Does lemmy.world really have 26000 users already?

MicroWave@lemmy.world to Lemmy.World Announcements@lemmy.world – 508 points –

Almost! At the time of this post, lemmy.world has a whopping 25733 users and is growing fast.

Since my last post yesterday, it has added 4000 new users, making it the clear second-largest lemmy instance out there. Also quickly catching up to lemmy.ml's 36000 (not taking new signups).

beehaw.org (3rd largest) sits at 12500 users, partly because of more restrictive registration requirements.

Source: https://lemmy.fediverse.observer/list

Exciting to see all this growth!

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I think Lemmy.world is the new meta right now. All Reddit refugees overflow this instance as this is the most generic one and by looking and the number of communities it’s the smarter choice.

I just hope that the influx of users won’t cause too many server issues. I can already imagine what the devs feel like to have so many active users without mentally and technologically preparing for it

Hello from kbin.social. Isn’t federation and diversity great?!

Hello from my personal lemmy instance. ;)

I'm trying to figure out how to make my own

It's not hard but a little challenging.. If your savvy but new to the docker world there is a nice Ansible playbook that will set it up for you. Or if you want turn key with not much tech savvy there is a managed host doing Lemmy's for 10 a month. Search on here you'll find it.

I'm going the ansible playbook version. I'll work on it this coming week when I have time.

Great... Do the ssh keys... Much easier than doing the password setup.

In this blessed age, we are all Federation champions. Or we devolve:

Once I saw this guy on a bridge about to jump. I said, "Don't do it!" He said, "Nobody loves me." I said, "God loves you. Do you believe in God?"

He said, "Yes." I said, "Are you a Christian or a Jew?" He said, "A Christian." I said, "Me, too! Protestant or Catholic?" He said, "Protestant." I said, "Me, too! What franchise?" He said, "Baptist." I said, "Me, too! Northern Baptist or Southern Baptist?" He said, "Northern Baptist." I said, "Me, too! Northern Conservative Baptist or Northern Liberal Baptist?"

He said, "Northern Conservative Baptist." I said, "Me, too! Northern Conservative Baptist Great Lakes Region, or Northern Conservative Baptist Eastern Region?" He said, "Northern Conservative Baptist Great Lakes Region." I said, "Me, too!"

Northern Conservative†Baptist Great Lakes Region Council of 1879, or Northern Conservative Baptist Great Lakes Region Council of 1912?" He said, "Northern Conservative Baptist Great Lakes Region Council of 1912." I said, "Die, heretic!" And I pushed him over.

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The lemmy.world mod is active and knows what he's doing from the looks of it. He upgraded the infra recently.

I think Lemmy.world is the new meta right now.

If I'm reading this right, kbin.social has 157k users as of today, and fedia.io has 39k. Does that not suggest the kbin instances are the new meta?

According to fedidb.org, the entirety of the Lemmy network (that uses the Lemmy software) has 140,442, while the entirety of the KBin network (that uses the KBin software) has 32,830.

you're reading it wrong, I'll maybe get to lokking up the link, but you're looking at a"users in the database" count, which includes posts from the fediverse.
kbin has ~27k users

oh,29k, that was quick
https://kbin.social/nodeinfo/2.0

FediDB says kbin.social has around 30k users and fedia.io has 2.8k: https://fedidb.org/software/kbin

Now I'm confused. Who's right?

I wonder if it reflects the fact that Kbin.social's federation has only recently been re-enabled and some users may have it turned off (it's an option)

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We're here! 10 year reddit user, deleted my account last week. Forcing myself to post and not just lurk. Fellow lurkers please comment a bit. Once traffic is decent you may resume your lurking. Thank you

15 years for me, ditched reddit a few days ago. platform is toxic, management doesnt care about the userbase at all.

fuck em

Agreed! Everybody's been trying hard to encourage each other to keep their favorite communities active. If we just keep doing what we already are, then there's no reason why Lemmy shouldn't make it. It's growing fast!

This is for sure a good thing to note. While bits of potential advertisement can be made by lurking, new users will be more inclined to join and stay if they see people.

