Lemmy's total users exceeds 740k today, up from 540k yesterday

MicroWave@lemmy.world to Fediverse@lemmy.world – 187 points –

Source: https://lemmy.fediverse.observer/dailystats&days=7

In other news, Sync is coming to Lemmy.

154

Whatever the number, I've definitely noticed in the past few days that there are getting to be enough people having conversations and posting content for this place to feel like a legit community instead of a ghost town. I'm really glad to see more people joining and taking part.

Agreed. It's really nice to see top posts having a lot of thoughtful engagement. Hopefully we'll have enough to start seeing people branching out to smaller niche communities too.

The small niche communities are pretty much dead, sadly. But there for sure is hope!

For example, your comment is the first one I have seen that has over 30 upvotes since I came on board a week back.

It's been amazing to feel like we're part of something that's growing so fast. I'll miss Reddit but I expect Lemmy will fill in the role sooner rather than later.

How easy is it!

I just used my Reddit name and continued here.

No effort what so ever.

Bit to wrap my head around the idea of subs being completely different communities on different servers, but I LIKE that idea.... no Fascist Overlords to control the groupthink.

I guess (if this is how the Lemmyverse/Fediverse works) is some AWS/cloud instances are going to be spun up hard and fast!

Sadly those are bots, real amount of users is around 150k. Source: https://lemmy.fmhy.ml/post/176547

Apparently a lot of those bots are just farming reddit and reposting here. Which I think in the short term is a good thing. People are more likely to join/stay if they see content. On the other I hope lemmy has the tools to prevent bot content from overwhelming user generated posts to the point that it loses the authenticity.

I would love to have a bot/a few scripts to migrate a lot of the useful posts that were on reddit over here for a few of my hobby communities instead of having to move them manually. I can definitely see a lot of use cases for those.

That's an interesting take, but I could definitely see it working out. As long as the reposted content isn't ads or spam, it could help the fediverse have content while it grows.

I don't see the proof in that link, although maybe I'm missing something, it just seems to imply that is the case.

Agreed. It's literally just them saying "there are a lot of new users and theoretically they could all be bots, therefore they are all bots".

I understand the bot concern, but when I look at the comment and active user figures, they're all in the same trendline of exponential growth. This is the exodus just beginning. Personally I'm finding Lemmy to be a refreshing alternative that serves far better than what Reddit has become. I think it's what we've all been waiting for, and the secret's starting to get out.

This is my first comment on Lemmy , excited to be here as we embark on a new journey away from Reddit.

I'm excited for Sync coming to lemmy , my go to app for reddit browsing was Sync.

And obligatory fuck spez

Just heard the news about Sync and instantly registered here. I'll still be hoping for Boost to cross over, but Sync is infinitely better than Reddit's app. A decent client was all that was missing for me to make the plunge, let's hope that's the case for more people.

And yes, fuck Spez

Line goes up?

You failed to continue multiplicative growth therefore your investors are going to pull their money... Wait there are no investors, there is no ipo. I'm going to donate 10$.

I don't doubt there's a great amount of user growth, but it appears that many of those are account creation spam on instances with 1 active monthly user though.

Edit to add a comment I made on another post Basically there might be about 200k real users right now including lurkers, growing at a rate of basically 13.5k per day.

Yeah, no idea whether this is spammers trying to stake turf or someone trying to inflate the user count to stick it to reddit (or something) but the numbers from the 18th on are clearly inauthentic.

TBF reddit's numbers are also inauthentic.

Hell, fake it till you make it isn't that bad a strategy to attract new users.

Of course, you also need content. I hope people start making bots which steal content from reddit, which bots on reddit steal from twitter/insta/tiktok/snapchat. That way we can all cut out the middle-man.

On a side note, I think it's really cool that I'm on kbin and commenting on something on lemmy.

On a side note, I think it's really cool that I'm on kbin and commenting on something on lemmy.

It's also so well integrated, that I just realized I am on a Lemmy magazine/community.

Conspiracy theory: what if Reddit is using it’s not army to make a bunch of dead/spam accounts to try to make Lemmy instances more expensive solely to try to price them out of their space so they can then turn and point to how “Reddit alternatives aren’t viable/stable.”

On one hand, that’s obviously stupid and not true. On the other hand, I can see Huffman being petty and malicious enough to do something like that.

Inactive accounts don't really add any expense. Creating a bot farm to create large amounts of artificial traffic to crush competitors would risk antitrust lawsuits that would actually cripple the company.

1 more...

the interface is just so clean. it feels like early internet and I love it.

Were you using new reddit? I don't find it that different from old.reddit (which is fine by me).

