lemmy.world leads the pack as the #1 most active instance, outpacing the next 5 non-bot instances combined!

MicroWave@lemmy.world to Fediverse@lemmy.world – 140 points –

Active users as of June 25, 2023:

  • lemmy.world (48k users): 13554 active users
  • lemmy.ml (38k users): 4582 active users
  • beehaw.org (11k users): 3743 active users
  • feddit.de (6.7k users): 2320 active users
  • sh.itjust.works (6.5k users): 2167 active users
  • lemmy.ca (3.5k users): 1082 active users

Great to see all this growth and activity in different lemmy instances!

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

158

That's great and imma let you finish but remember that decentralization is strength on the fediverse. Join or create other instances, join or create communities on other instances, thats our strength.

On the fediverse, instances come and go. I've seen big instances go down either permanently or temporarily, and ive also seen big communities decide they're turning off federation. The only way to be safe from that is to decentralize, so if something happens there's still something worth doing on the fediverse.

Besides that though, congratulations lemmy.world, I love to see the thrediverse Renaissance we're in, and nothing but love for the folks running this instance and the folks participating on it.

Also lemmy.world is extremely slow in pushing out messages to other instances, if at all. So leading the pack is not necessarily the best thing until you figure out scaling.

Yeah, they should really consider not accepting new users until that is figured out, honestly. There are plenty of servers out there that people can join at this point. Too much centralization in a decentralized system for my liking regardless of instance scaling.

Yeah, I've been missing a ton of comment replies from lemmy.world and it's frustrating. I am wondering if it's because they're still on 0.17.4 instead of 0.18.

Yeah I think that's the main issue. Hopefully 18.1 can be released soon so they can upgrade too.

Is that what's happening when I try to reply and it just loads forever?

No I think that is just you telling lemmy.world the message which sometimes can get stuck. Only after the message was sent will other instances sync with lemmy.world if they are federated.

The server has already been upgraded 3 times. I'm sure they'll upgrade again if they're seeing issues. They might not know if it's an external issue.

Good. It is important to have different instances to distribute the load though. However, I hope there are not many people joining BeeHaw...

I hope there are not many people joining BeeHaw…

I don't hope that, exactly, I just hope that the people who join understand what they're getting (and, more importantly, what they aren't). I fully support a community with a different goal than most, and their goal seems like a wholesome one. I personally think it's doomed to failure, but I support them giving it a try. They're barely part of the fediverse though.

I agree. That's the point of having different instances. Some of the original Lemmy instances had a very specific worldview and didn't want to hear much else. I'd prefer they stay there to live in their echo chamber and I leave them alone, than they come out and start demanding the rest of us bow to their authority.

The broader fediverse sort of works that way. There's a fediverse that's really locked down, the sort of in between, and there's the wild west, and the three coexist in different ways. I can disagree with them, but it's their sandbox and I have mine and in that way we can coexist on the same platform

Perfectly put.

As an aside, I feel like this was the situation in the early formation of the US. Different communities and different states had different views about what should be illegal, but they all wanted the freedom to pursue their individual ways of life. There were basic tenants that everyone generally agreed to, but we created a paradigm where states could do different things, and you could move freely between them to trade and interact.

I feel like people have lost sight of that. Too many want to legislate their view of how people should live - to force everyone to live that way - instead of all of us during l supporting the right of others to do something different within those broader societal bounds.

There still some good instances that Beehaw is federated with, but my personal issue is that it feels very fragile. If a couple of bigots show up on other instances and the mods don't delete their posts right away, will Beehaw defederate from them? There is a line between protecting your users and barring them from accessing anything you don't approve of, and I think they need to figure out where they stand in regards to that line. Beehaw feels more like a small forum than a piece of something bigger.

Defederating because of raiding, harassment, bots, etc is 100% understandable but it should not be done lightly.

I agree with you. And, honestly, I don't think they did it lightly after reading their post about it. It's just that they're dedicated to creating a safe space for their members, and they couldn't figure out how to do that with the mod tools they have and the influx of trolls from the open instances.

