Lemmy Just Broke the 54k MAU Record Set During the 2023 API Exodus!

Help retain users by discussing more than just politics
- For real we need more uplifting subs, my feed is just Musk and Trump diarrhea.
  
  be the change you want to see. Post and upvote.
  
  I think this is an artifact of what's oddly the biggest weakness of the fediverse: decentralization.
  When I used reddit back pre-api stuff, my front page was 100% niche subs I'd subscribed to, but those niches have trouble le growing here because there's so many instances.
  I was super active in the scuba subreddit. Here on Lemmy, there's several scuba groups that tried to form, but none of them stuck because they were all on different instances instead of one central location where everyone could work together to make the community.
  As a result, most of us haven't been filtering out 99% of Lemmy because the 1% where we'd be active doesn't exist. It's like joining reddit and having your frontpage be /r/all. It's a shitty experience that g9ves a lot of weight to political posts.
  
  Sort by "hot"
- I have a gimmick sublemmy, !horseblindness@lemmy.world. Post images that may or may not contain horses!

To the moon 🚀

Let's go! I hope to see these numbers continue to go up as the days go on.

Lemmy is more polished and populated now than before. Hope influx stays and we got all the real people from reddit and bots stay there.
- Downloading an app instead of using the web gui helped me a lot, almost gave up on Lemmy couple days ago. But some of these apps are so well made. Really shows commitment

- Reddit refugee here. Can I say Luigi?
  
  It's more frowned upon to not do so.
  
  Can you say Luigi lol. Son, you're required to pledge allegiance to Luigi before every post you make here.
  
  We can say whatever the hell we want
  
  This is exactly what I was wondering.
- And we love you for it❤️

Yeah in a few days I'm going to delete my Reddit account, liking this place so far, you get news and genuine discussion.
- Don't close it. Get permabanned instead. Make those fuckers miserable.
- Please keep it, it can be useful to promote Lemmy a bit, like we do on !fedibridge@lemmy.dbzer0.com
  Glad that you like it here!

Yay!!! Let’s go :)

Zoidberg voice: hooray im helping

I'll just say, the more I hang around Lemmy, the more I enjoy the genuine conversations. It feels like less snark, less joke replies, and just a generally more community-type feeling. Reminds me of when I first tried Reddit after leaving Digg way back when.
Hopefully, us exiles can leave the Reddit back at Reddit.
- I like a lot of things here better than Reddit. For one thing, I don't see the stupid buzzwords like literally or cringe in 98% of all posts. There's no hivemind here...yet. And hopefully there won't be.
  Also not the same 5 memes repeated for 15 years.
- I feel the exact same, and I’ve been hanging around here for almost two years (the great 3rd party app exodus of ‘23).
  This place feels more like a community filled with people versus a firehose of internet wrapped in layers of corporate and right wing BS.
  Reddit was almost exclusively read-only for me. Here, I am commenting all the time.
  
  This is one of the reasons I stayed. It was still small enough back then that you actually started to recognize people you had conversations with, and not just the troll farms.
- I find a bunch of snark here, but it absolutely feels more genuine. With reddit it felt like half the comments I saw were from bots. More than half, maybe.
  
  I hate everyone on lemmy but at least I'm hating people

You know it's bad for Reddit when people were even talking about going back to Digg
- Digg still exists?
  
  They just announced they were coming back the other day 😂
  
  Yup

MAU? Mostly Anal Users? Martian Appalachian Upholstery? Mass Ass Underwear? Missing Alligator Utensils? Moldy Apple Uterus? Massive Arctic Uranus?
- Monthly Average Users
  as opposed to DAU (Daily) or WAU (Weekly)
  For a live product, the number of average users / time is a pretty telling metric.
  I wonder what the arc will look like this time.
  
  Thanks
- Make Americans Useful.
  
  Start at the top.

I'm in this picture and I like it!

