A lazy search showed currently there are 6.5 million users in the Fediverse. A similar lazy search told that Threads reportedly had 30 million signups in the first 24 hours.

Even that makes me feel like we'd be in a hidden away corner of the Fediverse just based on sheer size.

[–] Thorny_Thicket@sopuli.xyz 2 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Is that necessarily a bad thing though? Two things come to mind:

Do I want the kind of user here that's willing to sign up for Facebook's new social platform?
Do I want +100 million users here flooding every interesting discussion with thousands of comments to the point that my reply is immediately going to get lost in the flood of new messages?

I wouldn't be surprised if even now with our 6.5 million users the quality of discussion here is far greater than it is on Threads with their 30 million users. Obviously too little users is a bad thing but I imagine there can also be too many. Back in my reddit days I much more enjoyed the more slow paced niche subs than the popular ones with 10 million subs. Replying to AskReddit thread with 1000 messages is a complete waste of time. No one is going to read it.

[–] Burstar@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

with our 6.5 million users

Are there really that many? Sure doesn't feel like it.

[–] ThatDamnFinnishGuy@sopuli.xyz 2 points 1 year ago

Keep in mind that's just registered users from what I saw. Not active users. I believe in terms of active users it's about 2 million. Don't quote me, that was off memory of reading a different thread.

[–] ThatDamnFinnishGuy@sopuli.xyz 1 points 1 year ago

I quote the lawyers: "it depends." Are you here for a more personal community? Do you love endless masses of discussion? I'm sure there more questions to go along with this.

For me as well, I never really participated much in Reddit due to the sheer size of most discussions. I do enjoy being able to make a comment that isn't washed into the void instantly, but I don't know how much that would actually be affected my Threads. There's a chance that the majority of Threads folks won't even bat an eye at the rest of the Fediverse.

What I'm more worried about is the fact that this is a massive, for profit, information harvesting corporation is trying to squeeze themselves into a five times smaller system. Why not start their own thing? They hyped up the Metaverse before, why not build off that?

I conclude that they see a way to maximize profits by setting up here. Be it as innocent as that they hope for more traffic from the Fediverse or something like hoping to snuff out competitors, I don't trust it. On the same level as I don't trust them with my data.