Exactly! I’m so happy it finally seems to be an alternative to Reddit, which has mutated into such a weird monster

I've tried moving away from Reddit several times with varying degrees of success, this time though it's felt really easy - the more i learn about Lemmy the more i like it and look forward to seeing it evolve. There are some really nice communities here too, feels like a lot of the most interesting people have come here but the spammers, bots and trolls haven't yet -- i'm sure it'll change as things grow but i'm going to enjoy it while it lasts.

I think it's either bots or some spooky spammers that are falsely reporting the number of users. e.g. lemmy.k6qw.com currently claims to have 44k users with no posts...

Yeah that's a bad instance.

There are many more bad instances like this in the statistics. I think it will become a problem for Lemmy sooner or later.

Probably! But in the mean time I bet some real people will join just because they see the numbers going up.

Ngl, I'm gonna miss these early days I think. Hopefully we have instilled some type of decent, thoughtful culture on here that can keep us grounded and keep flourishing.

I really like getting in on these big threads later at night when everyone is chopping it up and making me think.

Oh man, I hope this server can maintain. Support if you can. There is no CEO but there is a server admin who has to pay for us to be on it. No centralization means its up to us to keep it going. I don't know the history of lemmy world and I'd hate to see it go because it was too expensive for it's popularity. Something to think about.

Fuck you Spez, most may be bots right now but those bad boys will eventually become real users.

@MicroWave
There is a huge bot issue right now (started 3 days ago). All the numbers are worthless.

It’s a known issue, all admins should add captcha to the subscription page, delete the bots and re-compute the actual number of users. Unless we do that, we won’t have a correct number.

We can still look at the Monthly Active Users. Bots don’t post (yet)

Just check https://lemmit.online/c/itookapicture . Sadly only bot posts

This is a bot made to repost from reddit to generate content for remade subs, thought i don’t know if that’s the right thing to do, it’s not made purely to spam communities afaik

Bots get a bad rep. Bots are fantastic, it's just a shame they are prejuded to be bad. I'm sure signup has a bot mode on some instances.

I have no problem with bots in general (there were some really cool novelty ones on reddit, as well as moderation ones, etc). When large amounts of accounts are created for bots, it seems a bit shady, however. Will those be used to push political opinions and guerilla marketing as Lemmy gets bigger, or did someone just create a bunch of accounts to simulate conversations using an LLM?

They're supposed to be bot posts. That's what lemmit.online is for. To copy Reddit content into communities on lemmit.online.

Good to know. Also I have mixed feelings about this. It’s great to see more content but I would rather see more of original posts here than a copy from reddit.

Soon, the novelty accounts are going to start showing up here again.

something something undertaker mankind cage something.

I want to see shittywatercolors here in the fediverse!

Where are you shitty? We want your colors of water

Notice the disparity between monthly active users and registered users. These are bots. I'm very tempted to block these instances outright.

Just block them. going to have to with the number of bots on it.

Might be necessary. I don’t see any good coming from hundreds of thousands of bots.

1 more...

I'm super excited for Sync for Lemmy.

Also tinfoil hat on for a second. If there are really as many bots as people keep suggerting. Who has an interest in sabotaging lemmy?

But then it's probably the same bits which are everywhere now interested in lemmy because it gained users.

I assume its a target for bots because its a lie hanging fruit.

Also it's harder to find bots down the road

I wonder if these are real users or if someone wrote a script to register users via the lemmy API… 🤔

I can confirm that after a week of people posting links, I - a real user - finally took the plunge to sign up today.

-Sincerely, cdipierr-bot

HELLO A REAL USER. I AM ALSO A REAL USER AND LIKE TO DO NORMAL HUMAN THINGS LIKE CONSUME, SCROLL, LIE MOTIONLESS FOR 8 HOURS, AND MANY OTHER NORMAL HUMAN ACTIVITIES. I PARTICULARLY ENJOY THE HUMAN ACTIVI

Segmentation Fault

I kind to want to jump to a smaller instance

I self host! Very nice having an instance all to myself.

I'm planning to self host - but just have one question, mostly a confirmation, as long as you're not hosting communities, you can comment and interact with others, without needing other instances to explicitly sync with your insurance, right?

I kind of want my own instance just to control what communities I sync for my own account, but not going to host any myself, so defederation of some instances doesn't affect me (unless I myself want to block them)

This is exactly what I'm doing and it has been working great so far.

Do the big instances need to give permission, to your self-hosted instance, to read and post on their communities?

Do those instance owners need to manually approve access from some unknown small instance?

You could self host :)

I aim to self-host myself, one of these days. I'm having analysis paralysis picking a VPS tho, because I'll want to move my other online socials there too.

Use Docker or Ansible or something, so that migrating between VPSs is easy.

(Also, if you're solid, what does that make me?!)

(Also, if you’re solid, what does that make me?!)

Liquid, Gas or Plasma, mate. 🙃

@MicroWave the fact that there are almost a million people that are users on lemmy shows that there are a million more on the fediverse as a whole. i am very glad lemmy federated on activitypub. so i can use mastodon to communicate to lemmy communities.