Woo! That's awesome. I am seeing quite a few more people.
We are already successful, I'm seeing stories, news articles, and videos that normally would never get pushed to the top. We can actually talk about things without overwhelming censorship, strange algorithms, or ads.
- We can actually talk about things without overwhelming censorship, strange algorithms, or ads.

I'm calling this one the exodus of st mangione
- Luigi Migratione
- Have you considered reddit? I hear it's a great platform for people without any sense of humour.

Wow. And we’re almost at the halfway point of the month. I wonder if we’ll reach 100k at eom.

To anyone new wondering about phone apps for Lemmy, I use "Thunder" and it works great.
Also, feel free to say Luigi without getting banned.
- Luigi!
- I personally prefer Raccoon at the moment, but the gestures are starting to wear on me, so I might be switching back to Thunder. Honestly, can't remember why I left it. I'm a persnickety bitch about apps sometimes lol
- Voyager also work good.
  
  Or if you like it simple I can only recommend Jerboa
  
  Yup that’s what I’ve been using. The only downside is it’s hard to know who responds to whom.
- Just stay on the right side of pineapple on pizza.
  /s
  
  Insta-ban!
- Because 3rd party apps provide a native app experience to the mobile. Its far nicer to browser with all kinds of gestures than be limited to a 3rd party web browser
  
  "Hello, HR!"
  
  I’ve just looked at my instance on both my app (Voyager) and my mobile browser (DDG)
  The difference in presentation is stark.

People are finally done with reddit's shit! Thank God and welcome

Worth noting is that what counts as an "active user" has changed between now and then. During the Reddit API exodus, an "active user" was a user who had posted or commented in the past month. Now, it includes users who have voted. If the 54k MAU record was set using the first algorithm, it is likely that the MAU using the new algorithm (which includes voting) would have been much higher.
- Huzzah, us lurkers now count towards the global stats!
- I think that change was done way back when. Do you have a reference for the algorithm change? I tried a quick search and came out empty.
  
  The change was merged in Dec 2023 (see here). The Reddit Exodus was in summer 2023.
  
  Probably in the 0.19.3 changelog. There was a bump when LW changed, and I don't think they've updated since
- Good point

Slow and steady wins the race. Also helps to not be shit. looking at reddit.
- Also helps to not be shit.
  Yeah, we also turn a lot of people away by having boring UI and no Algorhythm, but I consider those to be more of a personality filter.
  
  Fuck the algorithm. Idk why people like that shit.
- Block lemmy.ml if you don't like it
  (Actually, is lemmy.world on too old of a version to have instance blocking? They're so far behind on updates)
  
  They're being diluted though! It was so much worse last year

Nice

Hmm. I wonder if the server i just launched was number 600 😁😁🔥😁

It is really awesome here. Like the good ol internet days.
- Absolutely. Feels like it's 2005 again, and you discover all kind of new places on the internet.
- Agreed. I hope it doesn't become so popular that it turns to shit.
  
  Eh. to some degree, enshittification is going to happen as more people come in, because more people = more shitty people. If we want to have the good niche communities that are IMO the only excellent thing about reddit, we'll have to put up with the fact that that also means a bunch of annoying people use the service.
  At least Lemmy has far, far better tools for dealing with them.
  
  Our most precious features is you'll never have to. If a community turns to shit, they just get defederated. If you can't find a server that defederates them, you can host it yourself. Your groups will be smaller, and you'll lose something in the transition, but what you have is what you'll put up with.

I guess some people get off on go team go, but to me looking at market share is very corporate thinking. If lemmy is better than reddit (which I think it is) it will just naturally grow, which is great. Whet I'm cheering for is that devs of software and other federated platforms are taking social media away from the business world by doing it better for free - whether that turns out to be lemmy or some other software.

