It probably would have been beehaw if they didnt defederate so early. Given the viewpoints of the people in charge there expressed in their comments on defederating and refederating, I suspect that Beehaw is going to have a consistent problem with constantly defederating and refederating.
Lemmy.world is most likely to grow the largest now because the barrier to entry is low compared to the other two. Additionally, the instance name gives the impression of a general or catchall instance moreso than lemmy.ml or beehaw.
Beehaw wants a safe space. They don’t want diversity; just the very rigid thoughts and opinions of which the owner approves. For this reason they don’t want most people to subscribe. And that’s fine. Every community can make their own rules.
Of course, every instance has the right to preserve their own echo chamber. That is not a problem, but it could be later when users keep seeing communities from one instance go away and come back, or users get effectively "banned" from interacting with those communities because they signed up on the wrong instance. Even if they refederate, they'll be seen as unreliable by everyone else.
Its like banning all people who drive a Toyota from parking in your parking lot because some people you don't like drive a Toyota. Sure, you have the right to do that, but you will be losing out on the parking fare of those big communities of Toyota drivers, and even people who dont drive Toyotas but see you banning them. Then you get less traffic, less users, people leave, and it becomes a parking lot that is 98% empty.
This leads to hyper segmented communities, which have benefits, but normies don't really like when a place only has 3 active users.
Agreed on the name thing, but the UI there is terrible. kbin is the most old school reddit-like one I've seen (admittedly I haven't seen much though) so I wonder if people will choose that in the end
UI will probably be fixed over time. Third party clients will arrive soon (some are already in early releases, such as Thunder: https://github.com/hjiangsu/thunder/issues)
Beehaw was big, but from memory, they were third, behind lemmy.world, and lemmy.ml before they defederated. The gap would have probably become larger over time, since their account creation restrictions would limit growth, for better or worse.
No way it's not Lemmy.world, once all the normies (for lack of a better term) learn about it they'll go swarming. It's already growing fast
The main reason it is growing is because you cannot sign up to Lemmy.ml if you tried right now.
Not sure about that. Even if .ml was open to new signups, there are quite a few reasons people would pick .world over it:
- .ml goes down more often than .world
- .world allows non-nudity NSFW content, while .ml does not allow any NSFW content
- A lot of people have concerns about "tankie" ownership of .ml (whether that's true or not), while the owners of .world seem more politically neutral
I got in before signups were closed, and have accounts on both .ml and .world, but have abandoned my .ml account for the above reasons
You probably can, but only if you have a good reason to want to be there specifically. (I'm posting this as my @lemmy.world account, but I also have a @lemmy.ml account that I asked for because I want to be involved with meta discussion about Lemmy and Lemmy development itself.)
I believe it is going to be Lemmy.World. Besides my home instance of Kbin, which I love dearly, it is the one I see and hear about the most.
It does make sense because it is open to sign-ups, is federated with pretty much everything (apart from closed off instances like Beehaw and the tankies at Grad), and has the advantage of being a Lemmy instance (which gives it name recognition).
In the long-term, I hope federation keeps this space open, even if there is one or some "main" instance(s) people use.
The good thing about having open sign-up is that you get a big userbase pretty quickly.
The bad thing about having open sign-up is that you have people squatting on usernames and impersonating other people.
I mean, can you imagine?
Take my username from my cold dead hands!
Lemmygrad.ml and lemmy.world are still federated
lemmy.world because it's currently the biggest instance with open signups, and it has "lemmy" right there in the name. It's the obvious place for a novice to choose.
Exactly the reason why I chose it. Tried to sign up one some other ones and it wasnt working for some reason but lemmy.world worked instantly and has a nice name.
It was also the biggest instance, and if you're not too familiar with how the Fediverse stuff works, it's a no-brainer to sign up to them, just in case you ended up stuck on there. You'd still have stuff to look at, compared to smaller instances like startrek.website, which might only have three communities.
Lemmy.World, almost certainly. As it is, they're on track to surpass lemmy.ml, and lemmy.ml has stated that they don't really want to be a big instance, but would prefer to be a smaller one like they used to be, redirecting new users to other instances, not least of all because the number of users was causing the server to implode.
Kbin is nice, and all, but it's technically its own thing, and isn't really a lemmy instance, even if it can be used as one. It's not quite as big as the others are.
Beehaw's account creation limits will almost certainly hamper any growth they will get, even if they decided to refederate with lemmy.world and sh.itjust.works again, but even then, they were still the third-biggest before defederating, so it might be a bit of a toss-up.
Could you explain to me more of what happened with beehaw?
Beehaw.org defederated from lemmy.world, and sh.itjust.works, effectively disconnecting from them. According to the post they made, they were disconnecting due to the influx of new users on both those instances overwhelming the moderation tools and moderation team that they had going.
It's worth noting that Beehaw describes itself as a safe-space instance, where registration is restricted, and all users registering have to be approved by instance operators. This is fine and all, but there's an issue. See, with the way that Lemmy and Federation works, you don't have to be a registered user on an instance to post there. So a user can just circumvent Beehaw's account creation restrictions by creating an account on a less-restrictive instance (such as lemmy.world), and posting over there. Which isn't ideal for Beehaw's moderators and operators, who had trouble dealing with "bad actors" from those instances (trolls and things), simply because their open registration policy meant that there would be be an influx of new users who found Beehaw's community through lemmy.world, or sh.itjust.works, or trolls who could comment on Beehaw's posts through them, circumventing bans and things.
