Dethroning lemmy.ml, lemm.ee rises as the second most active instance

MicroWave@lemmy.world to Fediverse@lemmy.world – 870 points –

Wow, things have changed since I last posted in /c/fediverse. Here are the top five most active instances based on monthly active users:

  • lemmy.world: 19516
  • lemm.ee: 3779
  • lemmy.ml: 2970
  • sh.itjust.works: 2355
  • feddit.de: 2293

Source: https://the-federation.info/platform/73

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Canadian and running on 99% renewal energy were all I needed to know to join sh.itjust.works

Also the name is top notch! And it's been pretty true to it too.

I like how the name can be read in 2 ways: shit just works and shh it just works!

There was a rough week or two there but it’s been good lately. Happy being a part of it though.

Tbf, depending on the region, that's just how the electricity is made. The fbxl network runs off of electricity generation made up of 86% hydroelectric and biomass, with the balance made up of wind, solar, and natural gas.

As I have repeatedly repeatedly said, with a geography of canada, the entire country could be 100% renewables in a decade or two if there was a real focus on hydroelectric generation that is presently powering entire regions, and it would make people's lives better in the process with plentiful inexpensive hydroelectric we would make electric heat the most competitive and thus would start offsetting burning fossil fuels for building heat which would have a massive impact on carbon emissions since buildings make up 25% of total emissions and most building heat is done with fossil fuels because electricity is too expensive and the costs are rising so people are migrating to fossil fuels even with the carbon tax...

But I digress...

If it were hosted in Nova Scotia half of its power would come from coal. So I don't take it for granted

I'm confused why it says it is in the Netherlands

I thought that was the French flag? I figured it got confused by the instance being bilingual.

It probably goes by ip only.

Also two good reasons for me as well.

It's strange that it doesn't report a Canadian flag on the graphic in the post heading though. Looks like Netherlands?

goddammit

i joined dxcomplex because it was the smallest instance i was confident wouldn't fold (and i liked the name);
then it folded so i joined .world because it was the smallest instance i was confident wouldn't fold (and i liked the name);
then it got massive so i joined lemm.ee because it was the smallest instance i was confident wouldn't fold (and i liked the name)

i'm starting to wonder if i'm cursed

Wtf go away

but what if going away makes it worse? .world's downtime has only increased since i made my l.ee acct

If you want an instance that almost definitely won't go under, sdf.org has existed since 1986 1987 and has an instance at lemmy.sdf.org

actually i almost went for sdf instead of l.ee. the reason i didn't was that it seems almost too good to be true? i see so many sites around that proclaim they're hosted on sdf, the biggest text on their homepage says "create a free account" and yet there isn't a donate button

i realise there's one on their lemmy instance, and i might choose them if l.ee does fold, but i felt like i was taking advantage of something meant for others

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I get your point, but I think lemm.ee is still so much smaller than lemmy.world that it’s not much of a problem (at least not yet).

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Considering how many startrek memes I see on lemmy, I'm surprised this was the original meme.

I don't care what anyone says I will always read it as start rek

Most of the times that i see this meme is always censured, they usually take out the part where the woman gets gropped. While i understeand why someone wouldnt whant to share something that contains sexuall harasment, i think its a little silly and very curious how its users self-censored themselvels with this meme, it its very unussual to find it like this in the wild.

In this version of the meme she's actually from an alien culture where it's considered rude not to kiss someone and squeeze their butt after accepting a medal. Their version of "bless you" after a sneeze.

I swear to god it's in the show somewhere look it up.

We did it!

Wait that wasn't the point.

People seem to only want their accounts on "general use" instances that are already pretty popular.

Which is... bizarre. There is no downside to having your account on a more niche instance (as long as it isn't so niche that it gets turned off), and there are arguably disadvantages to having your account on a more popular instance.

People want to be where people are. My guess is we’ll end up with a bunch of super instances eventually.

People want to be where people are.

This logic only applies in centralized platforms. In the case of the Fediverse, people are everywhere and anywhere.

But here on lemmy itself we can see people gathering in just a few instances

Not everything happens for a logical reason. It's human nature to get together in tribes, and the majority of people are okay with just following the pack.

I just hope that eventually more people figure out that there is no significant advantage in being in the largest instances, and that it can be actually harmful (too many resources, potential drama because too much power is given to the admins, etc)

One big thing that hasn't changed from reddit is that lemmy instances are still based on an autocratic power structure. Whether or not your content gets seen or you get to see other content depends on the relationships between those leaders. That means choosing your leadership is of utmost importance, and I eventually settled on lemm.ee because it was the first instance I came across that both a) seemed like it had actual adults running the show, and b) was large enough for that leadership have already faced some challenges and have an established track record.