Yeah, I am a long time lurker from Reddit as well. Now I started a community for back country skiing !backcountry@lemmy.world . Feel free to come watch me awkwardly post trip pictures trying to get the community going :-)

Subscribed! I've only been once and it ended with a concussion so I'll vicariously live through you guys

Sorry to hear about the concussion! Hopefully you still enjoy the community.

Hi, fellow lurker! I've being doing my part commenting here and there. I'm loving this place!

Crawling out of lurking to show support. Using Jerboa right now, but I keep getting timeouts and it's making browsing clunky since all my upvotes/comments are being undone.

But otherwise I love the concept of the fediverse so I'm here to stay

I'm getting that problem too. I saw that word - fediverse - a lot recently and it seemed like a concept that would be beyond me so I didn't even look. Now that I have, my mind is blown and technology continues to amaze me. The networks just get larger and I love it.

Similar. About seven years? Deleted and moved to lemm.ee and frankly I think it's good that we're having to learn about federation etc. An appropriate barrier to participation that is easily overcome if you just give it a little bit of your time. Reddit can go insert itself into the anus of the wicked witch of the west. And Spez can do the same.

8 years on Reddit and it’s refreshing having something new to learn to use

Just joined lemmy.world in response to reddit's BS. Picked this instance because its sounds most normal compared to other gibberish names. Hi everyone!

Welcome! I went through the same thought process.

Went with lemmy.one because it felt really snappy while navigating communities. I was torn between .world and .one but then I saw that beehaw de-federated from .world which I didn’t like because beehaw has some of the more popular and active subs.

It seems like beehaw.org focuses their userbase's activity within a handful of communities, whereas lemmy.world spreads it out across a wide range of (unlimited) communities. Seems to be working for beehaw so far, but we'll see how long that lasts.

I realized that there are no downvotes on lemmy? Do I have that right? Wouldn’t downvoting allow for better community moderation?

The lemmy network allows downvotes by default. Looks like both beehaw.org and lemmy.one (where your account is registered) have disabled them. I can downvote on lemmy.world.

I've also noticed some instances have updoots and downvotes broken out like Reddit used to, but other seem to aggregate them.

Got it. Yeah reading more about it in some threads now. Can you downvote my posts from your instance while it’s disabled on my instance?

Yep I can downvote your posts from my instance. Happy to downvote you if you'd like lol

Lol, interesting! So I guess the downvote will have weight when viewing from .world for yourself and fellow .world users, but it won’t offer any weight on .one?

If I have that right it’s a very cool example of instances curating content for their local community members in a way that works for them. Doesn’t mean I won’t see someone’s comment, but a user that got buried may have a chance of being heard by other communities. Very cool.

I'm still unclear on how downvotes from the whole network are treated by instances/servers that don't allow their own users to downvote. So if you find any info that, please share.

It works like this:

Essentially when you view his post on lemmy.one while logged into lemmy.world, you are not actually viewing the post on lemmy.one but a cached copy of the post on lemmy.world.

Lemmy.world allows downvotes so you click the button. It updates the cached copy on lemmy.world with your downvote and then send an update over to lemmy.one telling it about the downvote and to please do the same to keep the original post in sync with the copy. Lemmy.one ignores this update and chooses to retain the original based on its rules.

Thanks for the explanation. So different instances could be displaying wildly different points for the "same" post?

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Sounds good! Thanks for the chat, really enjoying the experience so far. Have a great day!

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You picked... Wisely! Welcome! It might be slightly confusing at first but just browse and chat wherever you can!

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I would not be surprised if lemmy.world will outgrow lemmy.ml this month. Lemmy.world has a lot of active communities and meanwhile lemmy.ml. is not allowing new registrations and many of the existing communities look like they are no longer maintained or used.

Yep still get subscribe pending for lemmy.ml but lemmy.world is ready with the instant subs 🙏🏾

The devs don't want to run the flagship instance with all the sysadmin and moderation issues that brings. You made the right choice :)

Yeah if the rate of 3-4k new users per day keeps up, lemmy.world should overtake lemmy.ml in just a few days even. Might even get another huge influx on July 1 when third-party reddit apps shut down.

That's my last day using Reddit for sure. I've already stopped posting/commenting/and voting. I'm in read only mode now lol

lemmy.ml seems to be mostly memes at this point

I reckon the biggest instances in a year won't have been made yet, we're in the equivalent of first year Reddit.

