It's much more difficult to sign up for a completely new website than it is to subscribe to subreddits on the site you already have an account for.

This is interesting.

Obviously, I don't have stats on things like the % active accounts vs inactive and such, so this is pure speculation.

If you look at the hot sorted posts on r/GothStyle they seem to get around 100 or so points per post. Note, this isn't a direct translation into upvotes. It also says there is 145 people online - Does that mean roughly 2/3 of active users vote stuff to hot? ~100 people holding up a niche community with a fraction of those the posters themselves.

So in effect ~0.1% of a subreddit's subscribers makes things happen. I always baselessly suspected that Reddit fluffs up the numbers to make engagement seem like it is much greater than it is, but this is 1000x smaller than the sub count suggests.

I'm sceptical of my maths here but r/PCMasterRace is similar. Out of nearly 8mil subscribers, roughly 8000 online.

Doesn't really mean anything. Facebook has around 3.4 billion active monthly users. Reddit has around 400 million. I'd still take the latter than the former. Lemmy will keep growing. Probably will never have 100s of millions of users and that's fine. More users can be a good thing but by itself the numbers mean nothing.

The difference is in the active number of content creators and participants. It’s nice to have a sub with ten million followers but if Gallowboob is the only one posting and his 250 bots are the only ones voting it’s just a popular Twitter account. That is good for ad revenue but shit for interaction.

Give me a vibrant, intelligent, argumentative (in a good way) 100,000 over a passive ten million any day.