Euler is pronounced “oiler,” in case you weren’t aware.

Yep, they’re likely about the same size, when comparing apples to apples (DAU ≠ current users logged in).

Hacker news, something awful, tons of special interest forums for things like cooking, cars, travel, etc. I’m sure there are many more that I’m not aware of.

In the current world where most of the forum discussion happen on Reddit, there is little space left for another active centralized forum.

I strongly disagree, and there are tons of other centralized forums that are doing just fine. They’re not as big as Reddit but some have an order of magnitude (at least) more users than Lemmy does.

The decentralized approach has at least the pro to offer something different (you can leave for another instance instead of depending on a single corporation for access).

There are lots of ways to offer something different, and new upstarts have been able to gain traction by offering something different countless times in the past.

Especially if we’re talking about a forum for the masses with a high number of users, the vast majority of those users simply don’t care about centralization vs federation.

Also, is there any centralized forum that is more active than the Threadiverse (Lemmy/Piefed/Pylova/Mbin)?

It looks like there are on the order of maybe 20-30k total monthly active users of the threadiverse, though I had to cobble this together from a few sources, so if you have any solid numbers I’d love to see them.

As much drama as there is/was, the Something Awful Forums are a Web 1.0 old school centralized forum which has been around for over a quarter of a century and is still going. At their peak they had hundreds of thousands of users.

I don’t think the argument that in order to host a large forum, you need to be decentralized holds any water. I know you’re not directly making that argument but I’ve seen others make it in their replies.

I imagine what the other commenter meant was that your post would have been 10x better just by removing the “You are a moron” sentence from the beginning.

Yes, in a perfect world, arguments should be all that matter. But on the other end of the little text replies here is (presumably) a real human being, and sometimes your argument doesn’t get across as well if you sandwich it with insults.