Except BeeHaw as defederated lemmy.world - which is a shame. Step in the wrong direction IMO. That's going to be a huge problem because now if you're a BeeHaw member you no longer see anything lemmy.world related - you're suddenly, overnight, cut off from thousands of people and posts.

Having these larger instances owned by 1 person like they all are now is a shame, but unavoidable at the beginning I suppose. One of them gets bitter and you have thousands defederated. I guess over time as things splinter up more it may get better.

I'll likely just spin up my own instance so I can federate with everyone and never be dropped (at least from my side).

For what it's worth, beehaw.org is run by 4 admins and a number of mods. They also hope the defederation is temporary until better moderation tools are available: https://beehaw.org/post/567170.

We'll see if they really mean that, but others have said that lemmy moderation tools are still limited compared to mastodon's, for example.

It's a shame that beehaw had to use a "nuke" because other moderation tools weren't available, but I think it makes for a great natural experiment in the early fediverse. Beehaw wants to build an instance with higher community standards, as is their right. Will defederation of lemmy.world and sh.itjust.works lead to fewer sign-ups at beehaw? Will members leave? Will they just make accounts at other instances and keep their beehaw account? Will this help spread membership to smaller instances? It should be interesting.

isn't it the best to use another instance than beehive, lemmy.world and sh.itjust.works in that case? you will still have access to all other communities. Been thinking of creating another account on feddit, since it is probably too local to get on beehives shitlist and other instances might be reluctant to just block out a whole country community

Haha, yeah I'm just sitting here at programming.dev like okay ✌️😎👍

that nutscrape gif really takes me back. I miss the 90s when all of the internet felt like Lemmy does today

Yeah, I was looking for a profile picture to upload. I found this in my pictures folder. No idea where I got it from. Probably just downloaded it because I thought it looked cool. I'm surprised it is animated in browsers.

After I uploaded it I did notice the feeling of the early internet. I was born in 1991 so I wasn't really using the internet back then but I imagine this might be what it felt like to an extent. :)

Probably the integration of modding tools like AutoMod would be heaps handy here, it could automatically flag potentially troublesome posts and help cut back on spam / bad actors.

From memory Reddit uses automod and so does twitch / discord. Though I'm not sure if they actively let you integrate with it directly on third party sites

There is an advantage that Lemmy's backend is entirely an API with a detached frontend. There are already API wrappers for Rust and Typescript that are officially supported, so I'm sure it's only a matter of time before someone writes a robust automod that can be implemented for communities that desire one.

I have a bit of interest in doing it, but I know nothing about the API itself, so I'm not sure how easy it would be to grab every new thing submitted to a community or instance for moderation.

Yeah I'm also interested in seeing how all of these sites work and looking at ways I can help improve it. The whole positing process / propagation process seems pretty complex though so I'll probably let the more familiar devs work on it for now.

From what I understand though, each admin (for example kbin.social) is maintaining a fork of their project so they could implement automod on their own local content, but that wouldn't stop propagated content (e.g from Lemmy) coming in that's spam.

Seems like the issue might need to be fixed on a site by site basis.

I think I would be helpful for instances to have more control over federation than turning on or of for there instances. Ideally I think giving lemmy.world and sh.itjust.works read only access to Beehaw would have been the best option while we wait for better moderation tools. Until those options exist though they didn't really have much other choice.

I'm hoping we'll see no code online hosting options one day, would make single user instances a lot easier.

I was on Beehaw up until they announced the defederation, switch here straight after.

It seems beehaw doesn't have enough mod power to deal with the current influx of trolls, I don't agree with what they did but I do understand why they did it.

I'm thinking about self-hosting an instance, but I'm not clear if these bigger instances would block me because I'm some little unknown server. Would they have to manually give me access to interact (federate?) with them if I self-host? Or would I automatically be able to post on their server?

Think they would have to defederate manually, I've seen people running instances with only themselves as members with no complaints

Yeah, defederation is not the answer. We are few and we need to stick together. That's the whole point of the fediverse after all, many connected together.

