Selfhosted

I was reading the Wikipedia page linked just an hour ago.
and I was surprised to see over a billion daily users on Facebook. I used to think at best that'd be in millions.

I understand now that what do people mean when they day social media's amplification of a certain message can have great impact. I used to take it lightly, partly because I an totally detached to any of these big platforms.

and being on Lemmy is a wholly different experience.

There is an interesting, and almost universal phenomenon on reddit that every time a subreddit gets past about 40,000 subscribers, the discussion quality immediately drops off a cliff, unless extremely harsh moderation policies are implemented to explicitly weed out low effort content which brings its own set of problems.

My theory on why this occurs is the scaling power of moderation. I think you computer people are probably very familiar with the concept of scalability, and that size is its own challenge at the hyperscale. So for a centralized system like Twitter or Instagram or Facebook, moderation can only scale vertically, so a huge moderation team is needed to contend with the scale of these platforms alone, which also forces the need of personalized recommendation algorithms to promote this that are actually interesting to individual users.

Reddit was able to partially avoid this phenomenon with the subreddit system, which means everyone was able to effectively manage their own, smaller subgroups who shares common interest without intervention from the site admin/mods to achieve a form of pseudo-horizontal scaling. You can also see the success of that with Facebook Groups, which are one of the few reasons why people still use Facebook for social media even though they do not want to interact with the current Facebook audience.

Lemmy, and the rest of the fediverse platforms would suffer the problems even less, as now every group admin can now be completely independent from one another, which means that real horizontal scaling can be achieved and hopefully preserving the discussion quality to a degree as it grows.

Since you posted it in a selfhosting community, this is the feeling I get:

So Facebook is:

Boring Full of bots Soulless

An we are:

Real people mostly Engaged A cute little dot!

Like someone said, 1,5M people are enough for me, specially if they are mostly active and it seems they are. Are they stats for mean user activity?

Wow, the Fediverse is actually visible :0

I'm happy with this. I feel like Lemmy is an oasis of nerds in a social media world of toxic people obsessed with all the wrong things.

WE'RE ON THE RADAR, BOYS!

we really need to stop calling it formerly Twitter and just call it Shitter.

he ruined the platform, the people can ruin a name

Why this many people use Snapchat is incomprehensible

There are so many good messenger apps and all of them, Snapchat's giant userbase remains

There's no way reddit has more "real" users than Twitter // X. Maybe with bots but half the shit on reddit is a Twitter screen cap or repost.

An elite 1.5 million.

Fuck Spez.. amirite ? Guys?

What was twitter at pre elonification?