this post was submitted on 18 May 2026
-13 points (37.7% liked)
No Stupid Questions
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No such thing. Ask away!
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It's indeed way smaller, On one hand it's great you don't have a forever stream of new content, on the other hand it sometimes feels a bit empty, but by posting you help making it less empty.
It is quieter.
Post some new shit, comment a little. It ain't no good if y'all just lurkin.
I wouldn't label this a stupid question but it has to lean towards one with a very obvious answer.
How could you not be aware that the fediverse as a whole and lemmy in particular are a niche network? With my filters set to new/all, I see on average 10-20 new posts per hour. It's one step up from a single-player game.
It would be like asking if it's you or if linux is a less popular OS than Windows.
To go more specific
https://lemmy.fediverse.observer/stats
Lemmy has about a million and a half registered users total. close to 35k active per month.
Reddit can be estimated as over 400k active weekly users. In short a semi popular subreddit would be expected to have more total active users than lemmy as a whole
Almost 1 in 11-12 is way more than i thought for fediverse - feels smaller.
Maybe reddit is smaller than i remember, or has more occasional users.
Do you know if those stats remove bots?
Either way it's back yard fishpond vs great lakes and that's the answer.
small pond :-(
big fish :*)
p.s.
It's one step up from a single-player game.
I gotta remember to steal that!
yes. of course. this is partially why I like it. I may not agree or like everyone in the fediverse but they are all techy enough and plugged in enough to get away from the corpo bs.
I definitely wish it was more active over here. But it's good enough and hopefully continues to grow.
of course there are far fewer users, but a few times I've gone back to see if I was missing something and of the 25 posts on the home page, it felt like more than half were reposts of some ask reddit question to bait interactions that I've seen before, followed by what appeared to be bot posts, then maybe like 3-5 user posts. Of course, specific, niche communities should be better, but as far as home experience, I have a hunch that it's mostly bots.
since Lemmy and the like don't have a motivation for that and the people in general hhhhaaaaaattee bots, I think that it may appear to be less than it is when you remove reddit's bot content
Yes, reddit is one of the most popular sites on the internet and lemmy (the whole fediverse really) is much, much smaller. I browse /all/new, id never do that on reddit.
It's better this way tbh
It’s better this way tbh
Agreed. Kinda weird how a smaller userbase actually feels better. Only problem is less people to answer specific questions and generally be active in niche communities. On the other hand you know people better, may even get to know them in real life. It's more personal.
Yeah this is much closer to reddit in the mid 2000s. I'll happily take the trade, even if it means I dont get replies im looking for (although I almost always do, lots of lemmings browse /all/new and stumble onto stuff)
I really enjoy being able to browse by new and the feed isnt just a bunch of junk.
everytime i do that here i'm just shocked at all the filth that shows up. very little quality content here.
however if i was a furry who jerked myself off about linux and had a victimhood-superiority complex about my autism, i'd be in heaven. it's scary to me how prolific that segment of the userbase is here.
Just block the communities you dont like. I dont want porn, non-English comms, etc. Two clicks and problem solved.
Also, why are you scared of autistic Linux furries?
I do, that doesn't mean they keep making new ones that are ever more specific, or new ones are popping up on new instances.
I'm not scared, I'm annoyed. Just like I hate people who ride Harleys. They are obnoxious and it sucks to be subjected to their bullshit for just existing in the same space as them.
I dont have an issue with people who ride normal motorcycles... almost as if they don't have anything to prove and are just enjoying their hobby without being obnoxious weird jerks...
It's also hilarious to me they get so upset that you might find them obnoxious because they really do think they are super wonderful amazing people. I made a complain last week about obnoxious Linux people, and people replied with multi-paragraphs to argue with me how not obnoxious they are and that if I don't think Linux is special than I'm a pathetic werido who worships windows.