Since it was too much for them to deal with, using the current tools that they had available to them, Beehaw defederated themselves from those two instances, effectively separating themselves from those two. Beehaw users won't see new posts from those instances, and those users wouldn't be able to see any new posts from Beehaw.
Given the current state of things, I wouldn't be surprised if Kbin might also be on the chopping block, since they've been having a few problems with users from there too, but that's neither here nor there.
Still, the Beehaw operators have said that they're willing to reconnect with those instances once Lemmy develops better moderation tools that let them manage that amount of users (and they're in contact with the operators for those two instances), but we have no real idea when that might be.
They were like, beeNAH, and defederated.
https://beehaw.org/post/567170
They wanted to keep things personal and civil so they closed the gates.
Either kbin.social or Lemmy.world. Then again, this hyper growth period is ripe for disruption. Facebook is talking about an ActivityPub instance. Imagine if they poured resources into UX improvements and directed their 2.5 billion users to it. It would be the largest instance by far overnight.
It would also be defederates instantly by hundreds of communities - people don't want corporations here because of what corpos have done to their own social media platforms.
The last thing I want to see is a meta community get big, because meta will probably start injecting ad posts directly into the community. I'm ok if it's just the users, I'm not ok if it's all the other baggage.
Not to mention meta will probably start with microblogging platforms first. Which is a bit harder to fuck with in the way meta can with Lemmy/kbin. I'd be more ok with it if they stayed there, I would however delete or park my Instagram accounts, especially if insta users can follow me directly on mastodon.
If Meta makes a ActivityPub instance, what are the chances they'll pull the old Microsoft "Embrance, Extend, Extinguish" approach on us?
To be honest, I'd rather them stay away. Let this be it's own thing, untainted by the monopolies.
Dumb newbie question, is kbin.social the same feed as lemmy.world?
They both run off of the ActivityPub protocol (aka. The Fediverse), so they are able to see each other's content (as long as they don't defederate), but they are not intrinsically the same feeds.
They are two different Lemmy instances. kbin calls it's communities "magazines" rather than "communities" to make things confusing.
We're all part of the shared fediverse, so barring any differences in defederated instances or how the algorithms work, kbin and Lemmy are showing the same content.
No, they are both on the fediverse but have a different website interface. I believe communities can be subscribed to between both, but a bug is currently preventing that.
Running the same protocol, it's a bit different, but can be interacted with from other fediverse platforms.
Definitely not kbin.social, but that's only because it technically isn't a "Lemmy instance."
IMO, I hope none becomes "the biggest" or "the official". It's good for decentralization to have "competing" instances.
currently it's looking like lemmy.world.
Biggest user base, or biggest in terms of posting? If it's the latter, definitely lemmynsfw
Someone build lemmy.xxx please.
there is lemmynsfw.com for you already
One that hasn't been created yet
That’s my guess too. Six months is a long time and things are moving super fast in the Lemmyverse.
Well spreading the userbase is the ideal situation.. when 1 becomes too big it gets an extreme server load and too much control over content created there.. The whole idea of lemmy is to spread out.. I can imagine if instance owners get this idea they would temporarily suspend account registration on their own trying to push alternative instances to maintain a good decentralized user base.
I mean, we already know distribution will naturally follow a gaussian curve. Same as city population and so many other things. There won’t be many equally big instances. Only many equally small ones.
Isn’t server load kind of irrelevant with the instances on CDNs?
AFAIK CDN's don't do much to help with logged in traffic. Only users who are not logged in. Kbin.social is on Fastly infrastructure, so it's likely to scale comparatively well.
It's probably not desirable for it to get too big, but it should be able to absorb waves of Redditors who will then move on to other instances hopefully.
doesn't matter, everyone can interact with all federated instances
Could be hexbear if they federate
They did.
If I'm not mistaken they've only switched over to the upstream for Lemmy, which gives them the option to federate, but they've yet to do so.
Kbin and probably kbin.social
The biggest growth will come from Reddit/Twitter. A huge chunk of users from both are young and become easily outraged over social issues.
Websites tend to grow in stages and at each stage they build momentum. If you kill momentum at a key point everyone can end up fleeing the website.
The developers of lemmy are tankies, idiologues can't help themselves. As a result they'll drop a comment supporting some abhorrent action from China/Russia or repost China/Russia state media propaganda and cause outrage at a key moment and lemmy will become a dirty word.
I think you might be falling for some propaganda yourself😀
Ngl I kinda love the whole tankie drama. It feels ripe for discourse. Though I did watch a fairly toxic debate on here where it turned into yelling, what was essentially the same points on both sides, at each other, without realizing they were actually kind of in agreement. To think any one human perspective is even remotely the right one is a pretty big oof ime. I think we can all agree that the people who came before us are not our goal, and we need to be better.
Aside from not having controversial admins it also has a much more Reddit like interface, which makes the transition much easier.
This is why I made an account on kbin instead of lemmy, kbin's UI is more polished and nicer to look at. Lemmy's jank UI makes it feel like a proof of concept instead of a finished website.
Edit: just after posting this I got a 503 server error :D it's definitely not perfect but it's still very early in development so I'll give it some slack
I tried lemmy too, but settled on kbin, for no other reason than it looking a bit cleaner and more like reddit.
I've exclusively used it since I found it and now don't feel like dipping into other ones yet. I also so far kind of like the dev. I'm just on that team for now, but we will see how things change. I'm hoping more work will be put into it to make it even better because I see potential.
