A timeline I created of the total users at the top 10 Lemmy instances as a bar chart race: https://public.flourish.studio/visualisation/14058992/ and as a line chart: https://public.flourish.studio/visualisation/14080522/.
The numbers are still quite low compared to what the activity now feels like. Two weeks ago I could easily read all posts and comments and now I can’t follow the many new posts ^^
I’m being a lot more active here than I was on Reddit. Trying to make sure it feels like a dynamic space for new redfugees :)
For some reason, same. I’m just, like, feel enthusiastic about Fediverse as a whole and Lemmy in particular.
Same here, I am just afraid this will stop after the first wave of enthusiasm.
I’m feeling the same way, but I suppose we’ll soon see.
Even if the reddit exodus doesn’t turn into another internet legend, I am enjoying having fun participating in a forum for the first time in a long time. Probably since reddit stopped feeling like one in the early 2010s.
Agreed, Lemmy needs to hit a critical mass to keep things going.
I’ve got a ton of things to post that are either from my pulled down Reddit posts or stuff I had but never posted. Here, if anything I’m trying to pace my posts so that I don’t drown a community in just my threads.
Yes, I don’t want to look like a spammer.
Same here as well, really enjoying it so far.
Well… dare I see me also! I told my wife “I’m pretty sure this is the push to Web 3.0.
50,000 people is a LOT of people. Keep in mind that a good chunk of the millions of users on reddit and other social media sites are either separated and isolated into smaller segments, or even then most people just lurk.
I looked at the participation (active user) rate, it shows above 20% in Beehaw and 7% overall in Lemmy. Normally subreddits of 3,000-6,000 are kind of slow and people post once in a while, most probably lurk.
Here, at least for now it’s really buzzing, people get a sense that they can be heard and real conversations are happening.
Same here, I am just afraid this will stop after the first wave of enthusiasm.
The situation in November with Fosstodon (Mastodon instance) & Twitter might be analogous.
Fosstodon had about 20k users, at the start of November, and more than 50k by the end.
There was definitely an initial surge of activity which diminished after a time, but it didn’t return to it’s previous level.
I don’t have the data but the vibe is that the users to activity ratio stayed about the same, now 6 months on it feels like there’s 250% of the activity that there was at the same time last year.
Of course loads of people are creating accounts here just to have a look but will probably never post, but there’s also plenty of new users who will be engaged long term.
Yeah, I’m usually just a lurker but Lemmy makes me want to take part of the experience. I really hope that it will take off in the long run.
I’d wager a large percentage are bots, too!
Same here, I am just afraid this will stop after the first wave of enthusiasm.
You just got used to have millions of users on sub, and forgot that tens of thousands of users is a lot. Especially New users, who is going to read and comment a lot, compared to reddit with half of users being, like, not active at all.
Makes sense. A friend of me unfortunately turns Lemmy down because the largest instance has “only” 1.6k users
I’m going to bee honest, the mascot was a big factor in picking this instance for me.
So far it’s not over run by assholes and brigades so I’m diggin it, even if content is sparse for now!
Don’t bee absurd. That’s no way to bumble your way through life!
Yup. That played a big role for me, too. The other factor was lemmy.ml was the first to approve my signup, finally giving me the ability to post. I’m still looking around to get a feel for other instances, and might even set up my own.
Only reason I didn’t go to lemmy.ml is because their top post was “please go somewhere else.” Lol
Yeah, I saw that too, but other places I signed up still haven’t approved me, so I signed up here.
Wait, you guys need approvals? #wereTheMillersMeme
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Wow beehaw really took off recently huh?
What this doesn’t show is active users, just total. For quite some time we’ve been one of the most active large instances. I don’t remember the exact timing, but we’ve held the spot of 3rd most active for some time, we just now have total users to match that.
I’ve known about Lemmy for a few months and just registered with Beehaw because it looked active and had a funny name.
What has been the biggest driver in activity? I’m curious how a community like Beehaw bootstraps itself into existence
In short, engagement. A bunch of us migrated off another Reddit alternative which promised a lot of what we set out to do, but in our opinion failed in moderating itself and actually promoting a nice environment. This core group of individuals has been enthusiastic about carving a little space for ourselves on the internet for like-minded people and that dedication that comes alongside engagement is what kept us active and slowly growing.
