yup, but that honestly makes it feel cozier :3
this post was submitted on 04 Mar 2025
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Asklemmy
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The large subreddits each have more users than all of Lemmy. So yes.
However, like others have said, who cares? Community and quality of discussion is more important than raw user count. Here, what you post is actually seen by people, even if the thread is days old.
yes but I would also argue that it's a nice benefit as of right now. it gives a more of a community feeling and less of a World Wide Web feeling
Yeah but don't worry; Reddit will do something stupid again soon so more users will leave for places like Lemmy until that place is pure AI hell
On paper, Lemmy does look like there's a lot. In practice, there's not really a lot that reflects the total number of registrations.
Reddit, even with its bots and whatever, still has a large amount of active users compared to Lemmy.
yup but its a good size from my experience when engaging with it overall. if we get larger we will definately need more niche things.
if we get larger we will definately need more niche things.
I can’t even count how many times I watched niche subreddits get ruined by the tyranny of the masses. As a niche thing becomes more popular, you get more casual lurkers. And those casual lurkers don’t typically have a strong knowledge on the subject. So they’ll start to upvote things that sound plausible and are eloquently written to make the reader feel smart for understanding it. But that doesn’t mean the info is accurate or correct; It just means the info appealed to the masses.
I work in a niche field of professional audio. The audiophile world has a lot of snake oil. Lots of people paying $2000 for solid gold cables when a wire coat hanger would sound exactly the same. I have seen “help, I have a buzz in my speaker and can’t figure out where it’s coming from” posts, where the top comment is suggesting a $7000 complete system rebuild… When all the OP needs is a 50¢ ferrite bead wrapped around one of their cables. But the “rebuild your system” comment was well written and sounded plausible to someone who only has surface-level knowledge, while the “ferrite bead” answer requires more in-depth knowledge on how interference is picked up in the first place. So the “rebuild your system” comment got pushed to the top.
Basically, nobody likes feeling dumb. And if a niche community gets popular, the laypeople begin to outnumber the experts. If a question has an answer that requires more than surface-level layperson knowledge, it will often get buried in downvotes from the laypeople. Not because it was incorrect, but because it made casual readers feel dumb. Even if the experts know better, they’re simply outnumbered.
Not even comparable. /r has more users and bots.
A particle on an object.
Yes. Go up to someone on the street and ask what Lemmy is.
That's fine, though, we're not going anywhere, and we can only grow.
it can easily shrink
How? Something else would have to pull community members away from the fediverse. I don't know what that would be right now.
Meanwhile, non-federated platforms will enshittify, be bought out by a crazy billionare who wants to ruin everything, or (like has happened with other, older monopolies) be broken up during a dynastic feud. I see some strong parallels to how Linux has outgrown proprietary alternatives over the decades, and arguably it's even harder for an OS.
How?
It is difficult to find conversations on the Fediverse that don't boil down to "America bad" "Linux good" "is the Fediverse growing?" and if that trend keeps up for terribly much longer people will stop logging in because they've experienced all the platform has to offer. Even people who hate America and love Linux are going to wander off if you don't show them enough cat pictures.
Threads like "ask a question and my guinea pig will type the answer" are way too rare here.
Do you see a bunch of "America bad" posts or a bunch of News/Discussions which places a negative light on America due to the bad things America does?
There's a huge difference, people don't typically get tired of being aware of and discussing current events.
There's a definite bent, but I actually don't feel starved for diversity. Looking at the posts in my feed sorted by new, it's about half America bad but there's also miscellaneous news stories and programming memes. No ancient Roman memes or goofy maps today, but I also spend a lot of time on that.
I suspect the next people in line to sign up are also interested in OSS and unhappy with Trump, but less likely to actually post about it, so basically content will regress to the mean fast enough to keep up. We've already seen a lot of movement away from Marxist-Leninist politics, which is what the devs started with.
How?
The number of people who use it decreases when the number of people who stop using it over some period of time is greater than the number of people who join
Yeah, but like, I gave some actual reasons why that probably won't happen.
That hasn't been the trend though.
Lemmy (also mastodon, in effect fediverse) is about quality and interaction, rather than consumption. So userbase being “tiny” is a feature. Here, your posts aren’t buried under karma farming accounts, your comments actually lead to discussions and get replies.
I’ve switched to RSS feeds for my consumption habbits
I agree. Lemmy today feels like reddit 15 years ago.
Well said, the emphasis here seems to be more about the content rather than the amount of upvotes you can get. But as this community grows so will exploiters as well. Time will tell I guess, but I really enjoy this platform more than any other.
I’ve switched to RSS feeds for my consumption habbits
are you using an app to do this?
I use NetNewsWire on iOS
No OC, but i "read you" on fdroid. Imo its the best option I've found for mobile.
On desktop there are a lot of options but i dont have a sigular recomendation.
Where does one find RSS feeds to subscribe to?
Pick a closed source/cloud-based RSS reader. They usually include a bunch of news/topic-based feeds built in. Not recommended for daily use, but it's a good way to get started (make your picks then export everything into an app like Read You). From there your list can grow organically.
I'd like to know myself.
Plenty of blog sites support rss by just adding /index, /feed, /atom to the sites names Example: https://www.ntietz.com/atom.xml https://chriscoyier.net/feed/
So I've just been adding them gradually as i encounter blogs i care to read.
There are probably lists you can search online but I find that adding /feed or /rss to the URL of a page I want to see updates from does the trick. There is also at least one Firefox add-on that indicates if a page has an RSS feed.
Normally you can paste the blog url directly into the rss reader and it will find the feed automatically.
rss feeds
Can u elaborate how you are using it
I follow blogs, gaming news and various other websites via RSS, and check my RSS reader couple times a day for new articles. Whenever they publish a new article, reader fetches it and there’s always something to read
There are plenty of pointless posts and comments here daily, but let’s hope for a quality future
bot users? yes!
human users? well, yes.
Assholes? Yes too
Plot twist: reddit is one guy and all his bots.
Interestingly
https://lemmy.ca/comment/5057563
The original reddit was closer to hackernews than the generic site it is now. Not only that but spez has admitted that the original traffic was artificial, by which I mean, the owners themselves were creating fake engagement through various means, such as scraping and cross-posting content from sites like digg via sockpuppets to appear that the site had way more traffic than it had.
You can see some stats here.
Pretty interesting how the number of active users per month has been fluctuating up/down but the number of comments and posts per month has been steadily going up
1337 you say
Haha. Obvs Lemmy is only for the leet.
Where do you see this chart?
On my phone. (In serious, the link to the picture is in the first comment of this thread)
Lol thanks for clarifying
Nice. How often is that updated?
Daily I think. It's an automated thing.
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