The growth in 2025 has been staggering, ngl. And this is the kind of thing which converts from a trickle to a tsunami very quickly. It never happens with one shock. But a consistent amount of enshittification shocks. Reddit's desperate struggle for profitability practically ensures those will keep happening, so this is all inevitable at this point. The only thing that is uncertain is whether digg can recapture the fleeing masses who are not cognizant of the dangers of corporate vc-backed enshittification yet, like bluesky did to Twitter.
- Yeah. Reddit is currently enshitifying in overdrive. They used to just do dumb features nobody wants, but now they are actively harming the base. The entire Luigi over-moderation this is just bad, and it feels like they want the formerly leftist site to go full maga now. and even if I do have to use it, the website often tends to not function properly these days, with the site constantly reloading, or voting functions to be broken. This is the year of lemmy.
  
  I figured the planned paywalling of content was going to be the last straw for me, but then they gave me a fucking warning for upvoting. I made a Lemmy account the same day. Fuck them.
  The paywall shit is still planned for this year afaik so be prepared to see more of Reddit heading this way.
  
  want the formerly leftist site to go full maga now.
  Reddit and X, sitting in a tree.
- The user growth we're seeomg could result in an overwhelming flood of users at anytime. Which is why people should consider supporting the lemmy devs and instance admins either financially or through contributions so that the lemmy software and infrastructure is ready to handle the growth.
  
  And then in 5-10 years the users will destroy it like everything else on the Internet...
  Seriously, though, make me wrong - because this kind of model is so new to me, I don't know, is there anything different about this that will resist it going the way of things that were once good and eventually weren't, like Craigslist and Reddit?
  Obviously a lot of Reddit sucks due to how it's run, but let's not overlook that part of its downfall, like with Craigslist, is the users as it grew having no respect for the model. I've been on my way out since well before the API exodus (and yet I was addicted and too lazy until now, that's on me). People posting whatever they want wherever they want and having very little understanding of nuance in language ("oddly satisfying" doesn't just mean "I like this"), misusing downvoting (I know I'm yelling at clouds, but that was where Reddit was doomed from the start to become an echo chamber, and I didn't know if Lemmy is different in that respect - do votes determine visibility here?), moderators becoming more power hungry, and I'm sorry if this is mean, but the userbase trending younger steering content much more to "mah crush, aitah?," fake stories for "points," and I feel the general populace there being more gullible. Not to mention the same comments being made over and over, and I'm not talking about bots, I'm talking about constant "this is the way" and "username checks out."
  I've seen so many actual discussions here already that are full of real passion and good points even when they're heated, some lovely user created and has posted around a really through socialist reading list. I've only seen "this is the way" once. Reddit is lazy one-word answers and downvotes. How do we encourage this and discourage that?
  Anyway, I rant. This place is great now and will only get better as it grows, but I hope this model will in some way resist that downfall. But I've come to accept that nothing on the Internet is permanent. And also that people are gonna people and if I don't like that, it's on me to leave.
  
  This seems unrealistic in my opinion. Normal people really don't like to donate, unfortunately. I think that Lemmy needs to make it so anyone can easily self host an instance without too much fuss. Something like docker on an old laptop. I know they have docker containers for Lemmy already, but in my opinion, they aren't simple enough to set up. And there should be an option to bundle it with a wireguard VPN tunnel, so that they really don't need to fuff about with reverse proxy to browse on your phone. This way, the cost is distributed across all users. It should be that setting up a domain and port forwarding should be the largest hurdle.
- But a consistent amount of enshittification shocks
  I think the proper term is enshittification sharts
  
  Lel

I flipping love Lemmy.

Makes me happy to see it, a future for a platform that is not locked by a single large player. Instead, I can have my own profile that I actually own and do not “lend”.
- Yep! We come from all over.

It's so nice to see the servers are not crashing anymore this time around like how Lemmy.world did for me a few times back when I first joined in 2023 and I remember when the only app that was available on ios was just Wefwef before Memmy and Mlem came out of testflight. Today the apps are much more developed as we now have: 6 ios apps, 10 android apps, advanced search, moderator tools, user tags, in-app video playback, baby account indicator, advanced markdown editors, crossposting, watch support, expanded customizations, content filters, fediseer integration, side by side posts, alternate sources menu, song service integration, direct messages in app, gallery view, local sub count on communities, troll buster, user theme directory, open web post in app, gestures, media bias check, alt check and personal contribution stats.
- Yes I remember the lemmy.world servers being DDOS'ed every couple of days and having to switch between 3 clients and the webinterface because all of the apps were missing some features. The alternative frontends like photon and tesseract have really improved and imo should be the new defaults.

