
List of virtual communities with more than 1 million users - lainon
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_virtual_communities_with_more_than_1_million_users
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nbm
Be careful comparing the "Registered Users" metric on the page between sites.
In some cases they're using total number of registered accounts on the forum,
and in others they're using metrics that involve recent activity, like a
"Monthly Active" metric.

Also, don't trust the numbers, even if they're cited. The current value for
Twitter (500 million) is cited as being from an article in 2011 that mentioned
200 million. The Twitter company page -
[https://about.twitter.com/company](https://about.twitter.com/company) \- says
the current official monthly actives is 313 million.

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yoodenvranx
Yes. StudiVZ is listed with 17 Mio registrations but it is virtually dead.
People used it for the first 1 or 2 years when it was popular and then
everybody moved to Facebook.

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majewsky
> for the first 1 or 2 years when it was popular

Context: It was immensely popular when I just entered university, which was in
2006.

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blakesterz
Wow, that list is waaaay shorter than I expected it would be. Kind of shocking
to me that there aren't more "virtual communities" over a million users.

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AznHisoka
They are being too restrictive on what they define as a virtual community. For
instance the forums in city-data.com has more than a million members. Same
with bodybuilding.com

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ggregoire
I don't see any restrictions in the article. You can edit it and add your info
with a reference.

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mlinksva
Shorter list but at some point will be more comprehensive and source for
linked article
[https://query.wikidata.org/#SELECT%20DISTINCT%20%3Fsite%20%3...](https://query.wikidata.org/#SELECT%20DISTINCT%20%3Fsite%20%3FsiteLabel%20%3Fusers%0A%7B%0A%20%20%3Fsite%20wdt%3AP1833%20%3Fusers%20.%0A%20%20SERVICE%20wikibase%3Alabel%20%7B%20bd%3AserviceParam%20wikibase%3Alanguage%20%22en%22%20%7D%0A%7D%0AGROUP%20BY%20%3Fsite%20%3FsiteLabel%20%3Fusers%0AORDER%20BY%20DESC%28%3Fusers%29)

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diamondo25
Hyves used to be the thing you had as a schoolkid. It had support for showing
your relation to somebody (through people in your friendlist), gifs, almost
fully customisable pages, a whole set of emoticons and other things.

When Facebook came around, most people left (mostly kids) because of parents
getting on the platform. There's a video of a lonely woman that had contact
with friends through Hyves, and said "But how am i supposed to send my friends
animated pictures now :("

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krick
Not sure if tis list is worth something. Like, are you saying 4chan has less
than 1 million users? Well, I don't know.

Even if it's "registered users" I'm not sure if I can believe it.

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Aardwolf
Odd that wikipedia itself isn't in the list

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cooper12
The list is about registered users. According to Wikimedia, the number of
active registered Wikimedia editors for all Wikipedia projects in February
2009 was ~85,000.
([https://stats.wikimedia.org/reportcard/](https://stats.wikimedia.org/reportcard/))
In a more recent count (and more tightly controlled against double counts) for
October 2016, that number seems to be ~65,000.
([https://stats.wikimedia.org/EN/TablesWikipediaZZ.htm#activit...](https://stats.wikimedia.org/EN/TablesWikipediaZZ.htm#activitylevels))
Note also that activity can fluctuate based on month so that also explains the
decreased number. (during the summer more students will contribute)

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angry-hacker
Blackplanet is surprising for me. I don't know how active those 20mil are, but
that's a very good percentage from the total percentage of blacks in America.

Does anyone know more about the site or is an active member?

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tyingq
See page 93 of [http://www.journalism.org/files/2015/04/FINAL-STATE-OF-
THE-N...](http://www.journalism.org/files/2015/04/FINAL-STATE-OF-THE-NEWS-
MEDIA1.pdf)

Says 390,000 unique visitors for January 2015, according to ComScore. For
comparison, DeviantArt has roughly the same number of "registered users", but
gets about 6,000,000 uniques/month.

I suppose "registered users" is close to useless as a measure, because some
may be automated spam accounts, some forums clean up dead accounts / others
don't, etc.

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edem
This is badly outdated. For example iWiW have been closed years ago.

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askvictor
Facebook (et al) is not a community; it is a platform that hosts communities.
It's probably more analogous to a country or religion than a community.

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91bananas
What would you have called it a few years ago before the pages concept started
and it was just pages of people? A community?

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mgkimsal
a place for communities to form.

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Asparagirl
Take the stats with a grain of salt. For example, MyHeritage (which is on the
list) has owned Geni (also on the list) for some time now.

