Relative size comparison of social media platforms (December 2023)

Ah Linkedin, the social network every professional has to have and almost no one participates in unless they're looking for or offering a job.

NEVER. STOP. GRINDING.
- A real cyber security specialist only has shill accounts for osint and if they do have a real account, they definitely don't share shit like this on a public account.
- WTAF? I've never been more glad that I only remember to look at LinkedIn a couple times a year.
- Jesus.
  That guy doesn't even love cyber security more than his wife, who would hire him.
I recently came dangerously close to having to use LinkedIn as my job was up in the air for awhile due to RTO shenanigans. I knew it was always a site for shilling but when I reactivated my account to update my resume, my God the amount of corporate back patting was insane. People I knew IRL as down to earth hardworking folks, were shilling so hard for a company that couldn't give two fucks less who they are and were using every buzz word from the white-collar, salaried company bootlicker playbook in every post.
Now, I know that's "the game" and if you want to get ahead you have to play, so I can't blame them for grinding, but at the same time, fuck that. I guess I'm fine being where I am and never moving up because I refuse to play that BS.
It is facebook but for the office. And unfortunately there is a lot going on beyond job hunting.
- It’s mostly an HR circlejerk and people who make their jobs their entire personality. Don’t get me wrong, there are people in my field who post valuable stuff on there, but they are a tiny minority.
Unless you're a narcissist desperate for attention and or a recruiter
- It’s also great for attempting to digitally lick boot
I always considered it more to be a kind of reverse tinder. It's the platform where women contact me to tell me they like what they see and to ask me for my phone number to have a talk. And once they have it, they won't leave me alone.
It's how I feel it must actually be like for women on actual dating platforms. Minus the unsolicited pics.
I don't even know why there are recruiting companies on there when companies can just post their job openings and do it themselves. If they truly believe these recruiting offices are vetting candidates.... I was once offered a job for an actual architect when I was a solution architect in IT....I told him I'd love to give it a try, even though I've never designed houses before. He didn't even reply :(
LinkedIn, the social network made by and for the PMC.
I feel like I'm a class traitor for not having a profile on there.

I feel like the Fediverse hasn't yet reached the Eternal September moment, and I'm happy for that. A smaller footprint means we get to have our own culture.

On the other hand, even though it means losing this culture, I would like to see greater general adoption of the fediverse and decentralized social media in general. Sure, there will likely be some big-name domains serving fediverse instances, the same way email is primarily served by Gmail et al, but anyone should be able to spin up their own instance and interact as well. I don't believe Internet communication should be locked behind various walled gardens, and people should re-acclimatize themselves to a version of the Internet where anyone can host and contribute.

I'm curious on how a federation would handle an Eternal September. If we [the community] play our cards right, we could get "newbie instances" - in those the newbies would either adapt themselves to the rest of the culture of the Fediverse or forge their own, in a non-conflicting way with the others. It would be kind of cool.

And yet, all those bigger bubbles were once 1.5 million large at one point. You have to start somewhere.

Mastodon has 13 million.
Not sure where you got the stat for Fediverse as a whole on that.

https://fediverse.observer/stats
Probably using the monthly active users.
13mil seems to be total users.
- It does look like Mastodon has around 9 million itself, that's a nice size. It also makes this graph wrong.

It's a fine picture of various platforms, but I'd have trouble calling Twitch, Discord, and YouTube "social media." Discord is basically IRC with more bells and whistles and no one ever called IRC "social media."

IRC is social media
There, now someone has said it
- I miss mid-90s IRC. That was far more social than any ‘social’ media I’ve experienced since.
Social media wasn't a thing back when IRC was big but it did basically the same as modern social media sites do today: people connected and talked. And I would argue that Twitch/Discord/YouTube do different things than Facebook or Twitter in the end all of those places are there to connect and talk about stuff (and to harvest money and data).

LinkedIn 930m? More than both Reddit and Twitter. I don’t believe this.

I'd wager the majority of them are dead/inactive accounts. I remember graduating from undergrad and thinking I had to make a LinkedIn account to get a job, used it for maybe 45 minutes, and never touched it again. I feel like this is the case with a lot of people
- I'm suprised as well. But it says monthly active users. So I'm guessing they count distinct logins per month, which a dead account can't do. I'd guess it's probably bots looking for keywords and building profiles for recruiters.
- Never use it if not applying for jobs or recruiting
It's only 30 million users, the other 900 million are recruiters.
- Nearly 1/6th of the earth’s population are recruiters.
  Do you know 6 people? One of them could be a recruiter

We are small but cooler than the other ones

Impressive. Very nice. Let's see it without bots.

Or reposts from other platforms.

YouTube is vulnerable due to their low payouts and high ad insertion. You’d think someone like Amazon would be trying to steal some of that huge market share with a competing service.

Amazon doesn't want to start a division that's essentially guaranteed to be unprofitable for the foreseeable future
- I'm gonna have to ask for a source on that...
- Amazon already has an ad sales division through FreeVee. They also already have the storage infrastructure. It would probably be a good fit.

As someone posted, this is straight up wrong. Why would you source wikipedia? https://fediverse.observer/stats

Mastodon is almost 9 million/month
Lemmy is a little over 2 million/month

of which 1.1M are alien[.]top bots mirroring shit from reddit
- you can block them
  Reddit is mirroring a shit ton of stuff from twitter, youtube, etc.
  All social media has a lot of bots, I'm betting there are a lot less here because we're not on many people's radars yet.

Dang. I thought Twitter was bigger than Reddit for some reason.

You can thank Elmo for that 🤣

I’m actually surprised by how large the fediverse is. I thought it was more like 50,000 at most.

It's even a wrong stat, there's 13 million, monthly active users.

Good to see we’re not that smol

Looks small to me
- We are visible with the naked eye so that’s something

And yet Facebook is the one platform I use the least often. I just don't see the appeal, let alone why I'd ever give a flying crap about what other people are doing. I only have a facebook page because my other family members use it to post and keep in touch.

But we have /u/stamets so the rest is moot.

Who made this?

Why isn't threads with the rest of the feduverse?

They don't federate yet.
They should be. I don t like it but they are their own instance
- That's kind of my point, whoever made this doesn't know what they're talking about. So who knows if they did anything else correctly, even though the only other thing is pulling user accounts from Wikipedia.

Definitely not to scale.