The MAU of lemmy.world is ~18,600 which is a bit greater than the combined MAU of the next 7 instances (a big help here is lemm.ee which has ~7000 MAU). This is a really healthy spread of users and it means we don't lose lemmy if the biggest instance goes down.
Compare that to Mastodon, where mastodon.social has more MAU (~372,000) than the combined MAU of the next 30 instances at least (I gave up counting). Thats not healthy for the ecosystem. Though tbf the total MAU of mastodon is ~899,000 so without mastodon.social they will still have ~527,000 but it will be very spread out.
- I think the distribution is fine as long as we still have nodes with good capacity. Our real issue is everyone demanding to be on the same instance because they're scared of Federation.
  What I'd REALLY like to see is a Federated Resource Locator service, kinda like nameservice for a federated user.
  rumba@mastodon.social is 101254684, if I move to rumba@ingrowntownail.es, I want all my followers to do that lookup and still be following me. It's great to have my settings migrate with me, but it would be bangin' to have other people linked to me to still follow me.
  
  There are no followers on Lemmy
- I don't think it's healthy enough but certainly better than the mastodon ecosystem
  
  It's mostly because people keep recommending LW instead of other instances.
- I think the biggest instance, lemmy.world, not being operated by the Lemmy devs is also a good health indicator - on every other Fedi service I can think of, the server run by the devs is the biggest by far.
  
  think the biggest instance, lemmy.world, not being operated by the Lemmy devs is also a good health indicator
  Doubly so considering how the main devs manage their instance according to their highly controversial political views LMAO

Let’s gooo

So by my math and some googling, that's about 0.00005% of Reddit's MAU.
On the one hand, cool, growth is growth.
On the other hand maybe it's... healthy to stop looking at Lemmy as an "alternative" to anything and start thinking about it as this small forum you like to use sometimes. Worked for me in the 90s, works for me now.
- You're off by some orders of magnitude.
  It's 0.005%
  But that's based off of the 1.1 billion number I saw. Somehow I very much doubt there's 1.1 billion people with accounts who login and browse at least once a month.
  
  Also never underestimate how many bots there are. And how many users have 10+ accounts. Seeing less evidence of that on Lemmy so far, though who knows honestly.
  
  Yeah, 1 bill with all the bots and alt accounts maybe.
  
  In spez’s wildest jizz wet dreams there are 1 billion Reddit users.
- Reddit is calculating its MAU differently. They seem to be counting even not-logged-in users coming from search engines - without that numbers like "1 billion monthly active users" really don't make any sense and even that is a crazy metric, if you think about it. There is no way that 1/8 of humanity is browsing on Reddit in a month. Lemmy seems to count only users who are doing something (submitting, commenting, upvoting)
  
  If they're doing that, it means they're counting unique IPs, which is a ridiculous metric. Even lemmy would have easily 10x the MAU with it.
  
  It doesn't really matter. For one thing, MAU and unique users are different metrics and they're both valid, so if Lemmy is counting verified uniques they can just call it that.
  For another, I looked at the data for logged in users and Fedi's MAU is 0.125% of their daily logged in users, so the point stands regardless.
- Reddit is inflating its numbers by a wide margin.
  A sub like https://old.reddit.com/r/BuyFromEU/ has 150k subscribers, but the activity definitely doesn't reflect that compared to !buyeuropean@feddit.uk and the 9k weekly active users
  
  It may or may not be.
  It is definitely not inflating its numbers by the orders of magnitude it'd take to make a dent on this particular takeaway.
- Totally, we don't want numbers for the sake of numbers. We need passionate people who are ready to ditch other mainstream ones for federated alternatives. Then only we can grow.
  