This is why you choose not to have an account on beehaw or lemmy.world and still interact with both. Picking and lemmey instance to live on should be taking everyone some time until you see how the they function. You can even host your own lemmy instance.

The problem is when you've already been participating and growing your sub list on a lemmy.world account and then beehaw pulls this shit. Suddenly half my subs are taken away without warning.

I kinda understand beehaws stance. Lemmy.world is very lightly moderated right now, allowing a huge influx of problems, questionable posts, NSFW in wrong sections, tons of racism and bigotry flowing out the walls. Maybe if more people get that shit under control they will reconsider.

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it's nice to be here. i wish every person on reddit would have come here. fediverse should be the real usage of social media. Open and free of big corps.

Not every person. I'm perfectly fine with the bulk of Reddit users staying there to wallow in their own crapulence.

Gotta admit, a week ago when people were posting about Lemmy I didn't see it working. There were something like 500 active users when I checked join-lemmy.org. That was just not enough of a crictical mass to make it work.

Now I've been here a few days (with another login at kbin) and if this volume of traffic keeps up (i.e., there's enough happening to be interesting and make it worth coming back), I think I can live without reddit. I'm happyt to be wrong!

While the number of registered accounts is interesting the monthly active accounts numbers are more interesting as lemmy.world is claiming 8,005 while lemmy.ml is claiming 3,467 and beehaw.org is claiming 2,919. lemmy.world's growth in posts also indicates that it is the most active of the lemmy instances.

I just posted these graphs through my bot https://mastodon.social/@fediversecounter/110558349415198155

Does that mean lemmy.world didn't exist 2 weeks ago or had very little users? That's some insane growth then.

Lemmy.world is extremely new, I don't think it is more than a few weeks old but the person who created it is very active and working to improve it constantly. I think that shows in its uptime vs the other instances.

Here is the oldest post by ruud, the admin 2 weeks old:

https://lemmy.world/post/1

We out here!

I've been a full-time lurker only at Reddit for over 10 years, never made a single comment there. Never even created an account. I suppose I don't have any interesting reasons other than I never really had a desire to engage in those communities but did like it as a lookup resource. I'm an 'internet old-fart' that has always preferred forums and even ran a few back in the day.

The fediverse is the first 'newer' social system that gives me those old-school forum vibes while at the same time being fresh and more connected. It feels like this is one of those 'shifts' in internet history and is a good time to hop back on the internet social train.

It really does feel like a shift. Of course it doesn't have to be anything near as big as Reddit and that's alright. This can be its own thing, which I'm pretty happy to be a part of.

Definitely know what you mean on the old school vibes though, I wonder if part of it is because "reddiquite" feels so unnecessary here, you don't have to post in fear of a slew of downvotes.

Agreed.

I’ve never really experienced that so much since I didn’t actually engage with Reddit but I understand what you mean. In the forum days, we used to do ‘Post Exchanges’ or other events with other communities (shout-out to ye old: https://www.theadminzone.com) to try and increase engagement. This federation system is the perfect evolution of that, its like having all of these forum communities but we can all see and interact with each other.

My only concern is that like most things, if/once it gets popular it will start attracting more of the worst of the internet (and humanity). Right now people flocking here are usually more technically inclined or those willing to put more effort into trying something new. But hopefully this is were federation can help some as its much easier to have separate communities that make it less effective for bots, trolls and other degenerates to overtake, thus keeping the content appealing and interesting to engage with.

Man, when I joined this was a brand new instance with only few users. That wasn't even that long ago.

Long time lurker at Reddit, using Apollo, but now part of Lemmy, due to the disappointing action by Reddit. Thank you to this community for being a great alternative during this upheaval.

I'm in the same boat but with Rif, the funny thing is I've posted the same here in the last few days as the last year of reddit.

Imagine when the end of the month comes!

Yeah I suspect when the API changes actually take place, we'll see another surge of blackouts and migration. It should be fun!

It's honestly pretty freeing to not have Karma at all. Keeps away the Gallowboobs of the world.

It also keeps me from occasionally seeing how much comment karma I have and feeling a tad embarrassed from the sheer volume. It definitely wasn't a quality over quantity thing.

Now if only Steam would hide my hours played in DOTA...