That's the downside to a niche instance.

That's the core of every problem that's occurred to every massive human social structure we've ever created in history.

We create systems, the systems become powerful, a small group of autocratic people naturally gravitate towards wanting to lead, the system is taken over by this small group, the system is corrupted, the system fails, the system ends .... then we start over again.

It keeps happening over and over again and the common denominator is human greed (either in the need to gain money and wealth ... or in the need to just want to gain power over everyone)

The only systems that last are the ones where everyone has an equal stake and a shared power structure. But it's a balancing game that constantly has to be monitored ... because once we stop being vigilant, some greedy idiots will naturally start taking over.

A slight advantage to big servers is the increase in anonymity on the backend. Given the server admins can do what ever that want. An admin on small server would no doubt be looking into who and where their individual users are. Big severs are more likely to become more population based. Doesn't really matter though I suppose.

Yeah no exact opposite for me: Big server means lots of user data making abuse of it more appealing and impactful. While an admin of a small instance having some fun digging through user internals would really do no harm (I don't believe that's a particularly typical hobby of small instance admins though xD ).

I wouldn't say no doubt. Some certainly would do that, others could have more integrity.

A good 40% of users are spread out on servers with less then 5% of the overall user base, but that is still a good 60% in the top 5 instances, considering how laggy lemmy.ml and lemmy.world are, I am surprised anyone stays on them.

Haven't noticed any issues, aside from the occasional down time on world.

Smaller instances take longer to load content from bigger instances.

I have a kbin account and a lemmy account, but I find myself more active on lemmy because it's faster to load new content.

It's not easy to see the list of all communities in an instance you don't have an account. If I login and federate as user@example.com, I can see all the local communities inside example.com, but not others like lemmy.world. I don't mean individual posts or an individual community, I mean list of all instance communities. I think this is one of high priority issues to be patched.

It's because instances are defederating from each other.

it's not that bizarre; people want easy and people don't seem to really understand how it works so they'd rather go where the most people are or the one that is "trending".

I've found that sometimes old posts don't propagate to newer servers. So if you want to participate in a old thread, you need another account.

The disadvantage of being on a small instance is that you could have an admin who is a fucking moron and ends up breaking stuff because they don't know what they are doing.

Sauce: am admin. am fucking moron.

Aw man are we gonna have to move?

If they ever defederate from piracy communities, yeah, but I don't think so, admin has a very anti defederate policy, so I see this scenario very hard to occur.

Oh, I don't really care about piracy communities. I meant on the basis of it getting big.

This graph is actually wrong, lemmy.ml doesn't have open sign ups, it just appears to because the Lemmy software doesn't accurately distinguish between open and closed registrations, it only distinguishes between open registrations and application-based registrations. If registrations are closed it'll look just like they are open, but we'll just give an error message when you try to sign up which is incredibly deceiving.

I filed an issue to fix this discrepancy on their GitHub.

Another issue with this graph is that it shows lemmy.world as American but it's actually hosted in Finland.

Woah, we grew fast!

lemm.ee has been consistently great for me, wonderful admin too.

Once lemm.ee can host larger images, I believe this will become the best instance on lemmy

one of the reasons it's fast is because they limit image sizes which lower server load.

Getting closer to being ddos'd every six seconds.

I chose ee over ml after what Mali started doing and that site could drop offline at any time.

The other .ml instances had a .ml free domain. Lemmy.ml paid for the domain so it's in no danger of losing it.

Edit: further proof that it is a paid domain:

Who owns lemm.ee and why do people choose it over other instances?

Can't speak for others, but my decision to stick with lemm.ee stemmed from seeing how active the owner is, the minimal defederation and the bot & moderation policies meaning there are minimal bots, and I've yet to currently see much spam issues, which is nice.

Also helps that the owner Sunaurus is an active contributor to the Lemmy project as a whole, so we get patches and fixes relatively quickly.

why do people choose it over other instances?

Non-techy people want a big instance, but .world goes offline too often and .ml doesn't allow new sign ups.

When I tested different instances lemm.ee was quite small compared to the big ones. The main pros are technically fast and stable. It also federates comprehensively.

Edit: also remembered that it hasn't had any insane admin/rule situations that I've noticed

.ml doesn’t allow new sign ups.

It does, however one must know what is six minus two to get the approval.

