Have to agree, I don’t really mind how many total users or active users there are at this point, there’s enough talk to engage in proper conversations now
I do expect that it will taper off eventually and then drop for a bit before leveling out (not being pessimistic, it's just a simple fact that much of the current growth of Lemmy, or for that matter kbin or other reddit alternatives, is due to people leaving reddit, and eventually everyone that wants to leave who is willing to consider this place will have come over, so the growth will stop or at least revert to a more "normal" pace, and not everyone will end up liking Lemmy, and so there will be some fraction of people that don't stay long once the hype over people moving from reddit has died down). However, it should still stabilize somewhere much higher than things were before the migration, so my hope is that it gets enough momentum that the number of people that remain when this incident is over is enough to sustain a functional community.
Realistic assessment but the way reddit's ceo is going ,I think we will see more exodus 1st july and again shortly after that, I do think reddits bad news train has only just left the station.
There won't always be this level of growth like the past week but I think all the ingredients are there to say that the number of active users will continue to increase indefinitely. 0.18 will probably also increase engagement from everyone already here, on top of the steady flow of new users we're already seeing.
Sometimes the site goes a little buggy. Sometimes i get 503 but i just wait, refresh, or i heard someone say too they have lemmy and kbin account and use the other when one is down xD I think it’s still adjusting to having so many users
The most important is to keep up the momentum. Users don't mean anything if there's no content. We all need to keep posting stuff and keep actively disucsing stuff!
To be honest, the fact that such immature software is capable of being a viable alternative to one of the biggest websites on the internet is already super impressive.
Let's see where we will head in a couple of years.
Damn right. I've been using Reddit for years, and after this shitshow I moved to Lemmy and honestly, it doesn't feel that much different. I don't make content, nor do I moderate, so I just scroll and lurk, and comment sometimes, and Lemmy has a steep, extremely short learning curve (you can call it simply a barrier to entry), but after understanding very few basic concepts, this shit feels as natural as Reddit. Besides, I'm testing the Memmy app for iOS and it's improving exponentially.
I seriously feel like Lemmy can become a good alternative, for real, not for the memes.
Lemmy has a lot of obstacles that will prevent it from truly going mainstream:
The community browser is complete dog shit for discovering content on different instances, and trying to view another instance's content from your own community is just needlessly complex. Discoverability is still a lot better than Mastodon though, where you'd look at all post and see nothing but hentai reposting bots regurgitating stuff that isn't even allowed on NSFWLemmy...
Due to the nature of federation, you also run the risk of committing to an instance only for them to defederate entirely, or disassociate from content you want to see but they don't agree with. Beehaw is a very good example of this.
As there's no option (yet) to migrate to a different instance, and Lemmy is a FOSS project that cannot be monetized in the same way as a traditional social media site, what happens when instances start shutting down due to being unable to keep up with server hosting costs?
I cannot speak for the iOS option available, but Jerboa is barebones. For example, you can't even tap on a post/comment reply in your inbox to go to that comment's permalink and view the context. This is incredibly basic functionality for any social news aggregator. Even with the fediverse in general surpassing 150,000 users, I don't see Lemmy getting the same level of third-party app support as Reddit had.
These are all valid complaints, but I feel like you need to put this into perspective. This platform has blown up in the last week, change is going to come but it’s going to take some time. I’m sure it will go faster now that it is really taking off though.
One or two of the devs might have some strange opinions, but if one thing's for sure, they solved a bug report ticket I opened in just a single day--yeah turns out it was a simple fix, but that's a damn impressive turnaround. Just sayin'.
Some are transitory however - 1, 3 and 4 all reflect the current state of Lemmy and the similar Kbin are in currently. The Reddit issues were unexpected and people have migrated en masse to Lemmy/Kbin and have found was is in many ways Alpha software. This issues will mostly be resolved with time, and that is probably accelerated now as more people means more people interested in development, and motivated by anger at Reddit. I don't think Lemmy/Kbin will replace Reddit right now, but I think a new trajectory has been set. Communities are hitting critical mass to keep growing.
