Relative size comparison of social media platforms (December 2023)
Relative size comparison of social media platforms (December 2023)
cross-posted from: https://lemmy.whynotdrs.org/post/494473
Compared against the predominant incumbent social media platforms, the fediverse is very small.
information sources:
I'm surprised that the fediverse is as popular as it is, I would've guessed <500k. That's awesome. I'm also shocked that Threads is apparently that popular, I completely forgot it existed immediately after it launched. I also didn't know that Snapchat still existed, so maybe I'm just out of touch on social media stuff.
Wow, the Fediverse is actually visible :0
I wonder how long it'll take before we finally collectively reject the SV ethos that size is the only metric that matters and success is only achieved via monopoly...
There was a time when Usenet and BBBses and IRC was tiny and yet people still found value through community in those places.
Maybe, and I know this is a wild idea, platforms don't have to include every human on the planet to be meaningful, relevant, or valuable.
There is an interesting, and almost universal phenomenon on reddit that every time a subreddit gets past about 40,000 subscribers, the discussion quality immediately drops off a cliff, unless extremely harsh moderation policies are implemented to explicitly weed out low effort content which brings its own set of problems.
My theory on why this occurs is the scaling power of moderation. I think you computer people are probably very familiar with the concept of scalability, and that size is its own challenge at the hyperscale. So for a centralized system like Twitter or Instagram or Facebook, moderation can only scale vertically, so a huge moderation team is needed to contend with the scale of these platforms alone, which also forces the need of personalized recommendation algorithms to promote this that are actually interesting to individual users.
Reddit was able to partially avoid this phenomenon with the subreddit system, which means everyone was able to effectively manage their own, smaller subgroups who shares common interest without intervention from the site admin/mods to achieve a form of pseudo-horizontal scaling. You can also see the success of that with Facebook Groups, which are one of the few reasons why people still use Facebook for social media even though they do not want to interact with the current Facebook audience.
Lemmy, and the rest of the fediverse platforms would suffer the problems even less, as now every group admin can now be completely independent from one another, which means that real horizontal scaling can be achieved and hopefully preserving the discussion quality to a degree as it grows.
more =/= better quality, if anything this might suggest the opposite.
Who doesn't like an underdog? 😤
For the biggest ones: How many of those active users are bots, advertisers, and scammers? I'd guess about half on Facebook.
Also, is it considered "active" if you have a dormant account but have the app installed on your phone and it still watches what you're doing? What if you only use it to communicate with family because it's the only internet they understand?
Further, what about duplicate accounts or "secretive" secondary accounts so you can click on the depraved stuff you like without that showing in your public feed?
I feel like the real numbers for the big ones are massively inflated by issues like these.
The Fediverse is small enough to as of yet not be affected. Once it gets large enough, it will have all of this, too.
Haha, now show us a map of the size of different stars compared to Sol (ours, in the local solar system).
Sometimes the small stars and communites are the most important. ;)
Damn, if only Spez didn't have fucked up Reddit. I even wanted to invest in that IPO, but now I'm not going to.
Look we are on the map!
There's some merit to whether those daily active accounts are people, and the quality of the folks engaged as those accounts.
Twitter has more users, and a lot of static too, like people posting pictures of their paninis. I'm also sure there's a large percentage of automated/bot accounts on Twitter; they're active, but not posting anything you'll care about. Same goes for Facebook and Reddit.... There's more but I'll stop there. I'm sure you all get the picture.
Fact is, you can have 5 billion daily active user accounts, and still have very little content anyone cares about. A nontrivial number of posts are news updates either from media outlets or business accounts/companies that are simply a mass posted and shortened version of some PR message or something with a link to the information. Simply bringing the information to people where they are, no matter how few on Twitter or FB are actually reading what they post.
I feel like Lemmy has a lot of content because the majority of accounts are real people, so there's a better capability for discussion. It may be fewer overall people, by comparison, but it is, in many ways, more valuable and entertaining.
IDK, I'm just some guy.
Happy to be part of the top 1% in this case.
I would say a good billion of Facebook users are either highly inactive, actually inactivated but Facebook is still counting them, scammers and porn bots, and dead people. Many people made an account in like 2011 and promptly forgot their password and never logged in again I'm sure. And lord knows Facebook isn't honest about anything.
I'm surprised Twitter is so comparatively small but it's also a weird site in that you literally talk into a void, at least Facebook you know your uncle is reading your post or whatever.
I'm in the 1%
I surprised Threads, LinkedIn and Snapchat have that many
Great graphic and thank you for sharing.
Now let's filter out bots, low quality trolls, NPCs, and content that isn't easily searchable. It's definitely an interesting diagram, and, though it is fascinating, I think its a 1 dimensional view of the social space.
I prefer to engage around ideas and topics, rather than specific users or content producers, so having a good search and topic based boards or groups immediately puts a site miles ahead for me. Reddit and Lemmy excel at this, but some of the others leave a lot to be desired. As someone who used FB to organize and manage a topic based social group in real life, with a Facebook group of 1000+ participants, FB has some good groups, but the interface is absolute rubbish and I would migrate to just about anything else if I could get people to move.
I guess my point is that we lump these together as "social media", but that's a broad category that holds some very distinct subcategories that excel at very different things.
Facebook has like many thousands or even hundreds of thousands really dead accounts ( of dead people ), some of those accounts are just Oculus accounts as they got forced to create a facebook account, but i think those are very low in the hundreds or with low probability in the thousands.
LinkedIn isnt really a social network for me, its rather you state your past work and current work only then to get invited to 6 sessions of coding reviews.
Twitch is a entertainment platform ( like youtube ), not social media.
Slowly and steadily. This platform has potential.
We’re on the map!
Permanently Deleted
hell yeah
Why Facebook sucks. With those numbers you’re bound to have hundreds of millions of trolls and stochastic terrorists.
Snap is still alive? I haven't heard name in quite a while.
if the fediverse gets to hundreds of millions of users, we'd better hope that we solve for moderation.
Good.
I was reading the Wikipedia page linked just an hour ago.
and I was surprised to see over a billion daily users on Facebook. I used to think at best that'd be in millions.I understand now that what do people mean when they day social media's amplification of a certain message can have great impact. I used to take it lightly, partly because I an totally detached to any of these big platforms.
and being on Lemmy is a wholly different experience.
So that's why Instagram is the way it is, i assumed it was fairly small but it has attracted a rather toxic userbase and i don't actually enjoy it anymore.
It used to be a place where i could share my joys and people with similar interests would follow me because they enjoy my joys too.
But now it's just tiktok, at least i assume seeing it's all reels and loud noises.
So this is the Pluto of the internet?
To be honest, despite the smaller community, I feel more at home in the Fediverse than ever I did in those big, bloated, commercial communities.
NTS
@jersan the happiest little circle on the internet
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