https://the-federation.info/platform/73 says for lemmy we have: 1,073,211 Users
It also says that: Last month users: 38897
Which is 2 orders of magnitude of a difference. If you look at the list of instances there ones like https://the-federation.info/node/details/48405 which have 50k users and 10 active last month users.
That means almost all of the 1 milion users are fake users.
I’m seeing people celebrating every 100k users every couple of hours without realizing this.
It’s so annoying that people are already trying to create fake users. Doing so on a federated network is straight up malicious :/
It’s not bullshit, it’s because of two reasons:
First, “Active last month” refers to users who have posted a comment in the last month. Every site like this has a large number of lurkers. A good rule of thumb is 10% of subscribers/users actually post/comment/participate. So 350-400k “legitimate” users sounds like the right ballpark.
Second, the numbers are so high because there has been a known bot attack. A few instances didn’t have email verification/captchas enabled so it was very easy to sign up for accounts very quickly. Some instances went from 500-800 users, to 10,000 users overnight.
It’s also probably inflated due to people making multiple accounts. I’m sure there’s lots of us (myself included) who made an account on one instance and then decided to swap to a different one.
That’s true. I first tried to create an account at beehaw but forgot about my application so I ended up on lemmy.world because it had open signups, so there’s at least 1 “useless” user account there.
Seeing how beehaw shut themselves off, things kinda worked out for me lol.
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Go on this page, sort by total users and compare to active users.
Yes, I’ve been using this site for tracking too.
lemmygrad.ml has 606 active users and 231752 comments
I’m not sure I understand your point? If you’re saying that the active user : comment ratio for all other instances is off, then I think you got it the wrong way round. lemmygrad was one of the first instances to be developed, way before the reddit exodus, so their number of active users has dropped even as their comment count slowly grew over time.
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Yes, lemmygrad really is that active. Try going to the instance to poke around and you’ll see. 600 active means 600 people have posted in the last month - like I said, lemmygrad has been around for much, much longer, so there are users who posted and then fell off, so their posts are part of the 230k comments but they don’t make up part of the 600 users.
Also, I don’t think you read my comment properly. What I said was that the numbers are not made up, but there are bot attacks on unsecured instances. Read my previous post again please.
But why should we know this?
Just so we don’t go out to the world and proclaim a million users while in reality it’s 2 magnitudes less. It just makes us look like we don’t check our sources.
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Could you please add a “Why YSK:”? It’s rule #2. :)
I like your avatar. I was such a huge Sonic fan since the original Sonic on Sega Master System that I spiked my hair from about 8yo to 18yo when I switched to wearing big 2in spiked hair when out clubbing.
Unfortunately middle age happened and my hair migrated from my head to my back which isn’t as good for spiking. :(
Why not, spike it and you can be a dinosaur
