So I just simply compared the top posts of lemmy r/all and reddits r/all. Currently this month’s top 5 r/all posts are somewhere between 228k - 142k upvotes, while lemmy’s are between 2.2k and 1.7k.
The monthly active user count of reddit is over a billion, while that of lemmy is 1.2 million(edit: no it’s 40k. It’s looking even worse for reddit). If we just compare them by these metrics, reddit has 1000x the users but 100x engagement. And this also held true when I compared the meme subreddits using the same metric, but news subreddit was an outlier where the subscriber to upvote ratio was equal between them.
It’s extremely crude calculation, but since I observed this pattern, I felt I need to share this somewhere. What I feel is that as social media platform gets larger, the number of lurkers, people who don’t engage, increase. could there be any other reason?


You have 3 possible reasons: A) those stats aren’t that accurate; B) “unique” is not that unique (same person counted more than once through the month); and C) it might also include bots. Maybe it’s a mix of the 3.
Semrush is supposed to be not that inaccurate. It’s a data analytics platform. I don’t have the subscription to it to verify this myself, but it’s a huge issue if they are posting inaccurate information.