Average Lemmy user and Kbin user counts as a whole across all instances are about even, but the cool thing about it is that it doesn't matter. Any user on any lemmy OR Kbin instance can access content on any other instance, barring any "defederation" activities by the instance owners.

Holy shit, you just made me realize that third party platforms don't seem to be tracking the active users on Lemmy accurately. Either that or kbin is defining an active user very generously and Lemmy is being more strict.

https://the-federation.info/node/details/48862 https://the-federation.info/node/details/49984

See how kbin.social and lemmy.world have nearly identical trajectories? Lemmy.world actually has significantly more posts and comments. However, lemmy.world only shows like 12k active users and kbin shows all 42k of it's users as active.

Incidentally, the answer to OP is that lemmy.world is slightly more popular now, but kbin.social is looking like they will overtake eventually.

This is a vital issue to get to the bottom of, because the narrative from reddit is going to be that Lemmy's userbase is all bots. And then you go to a page like this and it does look pretty bad.

https://fedidb.org/current-events/threadiverse

If kbin is overcounting active users, we can leave that for later 😅. But if Lemmy is undercounting, we need to fix that ASAP.

As long as federation exists ... why does it matter? That is the beauty of decentralization, right?

I hope they continue to serve their users and federate together, along with other large instances. The more the better! We need stability and options. (I'm saying this as a .world user, who is very happy here. Ruud seems to know what he's doing.)

As others have said, does it matter? It's like asking how many astraweb users there are vs giganews.

The wheel of time turns and ages come and pass. There are neither endings nor beginnings.