I’m curious, was the Reddit alternative non Lemmy based? I know there have been a bunch of attempts have been tried, but I didn’t keep up too much.
They were not lemmy based, no.
It did! Look at us go! Yip-Bee-Kiyay!
Hey the bee mascot is cute, who wouldn’t join
I chose this platform after I realized I accidentally signed up for an Italian one instead, lol! Glad to bee here!
Yeehaw Beehaw!
People see that they have the highest user count and gravitate towards it. Most people don’t really get how federation works, so they worry about getting “stuck” on an instance with no one to talk to
I think that it was also influenced by it being the developer’s instance (thus kinda had some official-ness to it, combined with the domain name reflecting the name of the service) and people wanting to just give newcomers an easy onboard by directing them straight to a link rather than to join-lemmy where some people get confused about choosing an instance. I had seen it in a few subs on reddit where it was just people putting lemmy.ml rather than join lemmy to give someone alternatives to reddit.
If you imagine you’re targeting reddit users looking for an alternative and you already know that some people get confused by choosing instances, you’re potentially more influenced to just give them a link to one of the instances. Doesn’t really matter where they sign up to an extent since it’s all federated, just need to skip them past the part that might confuse them. Then if you’re doing that, you’re also making it more familiar to things they understand by using a domain that looks official. If you say, “Use Lemmy” and then put “beehaw.org”, some might question why it’s called Lemmy but the website is beehaw. You don’t go to reddit.com but call it Linkit, so it may have seemed better to just use lemmy.ml to tell people to use Lemmy. Of course if you onboard people through join-lemmy then it better contextualizes names of instances that don’t have lemmy in them, but I think people were just trying to find ways to spread the word without potentially confusing people with the federation aspect.
I to thought it wise to pick one with high numbers. It had nothing to do with being afraid of not having people to talk to though, as I understood that we’d all be connected. It was more a fear that an instance with 20 users might get shut down because the owner got bored. In my mind it seems less likely that a popular instance gets shut down.
So what happens to an account if an I stance goes away?
it gets deleted and you would need to sign up to another instance
Makes sense. I assume the same applies to communities hosted be said instance. What, however, happens to posts one has made on other communities whos instances are still running? I assume posts made there will still be there, but the usernames will point to dead links?
Is it at all possible to migrate users or communities from one instance to another?
it isnt currently possible to migrate users from an instance to another but there is an issue on github about it so maybe it will get implemented at some point as for posts from a deleted instance im not sure maybe someone else can answer that
Most people don’t really get how federation works
This is 100% me, but my understanding is that you can see all community content and interact with everyone regardless of what server you’re on, is that more or less correct? I went with beehaw because it seemed moderately popular (I’d read that servers can disappear, and figure more users=less likely?) and is focused on keeping out assholes, which I am 100% cool with.
As long as the instances who’s content you’re trying to interact with are federating with your instance (beehaw), then you can interact with everyone, yes. It’s important to keep in mind instances can choose to not federate entirely, or selectively block certain instances from interacting with theirs, although this isn’t something you should have to worry about.
A good analogy I’m seeing thrown around is email: everyone has their own email provider - gmail, yahoo, outlook, or a corporate email server, etc - but all of those can send and receive emails from every other one. I have gmail, but I can email you at yahoo, and recieve emails from my friend on hotmail. If gmail starts being shitty and corporate or making decisions I don’t like, I can switch to a different provider, and crucially, gmail doesn’t get to decide how the rest of the email universe behaves.
Lemmy instances are like the email providers, and “sending emails” is like interacting with communites on any instance. If my Lemmy instance starts serving ads or something I can just leave it, and still have access to all the other communites on every other instance.
That’s really helpful, thanks!
I’m actually quite pleased to see lemmy.ml focus on what they want to focus on rather than being a general purpose instance like mastodon.social. I read their mission statement and they were pretty adamant that they want to see a variety of different instances - and we should! Reminds me of the golden forum days.
There’s definitely a forum vibe here. You can already see that the different instancess (lemmy.ml, beehaw.org, lemmy.world, lemmy.one) have their own specificities. Very refreshing.