Looks like beehaw.org is shedding users. They've lost about a thousand users since defederating from lemmy.world and sh.itjust.works last week. Maybe a bunch of people weren't happy with that move.

since defederating from lemmy.world

Oh. I think I maybe figured out why my subscriptions to beehaw communities are still pending.

Dang it. Am I really going to have to write a thoughtful essay to get an account there? I hate writing. Thoughtfully, anyhow.

As long as people understand the circumstances of that instance I have absolutely no problem with people finding the place they belong.

I just hope there are not new users who don't realize they may not be federated with the larger community.

Whats wrong with beehaw? I got a couple really active, good communities from there in my feed

They block a shit ton of instances, not always for good reasons. Often to maintain an echo chamber.

I thought they planned to refrigerate with those instances once mods tools are a little more developed

Hello All, First time poster here. I would just like to say that i tried signing up for beehaw.org but they have some kind of purity test that reminds me of Reddit. Don’t ever sign up for beehaw, that is going to be one hell of a drama filled instance.

Ironically all of the drama and complaining seems to be coming from instances outside of Beehaw, being dramatic and complaining about Beehaw. The content there is actually good.

Really it's just drama caused by the platform not maturing yet. Beehaw's reasons behind defederating from large instances like lemmy.world are valid, but it's not like other instances made them do it. It's a choice they made to be able to create the space they want in lieu of proper mod tools. Hope they realise it won't be an overnight fix, and the longer they stick to their guns the greater the risk of their communities fizzling out, which would be a shame as I agree they are some of the best.

I tried to sign up for beehaw… they rejected my application. Glad they did, I really enjoy lemmy.world!

More users does not ALWAYS mean a good thing.

You are correct and Lemmy.World and others will experience growing pains and will have their own share of issues but the positive of this is that more users means more content.

You are correct, but it at least shows that we are attracting more users (albeit, that doesn't mean quality).

I believe its a positive thing though, as it shows that the "normies" are seriously considering alternatives; outside of us niche, nerds here for the tech and the anti-corpo mindset.

I am decidedly not a niche nerd here for tech reasons. I just got pretty fed up with Reddit and it’s ridiculousness. I’m a 40 year old mom just here to cruise around the internet and find interesting things. So you are correct - the “normies” are starting to look for alternatives!

Just showed up here. We'll see how long I stay, but hoping this will be my social media fix each morning. If there are enough folks who feel the same, it will be.

I've been using it for about a week now, and it already is.

Of course, there's a handful of subreddits that I miss and feel the urge to go back to every now and then, but I realize that there is enough content on Lemmy to satisfy me during my coffee breaks. And it's enough to keep me from going back.

Same here. I go to Reddit for a specific thing and forget I’m not on lemmy, see some promoted post or whatever, and wonder who would even dare post that shit here, then remember and switch back.

It’s been nice to be able to reclaim yet another part of my life from advertisements and incessant tracking.

Well said. A month ago, I couldn't even imagine leaving reddit because there was hardly a viable alternative.

lemmy.world is probably leading because it’s easy to sign up

I mean, i would rather have an easy sign up then go through a shitty purity test like beehaw.org makes you go through.

I wrote 2 short paragraphs for the Beehaw entry and a week later was denied. By that point I was already on Lemmy.World.

I really don't know what else they wanted me to say to be honest. I'd be interested in seeing some accepted applications but seems excessive.

The very same thing happened to me. It's amazing to me how fast Lemmy.world has grown in the few weeks I've been here!

Same for me. The only thing beehaw now has that interests me is the technology community, which seems fairly active. Other than that it died for me there. For what? Because they couldn't deal with a few trolls? And they want their own walled garden for site applications?

In contrast, I wrote two lines basically saying "like your vibe and the growth of your community" and was approved within a few hours maybe less.

This is more or less what i said in my purity test to them and got rejected. They should figure their shit out before beehaw crashes and burns.

Exactly! Or a waitlist like lemmy.ml. There’s probably going to be some issues with so many people in this instance, but it’s better than an echo chamber.

I'm on my secondary account because of some 0.17.4 vs mobile app compatibility issues, but my accepted application read "I like your moderation philosophy"

That was it.

That was all I wrote.

Jesus you're bitter

That's not a nice thing to say to Jesus.

