It should be noted that social media companies like reddit, facebook, twitter, etc all have major incentives to inflate their user counts (with bots, or counting inactive users). Those user counts are the product that they’re selling to advertisers to set up on their platform.
We don’t have that incentive, in fact its the opposite, we’d rather have less users that are more active, as more users require more moderation resources and time.
It should be noted that social media companies like reddit, facebook, twitter, etc all have major incentives to inflate their user counts (with bots, or counting inactive users). Those user counts are the product that they’re selling to advertisers to set up on their platform.
We don’t have that incentive, in fact its the opposite, we’d rather have less users that are more active, as more users require more moderation resources and time.
That is a valid point. If we take those numbers with a hefty heap of salt, Reddit would still be 10x or 100x bigger than Lemmy.