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’d be interested to see how different it would look if we only counted average active daily users
It is wrong
Why this many people use Snapchat is incomprehensible
There are so many good messenger apps and all of them, Snapchat’s giant userbase remains
Hell, why do this many people use LinkedIn? The whole platform was built off of scraping Windows user’s address books without permission, sending unsolicited emails to all of those contacts using the name of that user, and pretending like they were such a great platform that of course your friends are inviting you to also join. And I’m pretty sure they still use this practice today because I continue to get emails from people who have no idea why their name is being attached to the spam I receive.
LinkedIn is very useful for job searching and networking. I don’t post on there, but it was key to getting several job offers.
I’m not aware of any other professional social networks.
I guess it just annoys me that they built a product on incredibly shady practices and have somehow managed to wedge themselves in to the business world under the guise of being “legitimate”. Trusting anything on their site, to me, feels as risky as trusting anything you see on Yelp – sure a real person might have posted the review, or maybe the business paid their blackmail tax to not get de-listed, but how many better opportunities are not being shown because the company deleted all their positive reviews?
I mean, sure, it’s not good if they did sketchy stuff to bootstrap their network. I hadn’t heard there before but I wouldn’t be surprised.
But I don’t think it’s really the same as Yelp. Or at least not how I use it. Trust isn’t really a factor. I don’t use LinkedIn to review a company. I don’t look at their soulless posts about how great their team is. I use it to see “do I know anyone who works at this place that has an opening I want?” Then when I see my old friend is a manager there, I shoot him a message (possibly not even via LinkedIn if it’s someone I know well) and ask if it’s someplace I would want to work at. There’s not really a lot of room for fake in that process.
Also sometimes recruiters just message me. Some of them suck but that’s not really particular to LinkedIn.
You’re not thinking of Glassdoor, are you? Because that’s more like yelp and I don’t especially trust the positive reviews on there.
I don’t really want to go to bat for Microsoft though. I’d be happier if there was a better professional network out there. But, you know, capitalist hellscape.
LinkedIn is a “need” for the ones wanting a job and trying to tell their new job /company is the best. Once these needs are satisfied they forget about it and only come back when the need arises again.
I’m in IT management at my company, the general management and HR folks basically require anyone in a leadership position to have a filled out LinkedIn profile with it linked to your Office account so it shows up in your outlook card and linked in your signature. So we look “professional and tech-driven” since all social media is lumped in with the tech industry for some reason
I really hate it but I still have active group chats that I haven’t had luck getting elsewhere. I get the impression it’s the same for most people because I haven’t heard anyone say anything positive about it in years
I use it for the same reason I use anything, the people I talk with are there. I already drew a hard line in the sand with some devices and Windows.
Snapchat is a line I drew. It’s probably my single least favourite messaging option
Honestly, I prefer it over a few of the others. That doesn’t make it good though. I’d much prefer to get everyone I know on to something more open and free like Matrix, wire, etc.
Different generations choosing different platforms I guess: >40 using facebook and <25 joined Snapchat.
Ngl FB Messenger is way better than Snapchat.
I don’t like Meta but at least the app feels like it isn’t making its users even more ADHD by the minute
Don’t know why you got downvoted. There is absolutely an “age” component to why people use a certain platform.
Social platforms have enormous retention leverage also. Once all your friends are there…
The age component is absolutely a reason and so is the leverage of the community and friends like you said. No doubt about it. It’s herd mentality and FOMO. Finally it is also how easy to get in and stay sucked in. These other platforms have the dopamine trigger game figured out on their apps. Fediverse doesn’t have that so much, other than the organic “did someone reply to me?” feeling. If you don’t engage then fediverse is not pulling you in.
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Imagine a dot a little bigger than the Fediverse with 25 million
NTS
Surprised to see LinkedIn’s 930 million MAU! I might have heard someone mention it irl like 2 times my whole life? But maybe that’s cuz I’m not in the job market yet.
It has different aspects to it. Big part of it is job hunters i believe, but i use it mostly for promotion of my research, discussion with other researchers, policy discussions and following conferences / webinars and news about climate related stuff. I use it daily.
It’s big for sales people too - I research who is the right person to contact at an organization, and also to find out what they’ve been up to lately that might be useful in a sales pitch.
I agree it’s has the corporate and institutional side of tech news that Lemmy doesn’t have.
Oh wow, I didn’t know it’s used for research and policy discussions as well! That’s pretty neat.
Like most popular social media sites, you usually won’t see very valuable discussion in the comments, at least in my experience. It’s mostly for people to post news, research, and so on, and follow the big names or organizations in their field.
Most of the valuable information is diffused via posts but I do put a bit of time and effort into trying to filter out all the crap posts like memes, the faux inspirational stuff, self-aggrandizing nonsense, etc.
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And no one is going to federate with them. They will destroy us and ruin everything.
it’s bonkers not to federate with them just because you’re gatekeeping - especially if you want the fediverse to grow into the mainstream
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Slowly and steadily. This platform has potential.
Damn! I didn’t know so many people still use Facebook. But it still doesn’t sound right. I definitely don’t feel like 37.5% of Earth’s population uses Facebook.
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.
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.
I see a lot of posts that are bot reposts with zero engagement. Maybe I need to find a better instance.
I’m on Lemmy.ca, and the “all” view shows all kinds of various instances. Most commonly Lemmy.world but others too.
It’s all federated. Unless your instance is defederated then you should have access to everything that Lemmy has to offer. You just need to find how to access it.
start blocking users and communities you don’t care about, or you can auto-ignore bot users in your profile; both options should help you out quickly.
My friends hate the need to do this. It does just take a second to click into community / instance and block it and you won’t be bothered again but a lot of people can’t be bothered with that one second even and would rather have something simpler unfortunately
Snap is still alive? I haven’t heard name in quite a while.
An elite 1.5 million.
I’m absolutely fine with 1.5 million. I enjoy lemmy much more than reddit. I feel like content and conversations here are better. None of the karma farming and corporate promotion disguised as natural content.
For now.
People need to realize that it’s okay for smaller forums to exist. Imagine if we measured fucking teamspeak servers by numbers. Would be just as ridiculous
If anything, smaller might be better in this case. We kind of have an idea of the type of demography we have here, with Reddit you could be arguing with a 9-year old in every other thread and you wouldn’t even know.
Although you’re correct, I find fediverse lacking in the department of the more niche stuff, e.g. fandoms of specific games, communities by geo proximity, obscure hobbies.
But well, Reddit wasn’t like this from the start and I hope the diversity and smaller communities will be here instead of there with time.
Yep, I used to be on r/diyhotas and that was already a niche within the HOTAS niche within the simulator game niche 😂
While I was also part of some niche communities back in the Reddit days, thanks to Lemmy, I switched to Linux and have found interesting new websites, tools and apps. So I’d say overall it’s a net positive.
Former r/fountainpens Reddit refugee here, and I agree 1.5m users doesn’t generate the kind of traffic for my hobby to figure in any sort of way. I miss the engagement
1.5 million is almost entirely Mastodon users which have no clue how Lemmy’s commenting culture works so rarely contribute in a way that makes sense to both the Mastodon commenter and the Lemmy comenter/poster at the same time.
Lemmy has ~20k ish actively commenting accounts.
Wow, the Fediverse is actually visible :0
