How active is Lemmy now?

Remember when forums would be super active with, like, 500 users?
"Millions of users" is a vanity stat. The critical mass needed to keep a discussion group alive is actually quite small -- assuming you're interested in, you know, discussing things. So, how active "Lemmy" is is entirely dependent on which topics you're interested in.
- There is a point where a forum is too active and you need to either split it or implement weird and complex rules so things don't get too large.
  
  Hasn't Lemmy sort of already accomplished that both with federated servers and communities?

There are dozens of us?

The real answer: https://lemmy.ca/post/35073012
- “Do you know about our lord and savior, Linux? Let me tell you about it…”
  
  Well actually we use Arch btw...
  
  😂
  
  I use Ubuntu. Wtf are you dorks gonna do about it?
  
  have you heard of plan 9 and 9 front? What about gnu/Hurd?
  
  Nah our lord and savior is Linus Torvalds and hes here to offer you Linux as his gift from the gods :3

So active that I always recognize the 100 or so usernames that are everywhere
- To be fair, that happens on Reddit as well.
- You're one of us too!
- These sort of comments always make me wonder who recognises my nick. A ranking of 'user-recognition' would be fun. Though obviously impractical.
  
  We all know what that list would look like: https://feddit.org/post/3602869
  TLDR version:
  
  I'll make sure to remember your name moving forward. Your current ranking: Awesome
  
  I do
  
  These sort of comments always make me wonder who recognises my nick.
  I wonder that too. I know I have seen yours, but not enough to dislike you if that means anything lol.
  
  These sort of comments make me wonder who is reading usernames. I barely ever look because it doesn't matter except in reply threads.
- It’s a feature, I’m gonna try to remember people’s names more
  
  Some clients (at least Connect and Voyager on Android) have a user tagging feature, so I've been tagging people I see over and over or trolls, or whatever. It's really handy to start to easily see who's around and posting.
- Same
- Heyo!

Active enough 🤷‍♂️

There's enough shit posts to keep most people happy.
- Amen

All I know is that i can mindlessly scroll for about 2 hours before I start hitting the NSFW content, at which point refreshing the feed sifts the new stuff to the top and is still good for another hour or so
I run into a lot of the same names, but I think that's fine (if not preferable)
- I've never seen nsfw stuff on Lemmy actually, neither did I see star trek
  
  neither did I see star trek
  I don't believe you.
  
  neither did I see star trek
  Lucky you
  
  NSFW is probably a matter of instance and preferences (not sure if filtering NSFW might be enabled by default)
  But star trek? What the hell? That seems to be one of the largest communities on the entire platform, and with high quality content and lots of interaction, how did you not see it? Is your instance defederated or something?
- I find it's about 5 pages in, sometimes as little as three depending on whether or not someone on lemmynsfw started a new community and self-spammed it.

I'm practically a fixture on Lemmy, and I view everything sorted by newest comments so I see only new posts and posts actively being participated in through replies and I'd say it's only slightly less active than Reddit appearance wise. Surely there is less things being posted over all, but I can just refresh the page every few seconds and get entirely new posts almost every single time, barring a few hours in the middle of the week.
I know that someone has a statistic site for Lemmy that could actually show you exactly what you wanna know, but I haven't saved the URL and don't know it off the top of my head.
- Can confirm that sorting by new comments makes it appear a lot more active. There's a reason why old forums' only sorting method was thread bumping.
- Reddit is very quiet lately, probably due to school breaks
  
  The dips I see on Lemmy are probably from people actually working. I at least have a job where nobody cares if I use my phone because I can still work while fucking around on it, so long as it's not in the dining room where customers can see me.
  
  sdfhjlaks;fjlk;asfjkl;sfjakl;
- sdfhjlaks;fjlk;asfjkl;sfjakl;

About 0.04 million monthly active users
- Just say 40,000. Which is a pathetic number, but perfectly fine for the type of niche communities budding up here and there across all the domains connected together here.
  
  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.
  
  I would have, but they asked in millions and I was being cheeky.
  I don't find it pathetic, I'm quite happy with it. Sure, I'd be happy to get more but in no rush.

The stats are irrelevant, imo. What matters is how useful lemmy is both to average users and specialty users.
Right now, the more niche the hobby/interest is, the less useful lemmy is unless it fits into the handful of subjects that lemmites grok.
That being said, for general use, lemmy is great. Plenty of memes, plenty discussion about subjects of general interest, and plenty of posts for casual scrolling on the john. In that regard, it's better than bigger forums because you don't have to scroll through a dozen fake posts to find things that interested a fellow human.
I can usually, on bad days when I'm not very mobile, spend an hour or so on lemmy before I get back to where I had previously left off. That's about the sweet spot, imo.

https://fedidb.org/
https://fedidb.org/software/lemmy
- The answer is (currently) ~42k monthly active users.
  
