Lemmy.world officially has 33k users! 3000 users away from becoming the #1 lemmy instance.

MicroWave@lemmy.world to Lemmy.World Announcements@lemmy.world – 109 points –

The user count at the moment of this post stands at 33279 and continues to grow!

To take the #1 spot from lemmy.ml (36185 users and no longer growing), lemmy.world just needs about 3000 new users. Given the current growth rate, it should be another day or two.

We’re building something here!

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As a Kbin user I went to take a look at Kbin, it's about 40k users in all. Looks like all in there'll be more than 100k users.

The monthly stats for users for both Kbin and Lemmy are encouraging, the numbers really spiked in June. I hope this continues for a while yet.

There will be another spike on July 1st IMO, that's when reddit 3rd party apps will stop working, after that things should settle, it's possible some people will go back to reddit but things should normalize after that.

Unless some other big corp decides to sh*it on their users like reddit is doing lol.

but things should normalize after that.

There's a greater likelihood that the content creators are the ones moving. Most of the reddit power users likely used third party apps. Most of the reddit power users are also the ones who wrote most of the comments worth reading.

So if on june 1 most of the reddit power users flee, reddit's enshitification will have reached a terminal stage. Eventually, reddit will stop having things worth reading, and the lurkers will all move over.

I think we're in for a long decline of reddit a la facebook. However unlike facebook, there isn't a market of old people/foreign markets that can fill their user numbers.

What really hurts so much about this is that Reddit is effectively a modern Alexandrian Library, and it's burning. There's so much content there that's vitally important and it could all go up in smoke. Anybody know any full archival projects?

I know r/DataHoarder is working hard for it, dunno where they are storing all the data tho.

Many of datahoarders initiatives are pointless at best. Hoarding reddits data across a thousand personal hard drives that are inaccessible to anyone else is of extremely limited value. I've watched them perform the same action over and over, but most of the time that data never ends up in a new home. It just rots at someone's house.

I think the biggest reddit archive initiative is led by ArchiveTeam Warrior and the data after processing ends up being accessible on Internet Archive. I've seen this initiative posted on DataHoarder two weeks ago.

During the protest I've seen several people saying they didn't even know 3rd party apps existed, I believe we seriously underestimate the amount of people who don't care about anything as long as they get their daily "dose" of memes.

Many power users have moved already, more will follow, but the masses? Reddit is infested with reposting bots but most people don't even notice, they have so much content in there that it will last them for years, even if all content creators left, not to mention AI.

That's not to say reddit will never die, but I believe it'll take a much longer time than we think.

I honestly don't care. If we make this thing here work, let the bots have reddit. As long as the old discussions aren't deleted, it can be tiktok 2 for all I care (if this here growth into what it seems to grow into).

So for me, while I knew of the 3PAs I didn't start using them until the uproar. And when I did switch, I was like "how the hell did I stay on the official app for so long!"

I agree, I know people irl who will be quitting on the 1st once they can't use Apollo.

I don't think reddit will ever actually die. I'll probably still even check it for information I need if it's a community that didn't move since I have a few eSports I follow and people post tournament threads on Reddit and no where else. But hoping that people move over still. Unfortunately it's a sub that's been re-opened and lots of users aren't even "redditors". A lot are on Reddit for the specific topic :/

I don't think Reddit will go through a dramatic death as Digg did. Digg v4, as many old timers remember, happened in a different era with a different mix of users.

Reddit will slowly become what their management always wanted it to become: a bastard child of facebook. Some may stay because of habit, some simply won't care, it's all the casual crowd Spez is betting on.

That also means it will die a slow death where big flashy subs will be inundated with recycled memes and botspam despite the effort of some with good intentions that still hang into that platform.

If any those become disillusioned and look for another place, Lemmy/Kbin can become that second home.

I think the biggest issue to user growth will be getting the word out that this place exists. Like a lot of people, I'm trying to find a more ethical alternative to Reddit and had no idea kbin was a thing.

I have little understanding of the technical details of Lemmy, but I'm having a hard time understanding how it can scale. How do you build something like /r/funny with 40 million subscribers when the biggest Lemmy instance seems to be suffering at 30k users?

