for every interest (ex, say my only interests were Linux & Plants, or something), that discussion of topics that was more popular on Lemmy, like Linux, would drown out my other interests. To avoid this being an issue, I made 3 accounts for 3 feeds
- My “general account” in which I subscribed to nearly every top sub, so if I found I didn’t care about a certain topic on All I could unsubscribe instead of outright blocking those communities (that’s this account)
- My “interests account” in which I subscribed to my personalized interests like privacy or environment
- My “fun account” in which I subscribed to just meme, gaming, cats, etc communities
That’s all just me though, how do y’all use Lemmy differently from Reddit? I’m curious as to how I can git gud at Lemmy lol
I just always sort by all and block instances / communities I don’t want to see
Should just introduce a list feature. Share lists of servers and have upvotes on them and subscribe counts and description of the list. So looking into Linux lists, you can see that the top list has most of the communities, a few that are excluded for whatever reason, most people subscribing to that list.
To avoid this being an issue, I made 3 accounts for 3 feeds
Similar approach here. Works okay, but personal feeds would be better
that discussion of topics that was more popular on Lemmy, like Linux, would drown out my other interests
I certainly run into that. I don’t think I have the energy for multiple accounts, but I wish I could ask for roughly equal numbers of posts from my top 4-5 communities, instead of News + WorldNews dominating everything.
Do you have a graph for these numbers?
In 2010 I was part of the Great Digg Exodus, and now in 2025 I’m part of the Reddit->Lemmy migration. Truly I’m part of the crowd.
You’re so cool keeping up with the trends 😎
More like I have no personality and just go with the flow 😜
I get its a bit of self deprecating humor but in seriousness it shows the exact opposite IMO. Going with the flow would be continuing to consume reddit slop no matter how awful the website gets, no matter how much content is baked by a bot, no matter how many more ads they show you just to comment or post.
“Lol I know its getting shittier but im addicted and unwilling to change my habits or show some backbone. Im sorry for even considering a 12 hour protest, Please daddy just let me continue posting I promise ill be good little content monkey and keep your shareholder numbers up this quarter. I don’t miss my old phone app for reddit at all…”
wipes away a single suppressed tear for the death of boost/sync/whatever and their own lost dignity when spez isn’t looking
Seriously good on you for being a trendsetter with a basic shred of self respect who knows when to tap out of a bad/abusive situation, Echofox. I wonder just how much more the water needs to be boiled before even the joke characature above gets tired of reddits BS. Maybe never.
Hey thanks, I do lean a little hard on the self deprecating humor sometimes.
Reddit has been getting worse for years, and the comments there are so adversarial and insincere.
Users definitely can get sick of bad sites, what happened with X shows that. Their user base is a small fraction of what it was a few years ago.
I’m definitely liking it here though!
Oh baby, if you wanted to get away from adversarial sarcastic comments you sure came to the right place.
If you want to be unique start using friendica lmao
I finally made the move to setting up an account here and wean my reddit usage.
It’s getting so bad on there, so many bots, trolls, and paid agitators. Plus the uptick in fascist apologists. Smaller communities with higher bars to entry produce better conversation, in my experience.
This place is so much better for actually discussing things.
The bots have really ramped up since Trump took office again. Seeing so many top comments with thousands of upvotes just gaslighting the shit out of frightened Americans, telling them they need to touch grass and everything is fine…it’s so chilling.
Yeah, I was starting to feel a bit crazy with how many were coming out of the woodwork with almost exactly that same wording, even in my city’s sub.
Welcome!
Proud to be one of the active user 🫡
Sounds like good news. Only heard about this place start of this year so glad to be in the numbers
Welcome!
So we have about as many users as the subreddit dedicated to Taylor Swift’s armpits
If only we could find a way to have such quality content here! If only…
You make I upload? Deal?
So much possibility…
…is this for real? I don’t want to check, but I also can’t tell if this is a joke.
I just checked, it exists but has 2500 subs
They’ve Streisanded it. Just the previous mention jumped the numbers 25%!
All part of my master plan
This is hilarious, but I need facts.
All together, we (Lemmy) are hotter than oatmeal, but we’re less interesting than office chairs. (On Reddit).
Everyone is comparing active users to total users though, Lemmy’s total users is about 10x the number of actives users at 477k. I think you have to post or comment to be marked active?
Ooh. Interesting. Thanks. Might need to revisit. See if we can compete with office chairs, after all. Lol.
Think it was changed to include upvotes/downvotes. Could be wrong, saw it on a similar thread.
