according to reddit they had 918 million Monthly Active Users (MAU) in 2022, then they stopped reporting it for I assume stock reasons 🤷♀️. Anyways, I’m not trying to be super specific so I’ll go with 1 billion since it’s 4 years out of date anyways.
The widely shared number for Lemmy MAU is ~40,000. I’ve heard this shared for many years and I wasn’t sure if it was accurate anymore. The actual numbers are easy to find so I added all of the totals from piefed statistics page for Lemmy + Piefed + Mbin.
It turned out to be 40,272. guess the number was correct after all!
https://piefed.social/statistics?software=Lemmy
so that’s 1,000,000,000 vs 40,000
that’s 0.004%! I lowkey forgot how big reddit is.
EDIT: for all the people saying my data is inaccurate, I know. There’s many factors that offset the accurate statistics of what a ‘user’ is. I’ll list a few, including some nobody else has considered
- reddits estimate includes bot accounts
- lemmys estimate includes bot accounts
- reddit estimate includes alt accounts
- lemmys estimate includes alt accounts (arguably moreso than reddit due to ppl having accounts on multiple instances)
- reddits estimate includes signed out accounts, lemmys does not
- VPN / dynamic routers can largely bias reddits number
- one last small factor, reddits data is 4 years out of date
I’m literally a college dropout because I’m bad at math, I just looked up numbers and divided them.
instead of constantly winging about data inaccuracies how about yall do something about it. comment a more accurate estimation and I’ll edit my posts title and give credit. stupid smelly nerds


…who were at One Time on reddit. How many like me who just stopped going there when it went full scale evil?
Yep. I am only new here but Reddit use had plummeted over the last few years. Here in Australia it looks like you now need an account to even view a sub-reddit. I don’t think I will ever go back there.
I don’t know about full skill evil, but I stopped using Reddit entirely when they started charging obscene amounts of money for their API. I had an app called Baconreader that I really liked, and its developer just essentially stopped making money because they couldn’t afford the API fees.
I’m new fairly new to lemmy. Reddit still seems useful, particularly because as the OP says due to number of users. You might get faster and broader discussions and ideas to whatever you’re looking for. Not sure why/when it started feeling negative on reddit, maybe that’s one of the side effect of large number of users and may apply to Lemmy too once userbase grows similarly
for specific niche topics, the frontpage is just slop, even AI slop.