Which Lemmy instance will be the biggest in 6 months?

AskThinkingTim@lemmy.world to No Stupid Questions@lemmy.world – 16 points –

Refer to title.

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lemmy.world because it's currently the biggest instance with open signups, and it has "lemmy" right there in the name. It's the obvious place for a novice to choose.

Exactly the reason why I chose it. Tried to sign up one some other ones and it wasnt working for some reason but lemmy.world worked instantly and has a nice name.

It probably would have been beehaw if they didnt defederate so early. Given the viewpoints of the people in charge there expressed in their comments on defederating and refederating, I suspect that Beehaw is going to have a consistent problem with constantly defederating and refederating.

Lemmy.world is most likely to grow the largest now because the barrier to entry is low compared to the other two. Additionally, the instance name gives the impression of a general or catchall instance moreso than lemmy.ml or beehaw.

Beehaw wants a safe space. They don’t want diversity; just the very rigid thoughts and opinions of which the owner approves. For this reason they don’t want most people to subscribe. And that’s fine. Every community can make their own rules.

Of course, every instance has the right to preserve their own echo chamber. That is not a problem, but it could be later when users keep seeing communities from one instance go away and come back, or users get effectively "banned" from interacting with those communities because they signed up on the wrong instance. Even if they refederate, they'll be seen as unreliable by everyone else.

Its like banning all people who drive a Toyota from parking in your parking lot because some people you don't like drive a Toyota. Sure, you have the right to do that, but you will be losing out on the parking fare of those big communities of Toyota drivers, and even people who dont drive Toyotas but see you banning them. Then you get less traffic, less users, people leave, and it becomes a parking lot that is 98% empty.

This leads to hyper segmented communities, which have benefits, but normies don't really like when a place only has 3 active users.

Agreed on the name thing, but the UI there is terrible. kbin is the most old school reddit-like one I've seen (admittedly I haven't seen much though) so I wonder if people will choose that in the end

Kbin has potential, I even tried to sign up for kbin but registration was disabled. So I just signed up to lemmy.world instead. Unless kbin is reopened for registration, I foresee many others doing exactly the same thing.

Beehaw was big, but from memory, they were third, behind lemmy.world, and lemmy.ml before they defederated. The gap would have probably become larger over time, since their account creation restrictions would limit growth, for better or worse.

No way it's not Lemmy.world, once all the normies (for lack of a better term) learn about it they'll go swarming. It's already growing fast

The main reason it is growing is because you cannot sign up to Lemmy.ml if you tried right now.

Exactly, the easy access and low barrier of entry (like reddit, twitter, etc.) make it perfect to populate. That's kind of why some of the instances need signups right, to keep out the riff riff?

It's also the second one in recommended servers. Lemmy.ml is nowhere to be seen.

Not sure about that. Even if .ml was open to new signups, there are quite a few reasons people would pick .world over it:

  1. .ml goes down more often than .world
  2. .world allows non-nudity NSFW content, while .ml does not allow any NSFW content
  3. A lot of people have concerns about "tankie" ownership of .ml (whether that's true or not), while the owners of .world seem more politically neutral

I got in before signups were closed, and have accounts on both .ml and .world, but have abandoned my .ml account for the above reasons

I believe it is going to be Lemmy.World. Besides my home instance of Kbin, which I love dearly, it is the one I see and hear about the most.

It does make sense because it is open to sign-ups, is federated with pretty much everything (apart from closed off instances like Beehaw and the tankies at Grad), and has the advantage of being a Lemmy instance (which gives it name recognition).

In the long-term, I hope federation keeps this space open, even if there is one or some "main" instance(s) people use.

The good thing about having open sign-up is that you get a big userbase pretty quickly.

The bad thing about having open sign-up is that you have people squatting on usernames and impersonating other people.

I mean, can you imagine?

I absolutely couldn't imagine it at all.

Loved your performance in Suicide Squad, particularly the bit where you said it was Squad'in time and Squaded on the Joker

I read this in a Harley Quinn accent so I'm 99% sure this is the actual Margot Robbie and is all the proof I need to consider this a verified account. Thank you Ms. Robbie for explaining things once again like you did in The Big Short!

If you like me explaining things, feel free to join the community I made for everyone to explain things.

https://lemmy.world/c/nowlemmyexplain

Also, preorder tickets for "Barbie", opening July 21st only in theaters. The writers are still on strike and I've got bills to pay.

Lemmy.World, almost certainly. As it is, they're on track to surpass lemmy.ml, and lemmy.ml has stated that they don't really want to be a big instance, but would prefer to be a smaller one like they used to be, redirecting new users to other instances, not least of all because the number of users was causing the server to implode.