They are that socially clueless and sadly stupid enough to really see the world in 'me vs everyone else' terms. When you point out their poor weird behaviors, they just lean into them and get defensive. 'leave me alone!' no dude, it's you that's not leaving me alone, because you can't keep your shit to your own communities, probably because of the victim-superiority complex they have. They need to broadcast it because they need to be aggrieved, like your typical Harley rider needs to be the loudest most insecure person on the road.
Besides the obvious size difference already discussed, the biggest causes of Lemmy feeling like a ghost town, are the splitting up of communities, both by instance and by niche, and the lack of common defaults across instances.
The first split is inherent to the design but could be solved (I think I saw a proposal for aggregating like communities from different instances that aren't defederated), but I don't know what the interest level is.
I feel like the second is a mental issue for everyone coming from the likes of Reddit. With the number of people here and the amount of activity you'd see, people should be much more forgiving of "off topic" posts in any given community. I'm guilty of it too, so this isn't meant to be a slight. But the answer to someone asking what community they should post in for some niche topic shouldn't be "create one". It should be "post in a popular related community, they'll be fine with it". I could go on about the nuances, but hopefully my point is clear: hardly any communities (if any) on Lemmy are big and active enough at this point to warrant gatekeeping to keep the noise level down.
The last one would be easier if there was a solution to the first one, but having five or six communities that everyone who joins Lemmy is subscribed to by default would go a long way to making this place feel busier.
don't forget it's mostly human here vs a plethora of bot accounts planted by Reddit themselves, as did facebook
That doesn't change the issue here.
Thank you very much for the excellent answer. I could say even the best one.
Keep in mind the best answer is still the size. The rest is my opinion.
Well yes, of course it is. It only a has a fraction of the user base.
It’s like… WAY smaller. This should not be shocking.
Also, I remain unconvinced that a ballooning userbase would be a good thing for lemmy / pubhub, for multiple reasons - not least of which: it would probably push a lot of instance admins/owners out, simply due to having to handle more load and infrastructure and cost and so on. A smaller community is more sustainable, more easily moderated, and tends to be less filled with pervasive cruft and bots and so on.
After spending some more time on Lemmy, I have to say, that's very true
And way more dull
Almost every obvious stupid joke is taken way too literally, or offensively by someone or other, so I always do a double check, and delete half of my drafted replies. And that's even after i (try to) block most politics/Dump/Skum channels.
Unless I'm really in the mood for downvote farming by trolling linux nerds (drunk).
You're drunk, or the linux nerds. Like, I have to know this now. Fucking nerds. You know, Ogre from revenge of the nerds just died, so in his honor, NERDS!!
Reddit is, conservatively, 60% bots. Not as many here.
There's more people on reddit, but somehow there's more pompous ass users here.
After spending some more time on Lemmy, I have to say, that's very true
It is less active - There's a fraction of the users here on Lemmy compared to Reddit.
There's also likely a lot of bots on Reddit which can artificially inflate how active something looks.
Is it just my sex Organ or is @meow@discuss.tchncs.de really fucking hot?
Thank you! But its only your increadibly large sex organs
yeah, this place as liek 1/10000th the userbase. the problem with this site is there are few people who are active and they are active about the same boring issues over and over, that got them kicked off reddit. it's annoying seeing the same 6 accounts spamming communities here.
not that reddit is really worthwhile anymore, the content is very manicured now, but it is still at least diverse. and yeah, part of that is the ridiculous auto-banning over 'bad' words regardless of where or how they appear on the site. in 2026, reddit will bad you for saying 'purge my garden of weeds' as 'inciting violence and hate', which i guess, yeah it kinda is... because apparently weeds are a persecuted identity or something?
anyway, you'll get banned her too if you offend whatever mod or site admin. don't worry. generally though you can't be banned from the fediverse. all my bans so far on fedi have been from news communities where I was challenging a dominant overly simplistic narrative and the single mod thought that was 'hate speech'.
Amazing answer. Thank you very much for your answer and anecdotes, it's very helpful.
Yes of course. Reddit has well over 50 million subscribers, lemmy has less than 50K