Love it, and we’re not even at 1st July, when all 3rd party apps stop working (shame or not I still go back to reddit with Apollo to enjoy the drama).

Also, we don’t need 400 million users to have a variety of communities with good discussion and content - a few million is more than enough, probably.

I keep seeing new communities daily and we're already the size of a decent city and much larger than the city I grew up in. We had all types from punks to queer kids to commies and fascists. We've got enough users to fill any niche I can think of and probably a lot more. And we're still growing, I don't remember reddit when it was this young, but there's a bit of an early 4chan (minus all the racism and homophobia and hate) vibe going on that I totally dig!

How do i stop lemmy from spewing out new 1 point posts when I'm viewing the top posts like weekly or daily

Far and away the biggest problem at the moment, lol.

replace the "1" in the url with "0" -- so "/page/1" turns into "/page/0"

it's an easy bandaid until they fix it!

Just a wild guess - but those "front page" algos must be tough to master, especially when a site doesn't have real data to play with. I'm sure the situation will improve soon!

So now I just gotta build up a new feed from scratch, that's the part that sucks the most. So many nice niche communities I've discovered over the years on reddit... But it was time, reddit has been going downhill for years.

I'm in the middle of doing the same. Its a shame when you go through your list of subreddits and can't find an equivelant community on here. Nevermind niche subs, there will still be plenty of 1mil+ subs which are missing from here.

Nor do I want to create and be the only mod of about 20 different subs. I feel like that requires a special sort of person lol.

The growth is insane, fediverse is coming!

I've been on Lemmy since last Monday (like 10 days). It's meteoric!

Back then, simply posting ANYTHING automatically meant you made the front page.

This is my first post on Lemmy and I just want to say that I'm so happy to be here guys. Finally my dream of seeing a decentralized social media platform gaining unprecedented traction is coming true.

This has been a dream of mine as well! I kept saying “why hasn’t someone created a better social media platform, especially an anonymous one like Reddit?” I didn’t know Lemmy existed until I went to post a negative review for Reddit and saw it plugged in someone else’s negative review for Reddit. I’m so happy it exists!

Unfortunately most of the communities I'm interested in are ghost towns

The best way to solve that is post some links and get the ball rolling. Can't get engagement without something to engage with. (I am guilty of not posting links myself lol)

I'm doing that but I don't know for how long if I'm the only one doing the effort

Unfortunately, there's no real way of knowing. But for any community someone's gotta take that initial leap of faith and build it up from just a few people, even if it sounds like you're talking to yourself sometimes. At least until like-minded people start to show up and be drawn in to what you've built.

Even for the community that I'm trying to start up here, !presidents, it might just be my friend and I making posts, and it might stay that way for weeks, or possibly months. But that's a possibility you have to be okay with when starting up a community.

Try and talk to other individuals who are as passionate about your community's premise as you are. Friends you know irl, or people you've met in a similar community on Reddit. Having even just a few other people to engage with can make the process seem a lot less lonely and futile.

I joined in the last few days. Seems like this site has much better content. Less bots and reposts. Plus, the user base seems a lot more intelligent in general at this point.

hello I'm actually really dumb

If you acknowledge it, you're already smarter than the majority of the Reddit user base

Honestly the only thing missing now is a good app for iOS. However I’ve been using the mobile browser version and it works just fine. I hope Apollo’s dev sees an opportunity here and goes for it.

How are you using the browser version? I just can't browse /all without having a new post pushing down the feed every 5 seconds I find it unusable.

1 more...

Just arrived here, does anyone know how to change the interface language? It presumed I wanted the language from my region, but I prefer English.

I just joined lemmy and this is the first social media service where I could grab my short username instead of a longer one no one uses I'm very glad

I typed my old Reddit username in at first then said “wait a minute…”, somehow nobody took my simple first name in the first several hundred thousand accounts created!

You could always host your own instance and be the only user with your special user and connect to other instances' communities.

Wow, amazing to see and experience the community grow and become so active. I love it! :D

That uptick in users the past week is crazy.

Wheres the Dark mode at?

On phone by default, the theme follows your phone. Set the phone to dark mode and it should switch.

If it isn’t or if you’re on PC go to themes in your user settings and manually change it.

TBH - I don't understand how people use Lemmy. It auto-updates and scrolls every few seconds if I try to look at anything that isn't a stale feed from 3 days ago. I know it'll get better but you have to REALLY want to be there to stick it out which will turn off many new users.

The patch to fix that is in and the next release includes it. Could also use kbin, which doesn't have the issue, though it has its own quirks, like squashed previews.

If your platform has support from a third-party app, could also use that.

Cool, but how many are bots?

First post on Lemmy! Ummm, what is sync?

"Sync for reddit" was one of the more popular Android apps for reddit