  Like Haskell's (unofficial) motto, "Avoid success at all costs". Depending on circumstance, that should be read as "(Avoid success) at all costs" or "Avoid (success at all costs)". We're mostly in the latter condition I think, with only a couple of things (such as DMs) being shoddy enough that success should be avoided.
  
  I super agree, would rather have one decent regular than a thousand average redditors who don't fit the vibe around here
- The problem with (very) low user count is the more nieche things will not have activity.
  
  Yep. Which ends up being why old forums were such tight-knit communities. You ended up hanging out with a handful of people. I'm mostly fine with that. If anything, it requires starting something yourself for your niche interests and being fine with it being dormant most of the time.

It's very exciting to see 48k MAU jump up to 55k in such a short time.

Currently using phtn.app for browsing lemmy, though it’s a bit buggy on mobile. V2 will be coming soon so hopefully most bugs will be fixed.
What y’all using?
- Voyager on android, im perfectly happy with it.
- Firefox
- Jerboa. Tried several and liked it best.
  
  That's the one I like. Or piefeds mobile on Firefox.
- Boost for Lemmy on Android.
- Thunder. I used to use Sync for reddit before, and used it a bit for Lemmy. But I like thunder a bit more.
  I also use Interstellar for mbin.
  
  Interesting. Is mbin the same as kbin or?
- vger.app
- I'm using my web browser (on mobile)! I know I'm not the only one, but that's usually pretty unpopular. I've never been big on social media, but I've never used an app for any of them I have used in the past, including Reddit. Website with ad blockers for me, screw those guys. Here, though, I might give in eventually and try an app...
  
  I also just use the web interface and it is so simple and excellent to use. I will never use an app for this.
  
  Phtn.app is actually a website/selfhosted interface for lemmy. The mobile PWA is a big buggy, but the desktop one works fine.
- Self hosted tesseract web UI.
  https://tesseract.asudox.dev/
  
  This one looks sleak af.
- Connect for Lemmy. Super under- rated.
- Voyager on iOS is great.
  
  I tried it but I have one beef with it: once logged in, my subscribed communities are no longer appearing and i have to resubbscribe to all of them. I did it once on phtn and wouldn't want to do it all over again as I'm hopping around lemmy apps.
- Tesseract on desktop and mobile.
- I’m using Mlem as I think it looks the best!
  
  Will look on it too, heard about it back in 2023 but never tried it.
- Eternity on phone, Lemmy as a PWA on my tablet and official Lemmy site on my laptop and on desktop.

Good for Lemmy.

Let's go Lemmyyyyy!!!!

Glad to be part of it!

where can I check these status? Which website do you use?
- The one shown is from join-lemmy:
  https://join-lemmy.org/instances
  Also of interest for people that love statistics (which I do):
  https://fedidb.org/software/lemmy
  https://lemmy.fediverse.observer/stats
  EDIT: As you can see, the Fediverse being what it is, it's basically impossible to get an exact, definitive count, so the numbers will always be a bit fuzzy. But they clearly show trends
  
  Fedidb used to have graphs for lemmy no? Now its only for all fediverse stuff combined :/
  
  It seems like the other two tools only report about 49k MAU, any idea why?

Meh. These stats are so flawed. Its like 5 servers having most of the users.
Its like pretending we have this amazing distributed network when its actually extreamly centralized.
But im happy Lemmy is growing, its good.
- 5 > 1
  even 3 would be a huge advantage over centralized
- Fedidb observes 50k monthly active users. 65% of these are distributed between instances with more than 2000 monthly active users, making up the five biggest instances. Half (51%) are on either Lemmy.world or Lemm.ee, which are the only instances with more than 3000 monthly active users.
  A fourth of us are on instances with less than 1000 monthly active users.
  I don't think that's all that bad. But who am I to say, I'm not even part of the statistic. :)
  
  imo we should focus on a statistic on the entire Threadiverse instead of only Lemmy. After all, these software are highly intercompatible, so excluding them doesn't make sense.
- 55.1k MAU are 55.1k MAU. What about that is flawed?