40000 is enough to be a functioning social media. most fediverse softwares don’t have that much. Sure, it is not enough to have discussions over non mainstream stuff, but there are still enough people for a variety of topics.
There are huge subreddits that are basically dead or just filled with spam. The ratio of active/passive users on Lemmy must be much much larger. A Lemmy community with 100 active members almost feels like a subreddit with 10 000 members.
A Lemmy community with 100 active members is more likely to be 100 active humans than a subreddit with 10,000 members is, based on the last time I went to Reddit: it was so, so clear that everything was either ChatGPT, or a repost of shit even I had already seen, or was just otherwise obviously not an authentic human sharing something interesting.
It might also be that we were some of the prolific posters on reddit. I heard somewhere that the top couple percent of posters on reddit used to make a majority of the new posts. And the rest lurk
That’s probably true, though I’m not sure who has ever actually made a legitimate determination since you’d have to remove the non-humans from the numbers first and, well, Reddit isn’t going to tank their MAU numbers by ever releasing that kind of stat.
It’s also not helped once you hit a certain size and the nature of scale takes over and the level of toxicity goes up: even in small groups, when a new person shows up and asks the same question for the 20th time, they start taking shit for it. If you’re in a BIG group, it turns into a giant dogpile, and people stop asking questions because who the hell likes that kind of response, so you end up with a lot of people who are subscribed to something, but none of whom actually contribute at all.
40k users is huge. Remember, lemmy is not profit driven. We don’t need to grow at all costs, we can grow naturally and sustainably.
40000 is enough to be a functioning social media. most fediverse softwares don’t have that much. Sure, it is not enough to have discussions over non mainstream stuff, but there are still enough people for a variety of topics.
…I kinda like it right now. Some communities of less than a 1000 have much more human responses. It nice. And not just from one server.
There are huge subreddits that are basically dead or just filled with spam. The ratio of active/passive users on Lemmy must be much much larger. A Lemmy community with 100 active members almost feels like a subreddit with 10 000 members.
The density of quality users and interactions on Lemmy nowadays reminds me of Reddit’s earlier days
A Lemmy community with 100 active members is more likely to be 100 active humans than a subreddit with 10,000 members is, based on the last time I went to Reddit: it was so, so clear that everything was either ChatGPT, or a repost of shit even I had already seen, or was just otherwise obviously not an authentic human sharing something interesting.
So yeah, not entirely surprising.
It might also be that we were some of the prolific posters on reddit. I heard somewhere that the top couple percent of posters on reddit used to make a majority of the new posts. And the rest lurk
That’s probably true, though I’m not sure who has ever actually made a legitimate determination since you’d have to remove the non-humans from the numbers first and, well, Reddit isn’t going to tank their MAU numbers by ever releasing that kind of stat.
It’s also not helped once you hit a certain size and the nature of scale takes over and the level of toxicity goes up: even in small groups, when a new person shows up and asks the same question for the 20th time, they start taking shit for it. If you’re in a BIG group, it turns into a giant dogpile, and people stop asking questions because who the hell likes that kind of response, so you end up with a lot of people who are subscribed to something, but none of whom actually contribute at all.
We’re actually at about 43k
43.001k! I just joined with my own instance in my over engineered lab 🧪
Welcome!