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.

  • @dystop
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    1 year ago

    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.

    • @[email protected]
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      281 year ago

      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.

      • @dystop
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        111 year ago

        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.

      • @dystop
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        111 year ago

        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.

        • @AnarchistArtificer
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          21 year ago

          And part of what led to lemmygrad in the first place was subs like /r/Genzedong being banned. I think the kinds of people who seek a new location after their sub is banned are much more likely to be in the 10% group who comment and create content. Besides that, the political nature of lemmygrad (and the fact that all those users are likely on the same page about a lot of things) leads to a much more engaged userbase.

          In short: lemmygrad is in no way a representative example/sample

        • @joneskind
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          -21 year ago

          600 active users a month making 230000 comments a month? Those are pretty active indeed

          Most of instances having 40K users but less than 100 actives?

          Compare the data of Lemmy.world with others. There is a common trend of ratio between users/active/posts and comments among them, and then there are those huge instances by users but zero activity?

          I’m sorry but there’s either a huge problem in the way users numbers are aggregated, or those users are just fake.

          • @dystop
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            31 year ago

            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.

            • @joneskind
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              -71 year ago

              Also, I don’t think you read my comment properly.

              Oh yes, I did. You are just finding ways:

              How can you say, “Not bulshit -but- attack by bots” “350-400k legitimate” ???

              That sentence alone tells me exactly what I need to know about your way of thinking, because even if you were correct about real users and not overestimate the numbers, 350K legitimate when everybody cheers 1 million is definitely bulshit.

              So ok, my bad. I shouldn’t have tried to have a sensical discussion with you.

              • @dystop
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                51 year ago

                I interpreted OP’s post as “the number of users reported on the website is wrong”.

                My point is that the number is accurate - there are that many signups - it’s just that a large majority of it are bots. The number is accurate, but it doesn’t mean anything.

                I was in no way trying to cheer the fact that we have that many users. Like I said, we probably only have 350-400k actual users. It’s not that the reporting is wrong, it’s the bot sign-ups that are making the number meaningless.

                I was unclear in my message, I guess. And you were also very rude.

                • @Holyginz
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                  51 year ago

                  There was a misunderstanding which happens. Unfortunate they felt the need to start trash talking before everything was made clear. It’s nice to see people admit when they make mistakes. Doesn’t happen as much as it used to.

          • Knighthawk 0811
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            11 year ago

            do comments count if they are on your instance coming from another instance?

            • @joneskind
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              11 year ago

              That’s a really good question to which I don’t have an answer.

              But even if it was the case, there shouldn’t be that much disparities between instances.