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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
It's actually pretty badass to see how quick the response is developing and the awareness being so immediate. What's really cool is to see what gets done about a problem with full transparency, instead of Reddit Admins' chamber of secrets.
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.
I read shittymorph's most recent Undertaker post in a thread the other day. It felt like a semi retirement post; at least that's the vibe I got from it.
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.
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!
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$.
@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)
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
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...
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.
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 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.
I don't understand. Are you claiming that the first 150k users that signed up are all real and that since the rate of growth has increased exponentially that it couldn't possibly be real users signing up? I don't dispute that some of it is bots for sure. There are clearly places that have 20k users and 2 posts and stuff like that that are very suspicious. But I don't think it's at all reasonable to assert that all of the growth that has occurred are bots. There is absolutely no evidence to suggest that. In fact, I would argue that the amount of activity (posts and comments) increasing alongside the user count is evidence to the contrary. I understand that bots can make posts too, but apart from the obviously labelled bots that are reposting content from reddit and stuff like that, I haven't seen any bot spam accounts posting links to suspicious sites or anything like that at all. Unless you're claiming that the bots are posting normal looking comments so that people think they are human? I don't understand.
before lemmy blew up the count was 150k but many joined in the last few days. sure many are boys but until an effective way to filter them out is there we can't know the precise numbers.
Captions and applications are not default enabled on an instance. There is no rate limit on the creation of accounts. Many new instances have 0 posts but 10,000 or 20,000+ user accounts. Startrek.website purged something like 20K fake accounts from their instance after enabling registration protections.
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!
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.
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.
You should grab memmy and join their discord. They've posted some screenshots of what the UI overhaul will look like in the short term and it looks incredible. If you love Apollo, it should be a pretty easy transition
I'm sure it will happen. There are already a few apps for Lemmy, and I know Sync is in development. I'd be rather surprised if no other apps are coming..
I don't use iOS, but I know there's an app for it, named Mlem. You could give that a shot, even if it's just a placeholder while you wait for something better. :)
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!
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!
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 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!
Usernames only have to be unique on each instance, kind of like email. Even if Lemmy is growing exponentially, not all that growth will be on lemmy.world.
I've always been able to grab my username. Of course, I originally (in a different context) tried "timholt", which was taken, then "thetimholt", which was also taken.
I'm really not sure these are spam bots. I suspect it's actually mostly people playing with the exploit that was recently posted on their personal instance. Definitely still bots though.
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)
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.
i really love the smaller communities, going to be so interesting to see how they all evolve and interact. Anyone that hasn't i really recommend going to the various other smaller instances just to look and get a feel for them, it's a great way to find interesting communities and you can subscribe from the instance you're on (assuming its federated).
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
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.
It's run by the same guy who runs mastodon.world (Ruud) so he has experience with huge servers. Apparently this server is currently set up to handle a million users. Here's the Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/mastodonworld
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.
The good news is that bots seem to be joining particular instances made for them. This will make preventing them from ruining the fediverse easy, just defederate from instances like k6qw.
If they start joining instances such as this one, then that is its own issue, but each instance can solve it to their own needs. I'm not too worried about bots on Lemmy at all really.
@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.
I think it's possible to belong to more than one form of social media, it isn't an either/or situation. Also it's way too early to project how any of this is going to end, it reminds me of the early days of the internet in miniature as people scrambled around trying new things. I say throw everything at the wall and lets see what sticks and if beehaw makes people happy and gives people that don't feel safe other places somewhere that they can be online I think it's great. Not everything is for everyone and that's OK, if we all liked the same thing vanilla would be the only ice cream flavor.
My understanding is that at least some of these instances are probably being attacked by bots that are auto-signing-up accounts on instances with open aign-up, because someone looking into it said that the instances are also banning a bunch of them. Probably not complicit (though that will presumably also be a long-term concern to deal with).
The instance admin at lemmy.dbzer0.com was apparently working on some kind of tool to monitor it. Had a start on GitHub, IIRC.
Click on your profile, and go to settings. Then change interface language to English.
But this seems like the wrong kind of thread for posting support questions.
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.
First comment on lemmy. It's exciting, but like, difficult. I can't be the only one who thinks it's too complicated. Reddit had one subreddit per thing. Here, there's infinite instances with so many of the same subreddit.