As far as I can see while users can subscribe to communities on different instances, communities themselves are locked to a single instance. How could a multi million strong community grow here?

First of all, as a software engineer I'm — well, "impressed" is the wrong word because I remember how efficient software used to be in the '90s — I'm "satisfied" with how well Lemmy instances are scaling. Even the largest instances are running on single, fairly-small servers.

Keep in mind that this is all alpha software and not only likely very unoptimized but also pretty buggy, so the surprisingly few problems there have been are more likely due to that than to real issues of scale.

Second, and more importantly, remember that having really big instances is "doing it wrong" to begin with. The intended design of Lemmy (and Fediverse services in general) is to have a whole lot of small instances, not a few big ones.

I guess my question is that you can't really control if a community grows to be huge or not. You can control who can create an account your instance, but unless you defederate, what happens if 20 million accounts subscribe to a single community? How is that load handled? Does it just collapse the entire instance under it's weight? Or is the fediverse just inherently built to stifle community growth past a certain scale?

I would hope that an instance/magazine that can't handle 20m users will have some sort of manual approval or other filter like Beehaw does. Beehaw defederated because they needed to breathe. Same with any other instance that begins to near its limit.

I was more referring about impacts of non-local users browsing communities on other instances. Which instance handles that load? If I browse lemmy.ml communities on my lemmy.world account am I impacting lemmy.world or lemmy.ml? What happens when all 35k lemmy.world users browse a lemmy.ml community because it's the most popular one? Does lemmy.ml need to support all their own users + any non-local visitors?

That's why I mentioned Beehaw. Beehaw defederated for this reason.

kbin.social is 36 258 ATM, more than any Lemmy server.

I'm trying to like kbin, but it's just kludgy in all the wrong places and I unreasonably hate the fact that they decided to call them "Magazines". Eww.

To be fair it is still actively being improved.

In just the week or less I've been here I've noticed a couple of issues get fixed (example: squished thumbnails) and others that are planned to be fixed.

It'll be interesting to watch it develop.

Oh sure, same with Lemmy, Mastodon, etc. the devs are continually working on improving these Fediverse platforms. As said, I want to like kbin but it's just not there yet for me.

Honestly: how do I display a feed of only the posts in subscribed "magazines"? I get random posts from random places in the fediverse.

In addition to the other suggestions, I'd recommend Jerboa for Lemmy if you're on android. I feel like the UI is a little more user friendly and streamlined than the mobile site.

Are there other good alternatives? It is very bare bones and a lot of links to communities or users just closes the app.

This will be fixed in the next update.. not sure on the release schedule though.

I got tired of waiting and just built it from source

I'm appreciative that accounts are still open; I came over from Beehaw because I want to experience ALL of what LemmyNet has to offer... We all need to support lemmy.world and LemmyNet - I think we're in the early days of pulling Reddit users... I know that's tough in many ways, but I'm ready to do whatever it takes - including leaning up a LemmyNet domain myself. Lets g00000!

it was the first one I found, not even sure I knew what I was picking when I signed up.

Same here. Then after doing some more reading I guess it's better if people spread around more. But I can not fault them for doing exactly the same thing.

A good percentage of lemmy.ml users aren't active vs. lemmy.world.

Hmmm random question... Any idea why I wouldn't be able to join lemmy.world/homeassistant? It's always stuck on "Pending". I tried posting...but also on pending (been like this for about 3 days now)

Tried subscribing to !homeassistant@lemmy.ml, got the same error. Kept hitting "Subscribe Pending" to cancel and redo a few times before it finally worked. Not sure if that's specific to c/homeassistant

Small thing... the "subscribe pending" thing is actually incorrect. I have that on a number of subs but I am actually subscribed and they show in my feed! It's just an odd bug, the subscription works!

This is great! Hopefully we will be around 50k before the 30th so when people check out Lemmy they will see it's active and join.

So fucking proud of lemmy.world right now. Long live the fediverse!