FediDB has a "Threadiverse" category which tracks kbin + lemmy - we're up to 169,312 in total now!

Edit: Oops, forgot the link: https://fedidb.org/current-events/threadiverse

though how many of these are duplicate accounts?

I myself have one kbin account and one lemmy.world account because kbin was not stable enough the first day and i did hear great things about the lemmy.world stability. I do use both though and also considering opening a feddit account

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All very new to me and changing daily with my understanding of things, but I'm in beehaw and lemmyworld because of beehaw restricting some instances. I want to see it all before deciding where to relocate more permanently

Also, if you have a Mastodon or kbin account, you can read Lemmy from there first if you want.

I was looking forward to ridding myself of my Reddit addiction. Now I'm here...

Same. I couldn’t deal with just scrolling Instagram so I had to look for alternatives

Same. I couldn’t deal with just scrolling Instagram, I needed something else lol

Ah the sweet moment of having to retype your comment

I love .world and I'm happy to see it grow. But at the same time I think such disproportion is not great and userbase should be more spread out.

There should be some kind of "tumbler" on join-lemmy

There's already kind of a "tumbler" at https://join-lemmy.org/instances. It confused the hell out of me the first time I tried to get on lemmy.

I get your point, but I also do see the benefit of a stable, default landing place (like lemmy.world is shaping up to be) before people start spreading out. Personally, I joined lemmy.world because it had a lot more content on its main page compared to the other instances (I also have accounts on other instances too).

Yes they seriously should. I get the people don't like the hassle of making multiple accounts or spending too long choosing where to live. I think with these early days though it is a wise thing to do. You don't have to live on the most popular server to enjoy the experience and talk to everyone.

I switched from lemmy.ml to lemmy.world because lemmy.ml has insane censorship of anything critical of authoritarian communist regimes

Some lead developers of Lemmy also seem to subscribe to these political beliefs. But as long as they don't censor people (and that's pretty hard seeing as it's open source and federated) still seems fine.

saved this post for when we have millions of users! i can say i was here from the start

My first comment in the "fediverse" and on Lemmy as a platform, hopefully I can look on it the same in the future. I'd love to see this grow

I'd be one of those users too if I could actually register here. the button just spins forever. Been like that for days now. :\

Hi, just registered. That was my case, and I simply had to verify my email, which somehow was redirected to the spam folder. So I suggest you check there and verify yours. Good luck.

Yeah, I've seen that suggestion. Haven't seen anything in my inbox nor spam across 2 email accounts now, so who knows. Searching up the username right now and one does pop up with a creation date that might be mine; no comments or posts lends credence to it being mine, maybe...

Same happened to me. It's either the username isn't available or the password is too long

the password is too long.

Uh oh, this is a very bad sign. Make sure you're not using the same password on Lemmy as on any other service!

Check if your username is already in use. I got the spin forever issue when the username I was registering was already taken

27.3k as of right now, that is crazy! Its nice to see the instance counts going up for both lemmy and kbin, hopefully communities can be more spread out too to prevent defederation like we saw this morning.

We're coming over from Reddit. The damage their CEO is doing is becoming permanent.

I am a new user. I have NO idea on what I'm doing

Welcome! Feel free to ask questions. People here are pretty responsive.

Browse All Hot and when you notice several appealing posts coming from some community subscribe to it. Build up your "Subscribed" feed and see how it improves over time.

Joined yesterday. Don't really grasp the different instances yet but world sounded like a default to me

Think of it like your email provider. One is yahoo, one is Google, one is Hotmail, etc. They can all email each other, but they have different rules.

.world is just another "provider" but by no means a default, in fact it was only started 2 weeks ago.

Hi I'm new here. Does it matter what instance I'm subscribed to? I don't know what the practical differences would really be from my experience?

Beehaw just defederated a few instances, which means lemmy.world users can't really interact with their users. Other than that, it affects what shows up in your local feed.

I an new myself but I dont think it does. Only difference there might be is that some just lag more (lemmy.ml) due to so many users.

Yes. Beehaw admins have just blocked access to their instance for lemmy.world users. In order to get the most content possible, it's best to sign with an instance that isn't blocked by other instances. If you don't care about that then it doesn't matter who you sign up with though.

