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.
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 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.
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?
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.
I'd just like to interject for a moment. What you're referring to as Linux, is in fact, GNU/Linux, or as I've recently taken to calling it, GNU plus Linux. Linux is not an operating system unto itself, but rather another free component of a fully functioning GNU system made useful by the GNU corelibs, shell utilities and vital system components comprising a full OS as defined by POSIX.
Many computer users run a modified version of the GNU system every day, without realizing it. Through a peculiar turn of events, the version of GNU which is widely used today is often called "Linux", and many of its users are not aware that it is basically the GNU system, developed by the GNU Project.
There really is a Linux, and these people are using it, but it is just a part of the system they use. Linux is the kernel: the program in the system that allocates the machine's resources to the other programs that you run. The kernel is an essential part of an operating system, but useless by itself; it can only function in the context of a complete operating system. Linux is normally used in combination with the GNU operating system: the whole system is basically GNU with Linux added, or GNU/Linux. All the so-called "Linux" distributions are really distributions of GNU/Linux.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.