At some point this instance should stop it's indefinite growth IMHO. Centralizing users is not in the ethos of lemmy. I think once it reaches the size of lemmy.ml it should close to new users.

Hard disagree. Lemmy, much like Mastadon is SO confusing for the mass public to sign up for. If you have an instance that is popular and can handle the load, NEVER turn people away. You just make it more confusing.

If your server can't handle the load, fine. If you want specific users on your instance, fine. But if you're a general Lemmy instance that average non technical redditors want to sign up for, DO NOT TURN THEM AWAY.

Furthermore, Lemmy is just a blip in the radar of Reddit. Worrying about centralization right now is putting the cart before the horse. Let's build up Lemmy whatever way we can.

Yep, we should have a stable, general-purpose landing place (like lemmy.world is shaping up to be) for new users before they start spreading out.

Then the other instances (including new ones) should step up their recruiting efforts as well.

Also, lemmy.world‘s user base is still nothing compared to Reddit’s 52 million daily users, for example.

Putting a pause on growth over some arbitrary number seems silly at this point, especially when lemmy as a whole is still in its infancy. Putting the cart before the horse to me.

Easy to say, harder to achieve. Join Lemmy alreayd recommends smaller instances, but if you scroll a bit down, there are Popular which most peple will choose as they are very likely to not understand federation.

Oh users understand it. The problem with smaller instances is they might not have the expertise and funding to run for a long time. And if something goes wrong you can rely on more help. Also you are locked in, because lack of account portability.

To play devils advocate, freedom is the ethos of lemmy. Let this instance encourage migration, whilst users are free to access it from any other instance too :)

I'm happy to see lemmy.world grow as I look inward from kbin.social, and I think we should all be happy the fediverse in general is gaining traction.

Same. I’m thrilled to see both lemmy.world and kbin.social growing, especially now that kbin.social has refederated.

I agree. We need the network to be resilient so we can't have all our eggs in one basket.

Centralizing users is not in the ethos of lemmy.

Users don't care about your ethos. They just want to be on a stable platform with other people.

Corporations didn't centralize the internet, people did. Corporations just got rich of it.

If signup was paused when I signed up I wouldn’t have bothered and looked for something else.

Is the instance ready for a huge influx of users on July 1st?

Have the same question, I'm quite worried about this as posting and federation is laggy at times

Look at that uptime! Huge shout out to @Ruud and the entire admin crew. Don't forget to leave a tip!

Is there something like a Lemmy guide on how to use it? I'm using jerboa, and finding communities is not a user friendly experience so far. Everything is so separated.

Edit: thanks! I also decided to use "install app" from my browser which just makes an applet on my home screen. For now, this is a much better experience than jerboa. I understand it's very new so I'll definitely keep an eye on development

Thanks for the install app tip. Seems like it works a bit nicer. Hopefully jerboa or some other apps will be equal to the the 3rd party teddit apps soon

I'm REALLY hoping the dev for boost (for reddit) makes a Lemmy app.

I would love to see Apollo, Relay, RIF, Boost etc rewrite their apps to Lemmy. But I suspect those devs will find a job elsewhere in the mobile dev space

This was my go to reddit app and I would love to see it. I'd happily buy ad free boost for lemmy.

Nice. Still praying for a hide submission feature so I don't see the same thing all the time (Serial refresher!)

So... Who's gonna stream the moment when we become number 1 community (like Reddark on Twitch lol)

Why not you?!

I'm too busy trolling Reddit users who whine about the "one sided" recent mod decisions 😁

I just joined today, enjoying that early breaking ground feel and learning the differences. Also have been using Beehaw for the past week or so but want to experience everything there is as well.

Thoughts so far?

I really like it, there’s still some of the smaller communities not available yet but that’s understandable because it’s still quite new. There’s a lot here and the feel is similar enough to Reddit that it fills that gap for me.

What do you think of Lemmy, what are your thoughts?

Lemmy looked barebone a couple of weeks ago, but it's changed dramatically since. Like you, I miss some smaller niche communities (gardening and home improvement related), but with the upcoming Lemmy app from the Sync dev, things are looking super exciting.