Don’t feel bad, office chairs are a big deal. Something you spend 8+ hours of your day in aught to be scrutinized and carefully chosen
https://www.reddit.com/r/taylorswiftarmpits but it’s just have 2000 user?
Wow, I for one, can’t wait until we have peak content like this over here.
You can try posting it to [email protected] , not sure how well it will be received
I’m holding out till we get taytays back of the knees sub! That’s truely the peak god tier content! Looool
what you mean all around the GLOBE there are only 47k active users? How does it compare to Reddit? I am an ex redditor. Banned for a comment in unpopular opinion sub lol
Well, in your case, even if Reddit has 8 billions users, you still wouldn’t be able to access it, so why worry?
I can access, I believe I can create another account. I just feel like lemmy is more like me people
Users are more active as the platform is smaller, interactions are more engaging
So in reddit not engaging? What users do there then?
Mostly lurk, as there’s no point commenting in a thread with 5000 comments
ah yes, true dat, I happened to comment sometime ago on some posts like related to luigi mangione as one of the first ones, and got upvoted like 20k times and got awards and such. Good times good times.
Yes I think what everyone is trying to say but can’t quite put into words is that reddit is an order of magnitude larger than lemmy like a massive big box store is an order of magnitude larger than a corner mart & cafe and yet nobody would stand in the corner mart & cafe and conclude it felt less human in comparison to the big box store because so many less people passed through its doors.
The environment of a big box store is steeped in distrust and it is a space where spontaneous interaction is codified with deep suspicion.
A local mart or cafe on the otherhand is more likely to suggest trustful grounds to interact that may provide bridges over the roaring rivers of first impression.
That is a difference that is invisible if you are primarily looking through the lens of large statistical noisey trends, but no mistake that unmistakable difference between “big box store” and “cornermart & cafe” is a multiplicative factor acting on every moment and is of the type that can nullify extreme powerbalances by making the entire paradigm that carefully precipitated it irrelevant in a flash.
I don’t know how many users reddit has, but it is a lot more than lemmy. Lemmy is quite small in terms of number of users.
But I think focusing on relative numbers of users is a mistake. Forty thousand people is still a lot of people. And we can see that it is enough people to create a vibrant community with a steady stream of good content and conversations. So the fact that it is small compared to other social media is not really relevant, in my opinion. Having a thousand times more users doesn’t make things a thousand times better - that’s for sure.
(That said, I do think its worth noting if the number of users is going up or down… because if there was a significant downward trend, that would be a bad sign.)
Well there’s still more niche topics that are hard to sustain a community for on Lemmy due to the lack of population. I’d like to see that grow. Hopefully in time.
You know how on reddit people comment to tell you to google, argue, etc. Here they just answer the question or move on, it’s wonderful.
Like, they’ll answer everything but your question, tell you how you’re wrong and should do something else entirely, here they read your question all the way and actually answer it
Yeah i know what you mean. I never thought about it. Thanks. I am fairly new on lemmy. I sure do miss more memes on reddit but damn you are right.
Suprisingly better for actual conversation, reddit would be like screaming into a void sometimes, any topic you’re interested in if it doesn’t already have a community, make one from a popular general purpose instance and start posting, people will reply and see it, and it’ll potentially hit the front page equivalent letting more eyes see it. Reddit was no longer showing me interesting niches, I had to already know about it to find a sub and get it on my feed, so many interesting subs I only learned about because I got into the hobby outside of reddit have more potential to be visible on the main feed here. Reddit algorithm right now is a roller coaster, this feels more like reading a newsletter, old reddit.
Hopefully people start posting in niche communities!
(But not the Taylor Swift armpit one)
The thing I miss most from Reddit is all the niche technical communities. So much knowledge is contained in those.
[email protected] can help
Same!!! Or niche fields of studies, although there’s a lot less serious ones of that kind lol
Sounds to me like we need universities and maybe even governments to be running Lemmy instances.
Did you say especially the Taylor Swift armpit one? You perv.
Which community is that so I can block it?
Hah, beat you to the joke by 4 minutes, nerd!
Honestly, that’s like a millisecond in Lemmy terms, so well done.
Yeah, what’s it called so I don’t accidentally stumble on it?
You’re welcome.
I came back to Lemmy as in trying to avoid American corporation owned social networks. Reddit falls into that category.
Welcome back!
I have been temporarily banned from a new account I made a while ago to return after my permabanned last summer. I am seriously thinking of fully ditching reddit save for a few special nerdy interests (and porn).
We have porn! But yeah we need more population growth for niche and local communities to really flourish.
That’s why I’m here.
Welcome!