Did they say why they did that?

The rationale appears to be that they don't have the moderation tools necessary to deal with an unvetted userbase. Lemmy.world doesn't require any prior user verification, so anyone can join (just like reddit). Beehaw claims that they were receiving a large amount of trolls or other negative traffic from lemmy.world and shitjustworks, so they have temporarily defederated these instances.

This may change if better modding tools come around.

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Quick note: beehaw has defederated as of the other day

I don't think people should be encouraged to join large lemmys. The federated nature makes your home instance irrelevant for the most part, but it is harder to understand to new users than other corporate sites': GIVE EMAIL GIVE PASSWORD HERE ACCESS

I joined Lemmy.click because the bigger instances were having timeouts when I tried to sign up. I see those issues have been resolved now, but I like the idea of keeping other instances populated.

Yep, in theory that should spread out the server load since every post/comment/like/etc. in the communities is sent to your instance only once but can be consumed by many people, at different times of day. I do wonder how much help one- or two-person instance are, though, or if they're actually detrimental to the overall system.

Yea...everyone joining the same one really defeats the purpose. Now if more than beehaw defederates from them, there's going to be a mass exodus.

So, it is recommended to either join one that fits your niche or maybe to self-host?

Maybe join a big one for general content and then supplement with smaller, niche ones.

I'm confused, why does it matter? Can't you view all content the same regardless of the instance you're on?

Yes, you're absolutely right. Once you understand how to subscribe to communities in different instances, it doesn't matter much. But new users may not be familiar with the process yet, and I (probably wrongly) assumed that you were one of them. That's why I suggested the option that worked for me until I figured out federation.

While this is indeed awesome remember that the whole point in federation is having a lot of small communities rather than one or two huge ones.

In large part the same also happened on mastodon where mastodon.social has 200k people. This is not the way that ti's supposed to work; no single instance should have this many users, in fact often it's better to have instances for maybe 50 users at most

Anyone who is really hoping for the "fediverse" (fuck me I hate that name) to actually play out that way is delusional. 99.9% of casual users don't care about federation, they care about convenience. They want to go where the people are. This was always going to happen to federated sites as they get big, one will win out as the most popular. As you said, happened with mastodon, will happen here, will happen on any other federated service like peer tube or whatever it's called.

I'm mostly focused on going to a place and seeing lots of posts and comments. Behind the scenes, the tech that powers it? While I'm interested in it from a tech stand point, most regular people just don't care.

Exactly. Casual users (like me) want to see content and activity before making an account and subscribing.

Yeah I see it like different UI to view the same content, just pick the layout or theme you like the best.

Email works, or used to until giant corporations consolidated hundreds of small providers into a handful. I don't know why it wouldn't work for this.

Sure, the average user doesn't care how it works. That doesn't mean they can't use it as intended anyway.

you're right that a large majority of people do not care, but this mentality will begin to change at some point. Also, the entire point of this is that it doesn't matter where the users are, because they can still join the same communities. Now, there are obviously a lot of things that need to improve in lemmy to make it more usable, but federation isn't one of them. The ActivityPub protocol is simple, yet powerful and relatively scalable.

Yeah, combine that with folks not understanding while registering that you can still see things from other servers while registering. They may kick the big one thinking it means they'll see the most content.

If you're having a hard time seeing all the columns on mobile, use "view as desktop" in your browser settings. It's the only way I can see all the columns. (Android / Opera)

There's also some great mobile apps: Jerboa for Android and mlem for iOS

The latest version of Jerboa, only on GitHub, is really good. I also seen a preview of the next version too, they have comment sort button! Lol

Huh. I wonder how many people are on kbin

Kbin has been feeling really lively since the Reddit migration. The admin seems to be pretty busy making improvements to the UI / infrastructure. Keen to see what he does next

omg almost 29k at this time of writing, i like people are escaping from reddit

Im pretty sure that Lemmy, even if it doesn't grow to eclipse Reddit, will have a nice little following of its own that makes it a suitable substitution

Almost 30k, lemmy.world is quickly becoming the largest instance, insane.

Judging by the fact it takes me 3 minutes to submit a comment and 30 seconds for posts to refresh then yes