Kbin is nice, and all, but it's technically its own thing, and isn't really a lemmy instance, even if it can be used as one. It's not quite as big as the others are.

Beehaw's account creation limits will almost certainly hamper any growth they will get, even if they decided to refederate with lemmy.world and sh.itjust.works again, but even then, they were still the third-biggest before defederating, so it might be a bit of a toss-up.

Could you explain to me more of what happened with beehaw?

Beehaw.org defederated from lemmy.world, and sh.itjust.works, effectively disconnecting from them. According to the post they made, they were disconnecting due to the influx of new users on both those instances overwhelming the moderation tools and moderation team that they had going.

It's worth noting that Beehaw describes itself as a safe-space instance, where registration is restricted, and all users registering have to be approved by instance operators. This is fine and all, but there's an issue. See, with the way that Lemmy and Federation works, you don't have to be a registered user on an instance to post there. So a user can just circumvent Beehaw's account creation restrictions by creating an account on a less-restrictive instance (such as lemmy.world), and posting over there. Which isn't ideal for Beehaw's moderators and operators, who had trouble dealing with "bad actors" from those instances (trolls and things), simply because their open registration policy meant that there would be be an influx of new users who found Beehaw's community through lemmy.world, or sh.itjust.works, or trolls who could comment on Beehaw's posts through them, circumventing bans and things.

Since it was too much for them to deal with, using the current tools that they had available to them, Beehaw defederated themselves from those two instances, effectively separating themselves from those two. Beehaw users won't see new posts from those instances, and those users wouldn't be able to see any new posts from Beehaw.

Given the current state of things, I wouldn't be surprised if Kbin might also be on the chopping block, since they've been having a few problems with users from there too, but that's neither here nor there.

Still, the Beehaw operators have said that they're willing to reconnect with those instances once Lemmy develops better moderation tools that let them manage that amount of users (and they're in contact with the operators for those two instances), but we have no real idea when that might be.

Biggest user base, or biggest in terms of posting? If it's the latter, definitely lemmynsfw

Either kbin.social or Lemmy.world. Then again, this hyper growth period is ripe for disruption. Facebook is talking about an ActivityPub instance. Imagine if they poured resources into UX improvements and directed their 2.5 billion users to it. It would be the largest instance by far overnight.

It would also be defederates instantly by hundreds of communities - people don't want corporations here because of what corpos have done to their own social media platforms.

The last thing I want to see is a meta community get big, because meta will probably start injecting ad posts directly into the community. I'm ok if it's just the users, I'm not ok if it's all the other baggage.

Not to mention meta will probably start with microblogging platforms first. Which is a bit harder to fuck with in the way meta can with Lemmy/kbin. I'd be more ok with it if they stayed there, I would however delete or park my Instagram accounts, especially if insta users can follow me directly on mastodon.

If Meta makes a ActivityPub instance, what are the chances they'll pull the old Microsoft "Embrance, Extend, Extinguish" approach on us?

To be honest, I'd rather them stay away. Let this be it's own thing, untainted by the monopolies.

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Well spreading the userbase is the ideal situation.. when 1 becomes too big it gets an extreme server load and too much control over content created there.. The whole idea of lemmy is to spread out.. I can imagine if instance owners get this idea they would temporarily suspend account registration on their own trying to push alternative instances to maintain a good decentralized user base.

Isn’t server load kind of irrelevant with the instances on CDNs?

@ghostalmedia

AFAIK CDN's don't do much to help with logged in traffic. Only users who are not logged in. Kbin.social is on Fastly infrastructure, so it's likely to scale comparatively well.

It's probably not desirable for it to get too big, but it should be able to absorb waves of Redditors who will then move on to other instances hopefully.

@AskThinkingTim @WhatThaFudge

IMO, I hope none becomes "the biggest" or "the official". It's good for decentralization to have "competing" instances.

Kbin and probably kbin.social

The biggest growth will come from Reddit/Twitter. A huge chunk of users from both are young and become easily outraged over social issues.

Websites tend to grow in stages and at each stage they build momentum. If you kill momentum at a key point everyone can end up fleeing the website.

The developers of lemmy are tankies, idiologues can't help themselves. As a result they'll drop a comment supporting some abhorrent action from China/Russia or repost China/Russia state media propaganda and cause outrage at a key moment and lemmy will become a dirty word.

I think you might be falling for some propaganda yourself😀

Aside from not having controversial admins it also has a much more Reddit like interface, which makes the transition much easier.