A post in Reddit’s Today I Learned community revealed that it doesn’t actually take six-degrees—or Kevin Bacon—to find your connection with most people in the world. In 2011, Facebook announced proof that it was making the world smaller—at least when it comes to degrees between strangers.

Collaborating with researchers from the Università degli Studi di Milano, the social network used 721 million users from around the globe to map social connectedness. The study demonstrated that, for 92 percent of users, it took only four people to find a common connection—updating the familiar adage that there are “six-degrees of separation.” When limited to a certain country, like in the United States for example, it took only three.

“When considering even the most distant Facebook user in the Siberian tundra or the Peruvian rainforest, a friend of your friend probably knows a friend of their friend,” shared Facebook director of engineering Lars Backstrom in a blog post publishing the findings.

The study, highlighted today by Reddit user SAT0725, built upon the work of psychologist Stanley Milgram whose 1967 “small world experiment” first showed that there were six-degrees of separation. Migram asked around 300 volunteers to mail a document to a chosen person. Rather than sending it directly, however, participants could only send it to someone they personally knew, who might be more likely to personally know the intended recipient.

Milgram and his colleagues at Harvard then averaged how many connections it took before the package arrived where it was supposed to. Milgram’s study has received its fair share of criticism—and many academics consider the theory to be not much more than an “urban myth.”

But the so-called small world phenomenon continued to fascinate social scientists—especially now that online networks are changing the game. In 2010, the year before the Facebook study was released, researchers found there were five-degrees of separation among Twitter users.

Facebook, however, utilized the largest social network to date and documented that—not only had the social world condensed—it was continuing to shrink. In just three years, between 2008 and 2011, the hops between friends went down from 5.3 to 4.7.

These days, more than three billion people around the world have access to the Internet and a third of them are interacting on Facebook. There are more social networks than there were in 2011 and connecting with others is only a click away. It’s likely that now there are even less than four steps between you and everyone else—and that gap is closing.