Bitter about what? Beehaw is literally running a purity test in order to let you sign up. You sound much more bitter for me telling the truth than i am.

I'm here because there's less censorship

Literally why I came to Lemmy as a whole.

However is been just "spinning" on yrying to sign up for over a week for me...so I ended up going with lemm.ee instead

Back in my day lemmy.ml was the biggest instance.

Last Tuesday.

y'all are cracking me up... time sure does fly by. i want to practice being present. that's what i should do.

NGL I thought Blajah would be higher given that 196 moved there

I kind of feel we're riding the sweet spot on size right now. Seems like a solid amount of content but we've not had so many new users that there's been any sudden cultural shift.

Probably a couple hundred dedicated posters. So many 196 memes on my feed and I don't even know what 196 stands for.

196 is the apartment of awesome!

Welcome to the party!

Share something while you're here it's the rule.

We've got Blahaj, memes, LGBTQ+, and no tankies.

We recently had to change venue due to reddit shenanigans, but the party don't stop until it all stops

I'm reading from kbin.social. Does kbin get included in the stats?

No, these stats are specifically how many users are active that have their accounts on Lemmy.world.

Check this

dang 49k users and 49k active users

are these actually true?

Looks kinda funky. I'm not sure if kbin data is accurate.

I'm unsure about the accuracy that depends on how they count active users, if upvoting and downvoting something counts as activity, then probably. It would certainly be different if they also showed "active today" stats in addition to monthly and bi-yearly stats.

I don’t think so. At least not the stats page OP used. It’s only Lemmy instances and kbin is a different platform.

Good time to appreciate the lack of dominant centrality here compared to mastodon.

Mastodon's flagship instance run by the BDFL, mastodon.social, has ~10 times the monthly active users of the next biggest instance.

Here, there isn't really a flagship instance, as the devs don't want their instance to be anything more than the one they happen to run, and it's not the biggest, and the biggest is independent of the lemmy dev team and isn't even that much bigger than the others.

It does appear that lemmy.world is heading in the same direction of mastodon.social though.

That might also be a response to what users were asking for. Signing up for a server confused the shit out of everyone. It was to the point where Mastodon’s confusing onboarding process was frequently being covered by major media outlet across the globe.

Instead of continuing to iterate on sever selection experience, they just started to say “fuck it” and started dumping everyone into .social.

Which is the only way they're ever going to work. It's a major barrier to sign ups. If the fediverse is actually going to take off one of the Lemmy sites will have to become the dominant one

If the tools for discovering and subscribing to communities could be improved so it becomes dead easy to subscribe to communities on any instance from any instance, that might not need to happen.

Right now the process of having to search for each community and subscribe is too clunky. And if someone posts a link to another community it often comes up in a format that takes you to the other instance, where you have no account so can't subscribe. We need a way to share links to other communities that incorporates an easy "subscribe" button that talks to your own instance.

It would be nice to have some index or search result page that lists communities on all instances, with a subscribe button next to each.

If these things can be smoothed out, it won't matter too much which instance you have your account on, so that will be less of an obstacle to new users.

Lemmyverse.net does that really well, I think. At the top you can click the house icon and put in your instance, then whatever community you search for or find by scrolling through the list, you can just click on and subscribe

Yes, that is good, though there seems to be a bug in version 0.18 which means that when you click through the Subscribe button doesn't show up (just the word "Subscribe" where it should be), so you end up having to search for the community anyway to subscribe. Once that bug is fixed though it will be nice and convenient.

Edit: I found another workaround: If when you first click through to the community the Subscribe button isn't shown (for me it just shows the word "Subscribe" but it's not a button), then change the "Hot/Active/New/etc." dropdown to a different value. This refreshes the page and the Subscribe button appears.

It's awesome to see the growth, but as a small question, why don't all the instances upgrade to version 0.18? Maybe that version isn't stable enough?

0.18 removed checks and balances to limit bot signups. lemmy.world won't upgrade until this is in place.

Yep, so now I need to put up with Jerboa whining at me every time I log in. Just the latest in what's likely to be a long line of teething problems. It's really unfortunate that the same guy is one of the primary devs of both the Lemmy server and the android client, as it allows him to use one to put pressure on the other. He could E.G. make it so Jerboa refuses to connect to any instance that refuses to update rather than just displaying an annoying dialog like it currently does.

