I discovered lemmy back when reddit started to charge for their API. However upon taking a look at it, it seemed that apart from like 8 communities,there was not much going on elsewhere. Things seem to have changed since then, quite a lot of active communities these days. So how many users do yall reckon lemmy has now? Is it close to 5M? or perhaps even higher?
Mastodon is the biggest fediverse platform and that has just short of 900k MAU (monthly active users) with around 8M registered users.
In terms of non activity pub but federated protocols, matrix is probably the biggest with a user count in the hundreds of millions. They also market very well to goverments and the public sector tho so they get lots of users from massive deployments with millions of users on one server.
People say this, but I’ve been on Lemmy and Mastodon for about 1.5 years and Lemmy feels a lot more engaging than Masto. My posts there get one or two likes and boosts, while posts and comments here regularly get dozens if not hundreds of upvotes. I think Blue Sky is eating their lunch right now.
Microblogging is about individuals while lemmy is about topics.
With the former, unless you involve algorithmic recommendations or recommendation lists like bluesky, its going to be a lot of work for users to get a nice feed from just following individual people.
With the latter, the things i mentioned are basically built into the system so its easier to get a lively experience even with much fewer users.
My experience goes against this position.
Between quite a few really active users and the ability to follow hashtags I have had a very active timeline almost since day 1 in Mastodon.
To put it in comparison, I find it hard to keep up with the Masto timeline while my 6-hour best sorting starts quickly showing a ton of doubles (wouldn’t it be great if we could somehow make them go away? )
In Thunder you can at least disable showing crossposts which should remove a lot of duplicates.