  Indeed: https://lemmy.fediverse.observer/stats

I'm an active user who post and comment regularly, and I would say that the experience is very similar to Reddit. Except for less adds and smaller numbers on the main/all page. The experience is probably very different if you're mainly a passive consumer of content.
Though I've never been active in "large" subreddits and I tend to block them from my feed. So guess I don't know what I'm missing.
- The main deficiency is niche and hobby communities, they're mostly empty or missing on Lemmy.
  
  This is about right. Its a great general interest thing and you have some really great folks but you don't have a ton of pathfinder people talking about pathfinder or sto people talking about sto on an sto sub, etc. so we have a general gaming community that is pretty active but if you want to know day to day whats happening with a particular game. not so much.
- You have ads? Where do you see them? Not sure if I'm being ignorant and not recognizing them or did something right that made me not see them
  
  Ok, I rephrase. Zero ads on Lemmy. 🙂

The active user base is trending slightly downward as a few instances have shut down recently but the amount of registered users is steadily increasing so those trends will reverse as the largest barrier to entry is just knowing about Lemmy and creating an account.
Users: 467k
MAU: 42k
Posts: 10.8m

https://fedidb.org/software/lemmy

This active

Not sure, but compared to about a year ago, it seems more active.
- It feels most active the month after June 12, 2023. Then it kinda got quieter
- According to the fedidb, it's about the same.

The economics of a social platform relies on growth over time and Lemmy is growing at the perfect pace because it’s not a single entity but a collaborative entity.
Once bigger federations break through to the mainstream market you’ll see the relevance of smaller federations growing along with it as it becomes a ‘bigger’ ecosystem
Mentioned in the comment section below what is necessary for community growth and it doesn’t require millions, only a few hundred active members.

If you care about American politics and being outraged at every and any thing thrown at you during the day, it is active enough. However you are SOL if are curious about any other topic that does not involve narcissistically talking about yourself.
Assuming you are invested enough to find or create a community for a topic you care about, be prepared to be talking to yourself for a long time and consider yourself lucky if you manage to get 2 other people commenting on it.
- any other topic
  !movies@lemm.ee
  !showsandmovies@lemm.ee
  !foodporn@lemmy.world
  !casualconversation@lemm.ee
  !patientgamers@sh.itjust.works
  !parenting@lemmy.world
  
  Congratulations. You are bringing your dozen communities that only survive due to your incessant work, which kind of exemplifies my point: Lemmy has maybe a handful of communities outside of the politics/meta-fediverse topics.
- TRUE
  Feels like it's just memes and specifically war and American politics
  The only actually different communities I found were about ancient times and history posts (thank you for that by the way)
  
  The big three are:
  memes
  politics/news
  tech
  There are a couple dozen people who keep a smaller community alive (like PugJesus on history, anon6789 on owls, JohnnyEnzyme on euro graphic novels, LaurenceWolse on b movies, Nexius Lobster on traditional art, etc); occasionally someone takes over a community and starts posting regularly, and occasionally someone burns out and the community dies.
  
  !movies@lemm.ee
  !showsandmovies@lemm.ee
  !foodporn@lemmy.world
  !casualconversation@lemm.ee
  !patientgamers@sh.itjust.works
  !parenting@lemmy.world
  !newcommunities@lemmy.world can help to find communities

I am seeing slow and steady growth in the areas I follow.

Anyone saying that it's even a little bit close to an adequate level for anything other than politics and star trek are lying to themselves.
- Don't forget to mention Linux. Literally eveywhere.
- I dunno, seems pretty good for queer spaces and shitposting, but I guess .world doesn't know much about either.
- I block politics, news and star trek.
  Then the rest of the content is visible

3 active

Do you mean just Lemmy, or do you also want users from mbin or others fediverse instances that can access lemmy discussions?
- 713 monthly active users for Mbin : https://mbin.fediverse.observer/stats
  135 for Piefed: https://piefed.fediverse.observer/stats
  
  There are dozens of us - not quite a dozen dozen, but at least multiple dozens! (on PieFed) :-P

🙋‍♀️ present

- Happy cake day

its 10x the useless circle jerk upvote farming of reddit with 1/n the user base

What difference does it even make?
- I was just curious man, didn't know where to look, people here helped me already so, thanks to them once more
  
  Feels right at home again, doesn't it? /S I'm hoping it picks up more traffic too.