according to reddit they had 918 million Monthly Active Users (MAU) in 2022, then they stopped reporting it for I assume stock reasons 🤷♀️. Anyways, I’m not trying to be super specific so I’ll go with 1 billion since it’s 4 years out of date anyways.
The widely shared number for Lemmy MAU is ~40,000. I’ve heard this shared for many years and I wasn’t sure if it was accurate anymore. The actual numbers are easy to find so I added all of the totals from piefed statistics page for Lemmy + Piefed + Mbin.
It turned out to be 40,272. guess the number was correct after all!
https://piefed.social/statistics?software=Lemmy
so that’s 1,000,000,000 vs 40,000
that’s 0.004%! I lowkey forgot how big reddit is.
EDIT: for all the people saying my data is inaccurate, I know. There’s many factors that offset the accurate statistics of what a ‘user’ is. I’ll list a few, including some nobody else has considered
- reddits estimate includes bot accounts
- lemmys estimate includes bot accounts
- reddit estimate includes alt accounts
- lemmys estimate includes alt accounts (arguably moreso than reddit due to ppl having accounts on multiple instances)
- reddits estimate includes signed out accounts, lemmys does not
- VPN / dynamic routers can largely bias reddits number
- one last small factor, reddits data is 4 years out of date
I’m literally a college dropout because I’m bad at math, I just looked up numbers and divided them.
instead of constantly winging about data inaccuracies how about yall do something about it. comment a more accurate estimation and I’ll edit my posts title and give credit. stupid smelly nerds
Not saying it won’t or even doesn’t have bots, its just not a big enough target yet to be worth the investment flooding the place with bots. It is one thing to have a bot doing what ever if 100,000 people are going to read it, it is another if it is only a hundred people. Return on investment is far too low, for now.
The investment is a fraction of a cent, give or take… Or zero, if you already have the hardware (like a 3 year old laptop is enough). I run a local model on my 2022 MacBook and it gives me perfectly reasoned answers (mostly about foreign language grammar or baking recipes).
While that is true, it is also much easier to go for the low hanging fruit and reddit posts would get a much higher return on investment. It also help that Lemmy is not in the mainstream (yet) so the caliber of people here is a bit more skeptical towards anything that smells like generative junk.