Huge growth in Lemmy from 156k to 240k users in one day

Reddit Migration@kbin.social – 181 points – 1 years ago

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I'm a bit out of the loop here, what might have happened on June 18 that have precipitated this spike in new accounts?

On a possibly related note, over here in Lemmy.world, there's a post by the admins that have touched a little on automated account creation. I don't know if those two are connected though.

This is an image-post and not a link to the real page, but the active user count follows a more normal curve. This jump in registered users isn't organic. If it's not bot accounts, it's some weird reporting error. Also note... The lemmy.world registered user count didn't jump all that much... so if it's bot accounts they're either not registering there or have already been purged.

Hexbear did just federate, and that does bring in like 25k users, but not 100k. But maybe that's being multi-counted somehow.

Hexbear.net is a community that’s been running on a forked version of Lemmy for a few years now and has ~25k users. Over the weekend they switched over to running core Lemmy, and will be federating in the coming weeks. I believe this is a big part of the jump in users since they would count even though there’s no actual federation yet.

It's the bit about Hexbear switching over from a fork to mainstream Lemmy (sorry, but that's how I understood what you said) made things click for me.

I've always assumed that even if Hexbear were not federated, its users should have been counted as Lemmy users, but Hexbear using a fork, and thus, not being counted makes sense.

Thanks!