Look at Mastodon, it's at 1.2m-2m active users each month; it is still small fry and niche compared to Twitter but it exploded thanks to Twitter's mess, and is growing. I think we're seeing something similar with Lemmy and Kbin, but this is just the start of a long road and an expanded community will accelerate improvement and growth.
But point 2 is fundamental to the fediverse - fragmentation due to defederating could be a concern. I get Beehaw's motivation but I think their actions will consign them to a niche part of the Fediverse, but that may be what they want. Ultimately I suspect the biggest servers will dominate a main interconnected fediverse through sheer size and notoriety - new servers will need to federate to the big players to grow. It's not necessairly a bad thing - but people may end up signed up to a "main" large interconnected "fediverse" and separately to smaller niche communities they're interested in but sitting in their own walled gardens/bubbles. It's not necessairly a bad thing though - it is just different to what people are used to with social media like Reddit. It'll be a trade off - servers and communities have complete independence and some will go for what suits them - part of a big fediverse or only federating to smaller aligned communities.
A lot of these issues are temporary. Also, this is all happening very fast, it's entirely possible that some other website/service will pop up that'll be a lot better thought out.
Reddit was already well established and functional during the Exodus of Digg, so there wasn't much discussion about where to go. Today we have no solid alternative, so people are trying Lemmy, Kbin, Mastodon, Squabbles and other websites.
Server costs are not as high as Reddit made us believe. You can probably run a 10 user instance for less than 10€/month.
If the instance is good donations could keep it up forever, not even expensive donations. Certainly a fraction of what reddit is asking for reddit premium.
4 is already fixed in the alpha of jerboa, and the functionality is there but got accidentally hidden in the current version. You have to hold-click in your inbox to see context. These kind of hiccups are normal in a very new foss browser.
I don't care much about the emoji option, but the ability to add an image to a reply without having to do it manually through imgur etc is something I've wanted for years!
You could probably find some ways to get a few of em but i don't know.
You shouldn't really need more than one or two accounts tho. Talking from kbin :)
The website now says that Lemmy is over 200,000 people, wow! This growth is amazing, I just hope the people joining are a bit more concrete though, and don't treat this place as a fad.
I have sync on my phone for now, going to be hard to delete. But, Jerboa has been great and the community here is nice. I definitely plan on staying for a long time after 13 years on reddit.
Yes same here. I lurked on Reddit long before the digg migration. And actively participated for at least 10 years. I still have the apps installed on my phone. But I literally have not opened them in days. I still have new tab or two in a browser open to specific subs. That I check infrequently. But as soon as I'm aware of counterparts on the Fediverse I am more than happy with Lemmy. My couple hours a day of scrolling on Reddit are now devoted solely to Lemmy and finding new communities as well as starting one of my own. Something which I never did on Reddit.
I dont know if you saw, but LJ just announced that Sync for Lemmy is now a thing happening in the next few weeks. I am very excited to see it coming over.
I would like it if lemmy had near the numbers of reddit (although i dont think that will happen), but the userbase is already big and diverse enough to sustain some good communities that have an (imo) better feeling to them than reddit.
I would like it if lemmy had near the numbers of reddit
I wouldn't. People need to get away from the notion that more users = better. With more users comes trolls, bad faith actors, etc. Quality over quantity.
It depends on the goal of the platform. For spending your free time on and socializing i fully agree that smaller communities are the best. However as a forum for getting information (especially on niche subjects) more users = better more or less.
Which is a good point to remember I think. Having the community grow is good for people using lemmy as it allows smaller, more niche communities to have enough people interested in that thing to actually functionally exist, but at the end of the day it doesn't have to have the same number of users as reddit to be usable for you. Once enough people are here to be usable (which depending on what kind of communities you use, it may already be), it doesn't really much matter how much bigger lemmy gets. After all, it isn't some company where the point is growth at all costs.
Reddit is blocked in my country so I have to open reddit using dns, because lemmy is already there, this is an opportunity to find a community forum for a replacement for reddit in my country.
This is my hope for Mastadon, and other instances as there is a need for information to continue to flow from areas of conflict/dictatorship regimes and democracies (actual information, not corporate or national propaganda).
