How big is Lemmy's user base right now if you take into account all of the Fediverse instances?
There used to be the Alexa ranking for websites but it seems to no exist anymore. Elsewhere I only could find for lemmy.world ranking (something like 55000, yay!) but not the actual userbase, and nothing about any other instance (let alone the entire Fediverse).
I'll admit to mostly checking into Bluesky for a month in January. The user count is much higher but the quality-post count lower ... unless you're into phographs of cats and mushrooms, product-promoters, and political opinions. Forget any quality posts - a 300-character limit (but unlimited photo sizes) and 60-second audio/video limit encourage superficial sheepiality.
Not a desert, but next to one, and the water prices are higher. Probably 1000 lurkers for every liker, let alone comments ... unless you're an 'name' into self-promotion. Some names deliver inside info you'll not see here.
Lemme delivers as much quality as bsky does. But you have to scroll thru more crap there.
I wouldn't say that, considering we (feddit.org) are currently experiencing a large growth from reddit users and others going away from US based platforms.
You'll know when it hits mainstream when it's referred to on the nightly news and every media outlet is running at least an account for each program, but hopefully an instance for each organisation.
I think significant media outlet uptake is more of a Mastodon metric, Reddit has a few high profile media outlet accounts - Tampa Bay Times I remember seeing quite a bit, they did a lot of good journalism about Scientology because Clearwater, but I think a lot of news companies slept on Reddit while it was worth using.
I think we have hit an interesting level for notability though. I use Bazzite Linux, and last month they sent a broken update for their version with legacy Nvidia drivers. I was one of the first people on the internet reporting having problems in a post here on Lemmy. As I stated to search my problem, I found that someone on the Bazzite forums linked to my Lemmy post because they had the same problem. They never commented in my thread and they may not even have an account. When's the last time you saw a Tildes link in the wild?
I think this is the key to natural growth. Especially as more mainstream sites move to login required, and more and more search results are AI slop. Lemmy could be the last open and search indexable platforms left soon
FediDB has listed the overall Lemmy monthly active users at about 45k for a while now. It's anyone's guess how many actual humans that represents, since the number includes bots and alt accounts.
That number only includes accounts that post, comment, or vote. I would love to know how many silent lurkers are out there.
Thank you! This includes also non-lemmy/non-reddit-like sites, such as Mastodon, PeerTube etc, right? I tried to but couldn't find in your link what is the share of Lemmy instances. EDIT, it took a while to load on my phone but actually there is a “pizza” diagram and lemmy is at about 3% or about 50k MAU as other reply stated. Thanks again!