That's new, they were closed for a while

They got aome of the most traffic during the migration, so it pulled itself off the instance list page i think for regiatration so that people would join other instances leveling the load

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Also lemme.ee is not defederated from one or two instances that I want to access consistently which is why I made a new account there for my new main

You sure about that? I just made this account a few days ago.

They closed sign ups during the early days of the migration up until recently. I just missed the moment they're open again since I'm not interested in large instances.

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Because it is more open and lenient in not defedereting and as a user i can choose which subs and instances to block.

Its admin @sunaurus@lemm.ee wrote all about it here: https://lemm.ee/post/26

Thanks. Looking at the admin's profile, he seems to be very reasonable. I especially like this comment he made:

"Not sure if I actually have to justify removing soviet and/or nazi symbolism, but I have lived my whole life in a country on the border of Russia. My country been ravaged by both Nazis and Soviets in very recent history. I want to be clear that while I think criticising capitalism is totally normal and necessary, I am also extremely aware of constant Kremlin propaganda. Propaganda which is spread both in their media, but also crucially in online channels. Propaganda which includes things like downplaying horrifying actions of the soviet union, portraying their “enemies” (the west) in the worst possible light, and mixing in soviet symbolism wherever possible. I have no intention of allowing anything which resembles this propaganda to be spread through lemm.ee. If banning offending users does not work, then further steps will definitely be taken."

Yep ... seems refreshingly and perfectly reasonable to me.

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It says a significant chunk of their funding comes from users. Where does the other funding come from?

The admin made a post reporting on the finances.

Good to see donations are keeping the place afloat!

What is github sponsorship? Are they advertising on that note instance?

GitHub sponsorships are a way of donating to programmers. In addition to hosting lemm.ee, sunaurus has made significant contributions to Lemmy's codebase. (In my opinion, he is by far the most skilled programmer working on Lemmy.)

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Noooooooooooo. Don't get too big or that'll just paint a target on our server for the DDOS attacks!

stop growing I don't want to move instances again 🫠

I see only two ways for this to stop happening:

  • Instance admins make a collective pact to close registrations if their instance reaches x% of the total active base, and only open again when this number goes down to x/2%. I think x=10 would be a good start.

  • Instead of donations, instances start charging for access after a certain number. This is what my instance is doing: the first 250 active users are free, after that payment is required.

They should probably add a % measure to that to show active users as a % of total users to give a more balanced look at active instances

What is felt by users is the absolute number rather than the proportion.

Why not both?

Because when you open and later refresh Lemmy, the quantity of new posts you will see, which gives an idea of Lemmy's activity, is proportional to the absolute number of active users, not the proportion of active users per instance.

By why not both, I meant why not display both the number of users and the proportion of the total userbase. This does not seem to be an answer to that question.

I thought you asked why wouldn't both be felt by users. Otherwise, sure both can be displayed, the proportion gives an idea of the dynamic of a community.

Oh goody. There's a RickRussell_CA@lemm.ee and it's not me. And it's using one of my older profile pictures.

EDIT: 2023/8/29 update -- I posted to the lemm.ee support community and the admins decided to disable the account. Well done!

Uhhhhh. Yeah this was always something I was worried about with multiple instances. Having multiple usernames run my different people. The @ at the end will be crucial for people keep them separate

That's why we disabled the buy-sell-trade community on our niche instance. Nobody got scammed during the short time it was open, but if a username can be duplicated it makes scamming that much easier.

That sucks. Looks like they actually went out of their way to create that account a few days after yours.

The only bad part about the fediverse, imho, it’s hard to be the only one with your username. What makes it bad is a malicious user, that you may have pissed off somehow, start using your username in a smear campaign to hurt your reputation.

The key is to not attempt to foster a reputation in anonymous social media

True. I try to stay anonymous. But that doesn’t work on all social medias. Take Facebook for example, they show all that info in your profile allowing haters to hate

Facebook is not anonymous social media. It's spyware to the max

This is true, yet no one wants to listen to reality

You are the only user with the username Efwis@lemmy.zip. Nobody else can have that username.

This is true, just like I have an ml account too. But I wouldn’t put past someone to create another account on another instance with efwis and start some shit because I hurt their feelings. So far that hasn’t been an issue but there is a first time. Especially since the username doesn’t show what instance your’re on on the feeds

lemm.ee best instance 100%

Isn’t that the one that censors the word “bitch”?

I'm gonna go with no, since I'm reading it perfectly currently.

100%

I think the beauty of Fediverse is that the majority of people can find pretty amazing instances for themselves. I could say the same of mine.

Where's lemm.ee located physically?