Try Liftoff it's a pretty sweet app

Hmm, I can't seem to find that anywhere. I checked the play store and f-droid but it's not in either one, at least not under the name liftoff.

You can use the website for the meantime. It's fairly responsively designed.

To clarify the vague "checks and balances" statement that you were given, it was the captcha feature. It will be added back in 0.18.1

This dominance worries me a little. Luckily the communities are spread across instances fairly well

This dominance worries me a little.

I don't think there's much to worry about. Having large general instances is perfectly healthy and good for the Fediverse as that's where people new to the Fediverse will land.

I predict that large niche instances will start popping up, one example already being programming.dev, and that's simply because there are domains where you might need extra customization.

For example, one can imagine a mathematics & physics oriented instance where LaTeX is available, or a chess-only instance where you'd have things like chessboard.js to allow members to post chess diagrams etc... Basically a return to what we had with old-school forums except this time the instances would be federated.

Just from my own subscriptions there's also startrek.website and dormi.zone (which is for the game Warframe). I think having an instance function like that is pretty awesome, if I want Star Trek or Warframe related content I know exactly where to go now.

For example, one can imagine a mathematics & physics oriented instance where LaTeX is available, or a chess-only instance where you’d have things like chessboard.js to allow members to post chess diagrams etc…

An interesting idea. But the problem with that is that the custom rendered content would not federate properly, so such communities would only really be usable to those on that instance, which destroys the whole point of being federated in the first place. Unless they were able to implement some sort of 'graceful degradation' so the content was enhanced on the main instance, but still serviceable on other instances.

Good point. I think it could still work well if the processing is done on the server, ie the specialized Lemmy instance processes the LaTeX equation and replaces it with a generated PNG.

Taking lessons from mastodon, I think server costs can really affect an instance's decision of how many users and how fast to register them. Can't blame them. lemmy.world just happens to have a pro admin who also runs mastodon.world.

oh yeah i remember mastodon.world, was my first ever instance i was on until i began to host my own instance.

I joined world because it was the little one, with like 100 active users according to the stats on the signup page. Hmph.

I joined lemmy.world on June 7th before it started to blow up. Crazy how much it has changed in 19 days.

question - why is/was joining a little instance a good thing?

The idea was to pick a smaller one to spread the load around and stop any one instance (at the time it looked like probably Beehaw or .ml) getting so big it became a "default" and thus accidentally centralising things and defeating the whole purpose of being here.

I guess a lot of people had the same idea at roughly the same time as me though lol, and now we're stuck with some serious unforseen federation issues due to sheer size. Therewasanattempt.

I think I read about future plans for being able to move an account to a different instance? I don't know if that's a possibility but I would be willing to move to keep things spread out, or create a new account if it was necessary. I know a lot of people wouldn't want that hassle but I'm glad to have a forum alternative to reddit and probably enough people feel that way to help make this work well into the future.

What counts as an active user? Voting? Commenting? Posting?

What counts as an active user? Voting? Commenting? Posting?

Submitting a comment or post. AFAIK upvoting/downvoting doesn't count, at least for Lemmy's numbers.

Kbin is looser with the definition, I think they even count accounts that simply vote among active users.

now they just need to update to 0.18. I've been back on lemmy.ml since the update. The scrolling kills it for me.

They're not updating til 0.18.1 comes. The lemmy devs got rid of captcha in 0.18 and lemmy.world devs asked if they could add it back in 0.18.1 and they agreed so once that happens it will update. Said there would be too many bots without captcha.

Too bad the users are partially yelling into the void: https://lemmy.world/post/609080 Hope it gets fixed.

Are they? I see tons of Lemmy.world posts (including this one) using my sh.itjust.works account.

Except, apparently, we are the void. Probably why most people on this instance haven't noticed a problem.

Do we want to be the void?