This is really cool, thanks for sharing! Do you plan to update it again in the future? I’d love to see what happens an about a month!
Yes, I plan to update it again after the 8th of July.
If you do update the post, maybe consider using an animated line graph. I find those usually show the change over time a lot better, because you see the total history of user count.
I think the bar graphs are really nice to show changes in the top position or when there are a lot of different „participants“ coming and going over the time of the graph.
Anyway, really nice animation. Only wanted to give my 2ct.
Is there a time-series plot version of this? I always have difficulty really absorbing the data when it is animated like that.
Poked my head in to the AMA and it’s basically what I expected. To the surprise of no-one Spez is a tool and should go boil his ass.
I spent years on Reddit and somehow didn’t realize until today what an unscrupulous person he is. And not only unscrupulous, but downright unprofessional.
We can say what we want about someone like Mark Zuckerberg, but he would never behave in the way that Spez did in that AMA. It’s just not befitting of the CEO of a company.
He also had a bit of controversy several years back when it came out that he was stealth-editing other people’s comments.
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The answers were infuriating beyond all reason. Like dude… If you’re trying to avoid being used for training llms, that’s totally reasonable. Nuking all 3P apps is an insane response, fuck off.
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Is it possible to message on mastodon and peertube with lemmy (or is it only through kbin currently)? I was trying to figure out how that worked but had some difficulty
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Beeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee HAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAW!
My join request hasn’t been acknowledged yet and it’s been a couple of days :(
Ditto, I joined lemmy.world instead
Yeah I’m on .world too. Ruud, the sysadmin, is working on improving reply delays.
With a username like that !nsfw@reddthat.com might be something interesting to you
Nice, thanks.
If you use gmail, go ahead and try to log in to beehaw - some people were accepted and didn’t get confirmation emails sent to their gmail because of a bug. I think they may have fixed that by now, but it’s possible this got you.
Other people are stuck in a “pending rejection for insufficient info to tell if you’re a fit for the community, but you can re-apply with more info” pile, I think.
They’re just super overwhelmed right now.
I just signed up and got in in a few minute! It’s worth the wait!
Pretty cool to see it growing. I’d love to see where this is at in another month or two after reddit’s latest clown changes.
Dope! I wonder what the numbers would be for active users
Why is lemmygrad so popular?
If I remember my Lemmy history right (someone correct me)…
In the early days of Lemmy, everyone was on one instance (lemmy.ml). The founding Lemmy developers (and their friends, I guess) were tankies. At some point they decided to make Lemmy more attractive to the general population, and make the flagship lemmy.ml less overtly Marxist-Leninist/offputting. So they split lemmy.ml into 2: lemmy.ml for non-commie stuff, and lemmygrad.ml for commie stuff. Since the bulk of Lemmy users in the early days were still tankies (or their friends), they were still generally using both instances very heavily.
The day that lemmygrad.ml ceases to be the #2 instance and becomes just another niche-interest instance is the day we can say Lemmy has truly become mainstream, I think.
All the cancerous social rejects and useful idiots. Wouldn’t be surprised ir it’s being propped up by Russian/Chinese propaganda machine either. At least I sincerely hope some of the people there are not real.
Tankies are the persistent type.
I notice (and I realize it’s most likely an issue at the source and not the fault of the creator) that some now-dead instances which were formerly top-10 aren’t show here. Hexbear also isn’t shown: while it (currently) doesn’t federate, similarly to bakchodi, it is also a fork and so technically not Lemmy, but pretty much Lemmy.
I used https://the-federation.info/'s Lemmy page to determine the current top 10 Lemmy instances as of the 8th of June 2023. The website only has sorting function for the current data, and the instances have to opt in to be included. Therefore, it is likely that some instances are not included. Furthermore, the website seems to only contain data from the last year, so the website do not have documentation on the top instances prior to this period.
Go beehaw!!
Nice work, Gabino! Thanks!
Did anyone else hear a horse race announcer while watching this? “And coming out of nowhere, it’s Beehaw! The crowd is stunned as Beehaw rockets to third place! This is one to keep an eye on, folks!”