PCGaming said this is the place to be, so I'm here. But why do I need to go to list > Subscribed to see the content I followed? Why isn't the stuff I want to see the default home page? I shouldn't have to go to settings and change the default to Subscriptions.
Because there's no preselected default subscriptions like with Reddit. If it defaulted to subscribed when you make an account, then the first thing you would see is nothing. By defaulting to all, it allows you new users to see all that's available, and once you find a decent amount of interesting communities and subscribe to them, then it makes sense for you to manually change your default to subscribed at your discretion.
The first thing I did after creating an account here was to go to Settings and find the setting to change that. And I mean at least that option exists and is easy to find.
My guess is that the feature of suggesting "subs" after creating an account does not exist yet and just showing an empty feed is not that great.
You can do this in Lemmy, default the Home Screen to Subscribed. It’s an option for each user, but the instance admin can choose a default. I’m not sure about Kbin.
Some instances are faster than others due to server load. Not sure how well Lemmy.world runs or what spec the server hosting the instance is, but Lemmy.ml runs like a pile of dog shite compared to the smaller ones, it’s constantly timing out, with error 500s too. I had to make another account on feddit.uk instead as it runs much faster.
Also for example if lemmynsfw was completely defederated, if you wanted nsfw content from there, you would have to make an account there to access that content.
Fret not though, over time the opensource community will step in to improve all of this.
I have 3. Signed up to beehaw first because that's what people recommended on Reddit. After a couple of days realised I'd prefer a mainstream server and went to ml. And then .world launched and with the better hardware and admin I moved again.
So it was all logical at the time but it means the total numbers across all instances are misleading. I'd say many users have at least 2 accounts.
I made an account for memes and stuff. Then a more professional account. I'll probably make a porn account at some point, but not while the big porn instances are allowing loli and shit on their instance.
Voat was actually pretty nice back in the day, smaller than Reddit but has its own niche communities, until the Pao thing happened, Voat committed to absolute free speech, and subs like FatPeopleHate and other subs banned from Reddit moved there, and then slowly it turned worse than /pol/ and the full front page was literally covered in Nazi slogans and N-word.
Then nobody wants to host such a horrid pool of toxic sludge anymore, and they shut down.
It's a lot more challenging to have that happen with federation, I think. Doesn't mean we shouldn't be actively vigilant of course, but there are a lot more centers they'd have to seize control of individually.
r/GothStyle has 159k subscribers, r/tarot has 306k, r/cycling has 348k, r/rpg and r/political humor have 1.5m each, r/ExplainLikeImFive has 22.3m, and r/AskReddit has 41.4m.
Make of that what you will. I'm just giving numbers.
Massive numbers of users is great for a business, but not necessarily great for discussion.
Lemmy doesn't feel like Reddit, but in a good way. Individual comments actually stand out, and it's not a sea of lowest common denominator trash and reposts.
I think people should stop conflating big numbers with success. If anything, we've seen the kind of nonsense big numbers lead to, with an IPO on the horizon and all that comes with that.
100%. Quality not quantity. There was clearly a tipping point where reddit blew up and the quality of responses from the "average" user went off a cliff
The difference is in the active number of content creators and participants. It’s nice to have a sub with ten million followers but if Gallowboob is the only one posting and his 250 bots are the only ones voting it’s just a popular Twitter account. That is good for ad revenue but shit for interaction.
Give me a vibrant, intelligent, argumentative (in a good way) 100,000 over a passive ten million any day.
As far as presenting raw data goes, I'd be interested in seeing numbers on what percentage of subreddit subscribers are actual active users. If 90% of the 1.5m subscribers on r/rpg are bots and inactive accounts, then the remaining 10% of real posters is roughly equal to the 150k on Lemmy. That is, at least, assuming Lemmy doesn't have any bots or inactive accounts. I'd be interested in seeing the numbers for that, too.
Obviously, I don't have stats on things like the % active accounts vs inactive and such, so this is pure speculation.
If you look at the hot sorted posts on r/GothStyle they seem to get around 100 or so points per post. Note, this isn't a direct translation into upvotes. It also says there is 145 people online - Does that mean roughly 2/3 of active users vote stuff to hot? ~100 people holding up a niche community with a fraction of those the posters themselves.