No, of course not, but I'm willing to be patient. This place grew very fast, and Lemmy itself was a tiny place before all of this. I remember the old days of reddit, too, and how sketch everything was. I hope it doesn't take very long for basic issues like this to get fixed by the people who know how to do that (which definitely is not me), and I'm okay with mostly chatting amongst ourselves for a bit. (TBF though, I do get responses back from people on other instances, so my messages appear to be getting through eventually.) I'm excited for this thing to work, and feel impatient myself at times, but there is a whole heck of a lot of work that will need to be done to make this place fully functional. This is just one of many issues, and I am here for the ride!

To bad they are still on 17.4 and not 18. Getting rid of web sockets really helped with the jumping around seen when viewing all

I thought content moving around and making me accidentally click stuff was supposed to be a "feature." I guess that's good news that it's a bug.

Is this just because we are a version back? That's gonna get fixed soon.

man all I did was make a couple of comments on reddit.

It's great to see Lemmy world growing so fast! As I'm still trying to grasp how to the Fediverse works in practice, how much does one need to 'trust' the lemmy instance?

If the instance is shut down or the owner enacts policies the community doesn't agree with, what happens to all of the content and communities in the instance?

how does kbin.social compare?

https://the-federation.info/platform/184

Wow kbin is blowing up faster than I thought.

Bigger than Lemmy's most popular instance is pretty big feat. As a platform, Lemmy presumably takes the cake though. At least for now.

That shows kbin.social at 43.9k users with 43.9k active users. Not sure if kbin counts active users the same way lemmy does.

With the top 5 lemmy instances having an average of 23.3% of their total users being active monthly users and assuming the same for kbin then they would have about 10266 active monthly users.

Thwe number #1 uswer of Lemm Worlkd is horses who are forcesd to horse by peple who rider horses in HoirseWOrld.,HELOM

Great, but all this activity also has a subtle downside. Lemmy.world is by far the slowest federating instance I see on the Lemmyverse. It typically takes hours for posts and comments to reach my instance.

Hopefully improvements to Lemmy will make federation faster and more efficient. Sidekiq seems to do a good job on large Mastodon instances.

I guess the percentage of inactive lemmy.ml user is higher due to the higher percentage of older accounts.

Probably a decent number of them like me where when I signed up there back then it was basically just lemmy.ml and lemmygrad.ml to pick from. Now that there are other options I created accounts on a couple other instances for redundancy (plus at the time lemmy.ml was buckling under the load) as well as having content and moderation rules I liked better. I'd bet a large number of those inactive accounts are actually active on lemmy, just on different instances.

If every lemmy.world active user committed to just 2 posts and 2 comments per day there would be 27,000 new posts and comments to read daily, or more than 1,000 per hour on average.

This is my second post today. Doing my part.

Don’t upgrade to 0.18.0, @ruud@lemmy.world!

What else other than the missing captcha makes it a lot of issues?

Currently there are 15 lemmy-ui bugs open, and 20 lemmy backend bugs open, against 0.18.0.

Upgrading my instance to 0.18.0 has caused a lot of problems. One major issue is the main web UI won't even load (returns a blank page with just text Server error), unless you manually remove the site's image icon via a SQL query in the Postgres database. So, upgrade to 0.18.0 at your own risk.

Also, this is not intended as a criticism to anyone. Just a warning that 0.18.0 is a bit unstable and waiting for 0.18.1+ is a safer option for the larger hosted communities (my opinion).

I've personally been having a better time with 0.18 on lemmy.ml than with 0.17.4.

Devs will be addressing the submitted captcha fix after the weekend (they said so on GitHub). So I hope 0.18.1 drops early next week. They wanted 0.18 released before 3rd party apps die, so I presume having the largest instance holding back will give them a reason to push it before the end of the week.

I hope it is released soon as well. I'm hoping some of the other open issues are addressed.

Who is Lemmy? Is this an underground movement thing on the dark web or something?

What is the purpose of bots, other than spam, lemmy tools and 3rd party scrapers (if that’s a thing)?

Propaganda, brigading, post votes manipulation, and once accounts are "established" they could be sold for astroturfing.

I've noticed weird vote counts, and sometimes it's clearly a bug. But do you think a small number of downvotes that make no sense would be bots? Or just trolls?

The weird count on posts is a bug, as for the small number of downvotes, I don't think they're bots, not yet, just either people disliking the comment or a few trolls, it doesn't happen systematically, that's what bots usually do.