Online communities span social networks, discussion platforms, gaming spaces, and developer ecosystems. The figures below show who uses major platforms, how large their active audiences are, and how participation is supported and moderated. Dates and geographies matter: audience percentages are U.S. measures, while platform activity figures may be global or platform-specific.
Contents
- Platform use by age
- Differences by gender, race, and income
- Urban and rural community reach
- The scale of major communities
- Activity across Reddit and Discord
- Moderation and community health
- Support for creators and developers
Platform use by age
Pew Research Center’s Social Media Fact Sheet reports high YouTube use across every adult age group listed. Among U.S. adults ages 18–29, 95% use YouTube. The share is 92% among adults ages 30–49, 85% among those ages 50–64, and 64% among adults 65 and older. That makes YouTube the broadest-reaching platform in this age breakdown.
Facebook also reaches every age group, though its highest reported use is among adults ages 30–49. The shares are 68% for ages 18–29, 80% for ages 30–49, 74% for ages 50–64, and 57% for ages 65 and older.
Instagram’s U.S. adult usage is more concentrated among younger adults: 80% of adults ages 18–29 use it, compared with 62% of those ages 30–49, 40% of those ages 50–64, and 19% of those 65 and older. TikTok follows a similar pattern, with use at 63%, 44%, 30%, and 12% across those same age groups.
| Platform | 18–29 | 30–49 | 50–64 | 65+ |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| YouTube | 95% | 92% | 85% | 64% |
| 68% | 80% | 74% | 57% | |
| 80% | 62% | 40% | 19% | |
| TikTok | 63% | 44% | 30% | 12% |
| 48% | 35% | 16% | 6% |
Reddit use is 48% among U.S. adults ages 18–29, 35% among ages 30–49, 16% among ages 50–64, and 6% among adults 65 and older. Snapchat is used by 58% of adults ages 18–29, 31% of those 30–49, and is not quantified here for the older groups. X is used by 33% of adults ages 18–29 in the same Pew fact sheet.
Differences by gender, race, and income
Pew’s gender figures show meaningful differences in reported use. Facebook usage is 63% among men and 78% among women. Instagram usage is 44% among men and 55% among women. TikTok usage is 30% among men and 42% among women. Reddit is the exception in this set: usage is 29% among men and 23% among women.
The racial and ethnic figures also vary by platform. Facebook usage is 70% among White adults, 74% among Black adults, 74% among Hispanic adults, and 62% among Asian adults. TikTok usage is 28% among White adults, 53% among Black adults, 57% among Hispanic adults, and 31% among Asian adults.
Reddit’s reported usage is 27% among White adults, 18% among Black adults, 22% among Hispanic adults, and 44% among Asian adults. These are audience percentages from the Pew Research Center Social Media Fact Sheet, not measures of posting frequency or membership in a particular community.
Household income is associated with different reported levels of Instagram and Reddit use. Instagram usage is 41% among adults in households earning under $30,000, 46% at $30,000–$69,999, 54% at $70,000–$99,999, and 60% at $100,000 or more. Reddit usage is 17%, 22%, 29%, and 37% across those same income bands.
Urban and rural community reach
Pew’s place-of-residence figures show a clear urban-suburban-rural gradient for WhatsApp and Threads. WhatsApp usage is 44% among urban adults, 34% among suburban adults, and 17% among rural adults.
Threads usage is 11% among urban adults, 9% among suburban adults, and 4% among rural adults. The figures describe reported platform use by U.S. adults in each residence category. They do not establish why the differences exist, but they show that community-building opportunities can vary substantially by location.
The scale of major communities
Large communities can be measured in several ways: members in a single group, daily users across a family of apps, or monthly active users on one service. Meta’s Facebook group “Weird (and Wonderful) Secondhand Finds That Just Need to Be Shared” has 3.4 million members, according to the Meta/Facebook Newsroom.
Meta reported 3.27 billion daily active users across its family of apps in Q3 2024. In the same quarter, Threads had about 275 million monthly active users and added more than 1 million new sign-ups per day. These are different measures: daily active users, monthly active users, and sign-ups should not be treated as interchangeable audience totals.
Meta also reported more than 40 million U.S. and Canada young adults as daily active Facebook users in Q3 2024, describing that level as the highest in three years. The geography is limited to the United States and Canada, unlike the global family-of-apps figure.
WhatsApp handled more than 2 billion calls per day globally in Q3 2024, according to Meta’s Q3 2024 earnings information. Meta also said Meta AI surpassed 500 million monthly active users in Q3 2024. These figures show the scale of communication and adjacent services around online communities, but they are not counts of unique people participating in a specific group.
Historical context is useful but should remain dated. Meta reported that Facebook Groups first crossed 1 billion monthly users in 2016. More than 60% of Facebook’s 1.59 billion monthly active users used Groups in 2016, and Groups generated nearly 10 billion comments in December 2015. Those figures describe that earlier period and are not current platform totals.
Activity across Reddit and Discord
Reddit’s Q2 2024 results reported 91.2 million daily active uniques, $281.2 million in revenue, 54% year-over-year revenue growth, and 51% year-over-year growth in daily active uniques. In Q1 2024, Reddit reported more than 100,000 active communities and more than 82 million daily active uniques.
Reddit’s later transparency reporting gives a view of the volume created by participants. In the second half of 2024, Redditors created 2,032,304,294 posts and comments, sent 522,221,447 private messages, and exchanged 3,413,587,368 chat messages. Administrators removed 2,788,652 private messages and 1,719,628 chat messages during that period.
Discord reported 200 million monthly users in September 2024. More than 90% of those monthly users spent over 1.5 billion total hours playing thousands of unique titles each month, according to the Discord blog. A separate Discord Quests blog reported 1.5 billion combined hours played each month across more than 8,000 PC titles in 2024. In March 2025, Discord said its community had more than 200 million monthly active users and that users played and talked across thousands of game titles each month.
Moderation and community health
Reddit created 841,314 new communities and banned 491,544 communities in the second half of 2024, according to the Reddit Transparency Report for H2 2024. Spam accounted for 70.8% of community bans; the remaining 29.2% involved non-spam violations. Unmoderated communities accounted for 95.2% of the non-spam bans.
Reddit removed 2.66% of total content created in H2 2024. Moderators performed 42% of all content removals, and 72.5% of moderator removals were proactive Automod removals. Users submitted 16,070,307 reports, while Reddit administrators took removal action on 9.3% of those reports.
The messaging figures show how moderation extends beyond public posts. Of the private messages removed by Reddit administrators in H2 2024, 97.4% were spam. Of the chat-message removals, 89.1% were initially flagged by automation. These percentages refer to removed messages or removals, not to all messages exchanged on the service.
Support for creators and developers
Online communities also support maintainers and organizations directly. GitHub Sponsors reports that it has given back more than $40 million to maintainers and supports 103 regions globally. More than 4.2K organizations are sponsoring through GitHub Sponsors.
Meta’s Q3 2024 earnings report adds an advertiser-side measure of generative tools in a large community ecosystem. More than 1 million advertisers used Meta’s generative AI creative tools in the prior month, and those advertisers created more than 15 million ads in that month. The measures concern advertiser activity, not organic community participation, but they illustrate how platforms connect audiences with publishing and commercial tools.