So in effect ~0.1% of a subreddit's subscribers makes things happen. I always baselessly suspected that Reddit fluffs up the numbers to make engagement seem like it is much greater than it is, but this is 1000x smaller than the sub count suggests.
I'm sceptical of my maths here but r/PCMasterRace is similar. Out of nearly 8mil subscribers, roughly 8000 online.
It also says there is 145 people online - Does that mean roughly 2/3 of active users vote stuff to hot? ~100 people holding up a niche community with a fraction of those the posters themselves.
For this, it's important to remember that's the number of people online at that very moment, but the vote count is persistent. Any number of those upvotes could have come from users who aren't online presently, but had been online an hour or two prior. ~66%, in this case, is not the actual amount, it's just the upper bound.
I always baselessly suspected that Reddit fluffs up the numbers to make engagement seem like it is much greater than it is, but this is 1000x smaller than the sub count suggests.
It's possible, and very plausible, that they do this, but it's much less plausible (though still possible) that they do it to that degree.
Doesn't really mean anything. Facebook has around 3.4 billion active monthly users. Reddit has around 400 million. I'd still take the latter than the former.
Lemmy will keep growing. Probably will never have 100s of millions of users and that's fine. More users can be a good thing but by itself the numbers mean nothing.
You think it's big now, just wait until July. Reddit's api changes are going to force people off of the site in droves. Right now it's a lot of noise and some movement, but a lot of the regular user base hasn't actually felt any effects yet. Once the changes make the site unusable for a lot of people there will be a lot more.
As someone who just deleted Apollo and tried to use the Reddit iOS app - this is exactly correct - site is unusable on the official app. People will flee.
Yes I can only imagine that some of these servers have definitely been getting the hug of death. Though that the good thing with them not all being monolithic. I remember seeing the astonished posts earlier this week when Lemmy.world had grown 10 times its previous size in just a few days and was near around 20,000 users. We're now five times beyond that. And not stopping yet. That sort of growth isn't sustainable but damn well fun to see.
Yeah, I am kinda worried about that. This whole Fediverse thing needed to be an open secret that grew in dribs and drabs, considering that it's basically user-hosted. Explosive growth already caused a lot of grief for Beehaw. Things across the Fediverse stay working for now because a small army of working professional sysadmins are running large instances for kicks.
I was kinda hoping that all the cool kids acting like everything here was dumb would keep the growth sustainable but I get the impression that we're all too old to care what the cool kids think.
We're all thiiiis close to talking about our dividend portfolios n shit. Somebody's gonna fuck around and start a thread about shitty knees and that thing's gonna run for days.
If everyone can be all comfy with letting Twitch streamers have $5 a month just because, then it might be time to cough up for your social media, too. Ain't no VC funding propping the Fediverse up. It's not even propping up Reddit anymore. Jerome say no more free moneys, go buy a bond, and start a business that makes actual profit.
This is probably a good time to bring up that the Fediverse system seems designed around not one central server, but an endless chain of tiny user-hosted servers (instances), all interlinked together to create one community. Like the OLD days, but the software is a lot more seamless. This is what webrings look like now after 20 years of community development.
So if you were ever interested in hosting your own thing, just enough instance for you and 100 buddies, it's something to look into. There's a cottage industry of cloud providers who already understand what you'd be up to, no need to run the server yourself unless you want to. Digital Ocean is the suggestion I got from Byron Miller who is running Universidon. They've been doing well for small Masto instances. Of course Byron is one of those "army of sysadmins" guys so he's rolling his own.
That is the sustainable model for this place, so the more it acts like the commercial socials, concentrating traffic in large instances, the more unsustainable it will get. Things like private instances are okay for a reason.
Dumb question but have some people double dipped? I started on Lemmy.one and then created an instance on lemmy.world after realizing I couldn’t downvote.
Dumb question but have some people double dipped? I started on Lemmy.one and then created an instance on lemmy.world after realizing I couldn’t downvote.
I only looked on reddit recently to see which subreddits of mine have not blacked out completely
I've found the content here to be at the level of quality where I can just order my subscribed feed by "new" and still get mostly bangers, while also never running out