This was asked in the lemm.ee discord and the answer given is below.

Ping times are low everywhere because the files we serve are hosted on globally distributed servers. So if you're in North America, you will download the frontend code (and images etc) from a North American server. But the backend is actually hosted in Germany

Do you know if personal data (like emails, IP addresses) is also distributed across the world? I mean, this is important from the privacy perspective. Different countries have different rules.

It's just using cloudflare. So likely your private data is just temporarily stored on the CloudFlare node in your region and in Germany.

Frankly I have absolutely no idea, I would encourage asking if you're concerned though.

So which country's laws apply to user generated content?

Hmm hosted in Germany that’s not reassuring.

Oh boy, I can't wait until everyone defederares from us too. /s

I switched from lemmy.world to the one I'm on right now. Runs smoothly, and there are like a dozen of us, lmao.

So if you're looking for a small instance that just runs smoothly, come say hi.

Damn it, I chose lemm.ee as my backup account (primary is lemmy.world) as it wasn't the number two...

is there a way to transfer my account to another instance? lemmy.world for me is unreliable and slow :/

No, but there are tools that can automatically copy over your subscribed communities.

You lose comment history and all that jazz too but it's better than nothing. I'm not sure if devs plan to implement a way to do it but it's one of the reasons I decided to roll my own instance. Nothing more frustrating than using someone else's and losing access while they take days to get it back up.

They're quick when it comes to defederating lefties. Not so much with toxic right wingers.

In all seriousness though, some apps copy subbed communities. Having a backup lemmy is useful.

I need more data on that first point. Everyone's defederation rationales and strategies have evolved over the last few months.

Exploding heads was slow. Hexbear was instantaneous.

Read the Hexbear defederation post if you want to see how subjective it actually was.

Don't get me wrong, commies are badly misguided, but they can hold a good faith rational debate.

I think I'll have to see how quickly they make a decision on other instances in the future.

The hexbear defederation did seem odd to me since the rationale was the admins there reminding their users to follow other instances rules?

Idk, I'm glad I can still see hexbear comments. I may not agree with them but at least they appear more literate than the exploding heads users.

Nice! The only issue is the extremely small size limit of images, but still a great instance

I really wish they would increase the image size to at least 200 or 300kb to fit larger images. You can get around it by using external image hosting but you can't do that for banners and profiles.

Significantly less posts and comments when compared to ML. So, a lurkers instance?

A lot of main communities (especially regarding technology, news and politics) are located in .world and .ml, so users from all instances will participate there.

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Good for them. Glad to see five different ones over 2200.

clap

Another mega-instance is formed, with lots of people grouped together, to make a big target.

Perhaps one day, everyone will discover what "Federated" means.

Well, it doesn't implicitly mean “survey all instances when making a new account and calculate where your additional account will average out the numbers.” 🙄

ee wasn't big originally, but it was one of the few instances that were big enough to not dissappear, run by a competent sys admin, and small enough to not be affected by the big instance performance challenges, while keep registrations open when many instances shut the door on newcomers. Basically, ee, sh.itjust.works and lemmy.world were there main options for people moving across. Their sensible stewardship has led to growth, and trust is why it has kept growing.

Federation means people can choose, and they do. It doesn't mean everything will be exactly the same size and stay small. An instance needs good sysadmin who will investigate issues an liase with dev teams to get them fixed. People will gravitate to those instances run by talented devs.

People will gravitate to those instances run by talented devs.

Eh, people gravitate to where everyone else is. Half of the fediverse doesn't realize federation means, you can read/post to most communities from most instances, bar federation issues. They see, OH HEY, Lemmy World has the most posts. I want to go where all of the posts are.

People RUN from instances, whenever the instance starts breaking, and the admins show their ineptitude. Either that, or when instances start clicking the defederation button too much.

How did ee, and sh.itjust.works grow? Because they were open. You have a short memory if you don't remember how many instances closed, during API blackout.

I didn't want to pick an instance that was running on a thinkpad that would get switched off when someone got bored.

Federation was confusing for many. Many used the join Lemmy website and options that were general purpose open instances that were English speaking and open were not huge. People made decisions in a short period of time and many went with world, ee, and sh.it. It isn't baffling. It is also no shock that people set up communities where they register and may be big enough to survive. Who would create a community that disappears in 3 weeks.

You painting users as brainless sheep does nothing more than give you some feeling superiority. Maybe your fragile ego needs that. I'll help if you need it. Congratulations, you're so smart and clever. More so than most. Thanks for stepping on your soap box and imparting your wisdom/red hot takes upon us.