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.
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.
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.
