I joined when you had under 1000 users total, now there are 1.3k online at this very moment. I can imagine it's quite a strain!

It was pretty surprising to read their first update that had it at $12 a month! Though my server is running on a $2 a month VPS (currently) and doing pretty well so when you don't have too many users it doesn't cost an awful lot to run (so long as your technical people are donating their time!)

There's a financials post here: https://beehaw.org/post/416496

And near the bottom of this page you can see the donations made, the money actually spent, and their current balance: https://opencollective.com/beehaw

I wish I'd known about Beehaw earlier, though before this influx it seems there wasn't a huge amount of content as the community was pretty small.

I have known about Lemmy for some time, but the more popular instances were basically filled with people who had been kicked off reddit for their views. It was not a welcoming place, so until now I hadn't felt comfortable hanging around.

Are they not? The donation page says "This Collective's Fiscal Host is a registered 501(c)(3) non-profit organization. Your contribution will be tax-deductible in the US, to the extent allowed by the law."

I presumed this was based on the umbrella you were accepted under to be on opencollective?

I... can't see anywhere where they are complaining? This was just a post about how much the server cost to run. They updated it over time with new numbers as they beefed up the server capacity. But the post basically says "Here's how much it costs to run, and we have plenty of money". I don't see the complaining?

Represent! Love being a part of history. I'll tell my kids about this some day.

Somehow "the first rule of reddit" got forgotten, and suddenly everyone knew about it. That's about when it went downhill.

Does the Lemmy license prevent corporations running nodes? In fact, it doesn't even have to be Lemmy.

If you think about email, it's widespread and used by everyone; but it is still mostly ruled by corporations (Google's Gmail, Microsoft's Outlook/Hotmail) for the average personal user. The protocol is open but the servers are run by different corporations each with their own UI. I'd guess there's probably no reason we won't end up like that some day, with some corporation creating a big social network with proprietary code, that happens to work well with ActivityPub so they have heaps of content and users on day 1, getting over that common initial social media hurdle (that none of your friends use it).

I mentioned Lemmy on Mastodon and some people noted some controversy surrounding the "main" instances. I don't know exactly what concerned people

One of, if not the most active lemmy instance is a Marxist, pro-Russian war, pro-CCP, pro-North Korea community. When I signed up on lemmy.ml a while back, it was almost all you saw.

The problem with reddit alternatives is that, until now, the only people leaving reddit were the ones kicked off. They needed new homes and they found them in unmoderated communities they could host themselves, like lemmy.

Some of us have been waiting for some time for more "average" redditors to make the move, so this exodus is like Christmas coming early.

The difference with the Digg to Reddit exodus is that the two communities were rival competitors working in the same space. It wasn't a case of one being a huge monolith that everyone used and the other being a small unknown, they were more evenly matched and reddit already had plenty of content and community, and neither were household names.

The situation today is very different. If Lemmy takes off, which I hope it does, it will likely still be small compared to reddit. A bit like how young people are fleeing facebook for other platforms, but there's still no platform actually displacing facebook.

Haha yes, it's like a big foot reaching out to give reddit a kick in the pants: https://the-federation.info/node/details/25274

I think it's normal after a big surge to see participation drop off. If you can hit the critical mass to keep content flowing, that would be awesome.

And at least in the short term, it's appreciated that the site is now running much smoother! That's also important for retention of users :)

It will be interesting to see how many users stick around. It's busy right now but in a month you may be able to backtrack to the previous hardware.

I like the email analogy.

When you want to use email, you sign up for an account. It doesn't matter if you go to gmail or hotmail or something else, you can still communicate with anyone else that has email.

Now if your username for email is [email protected] and then that server went down, you would no longer have access to your account, people couldn't contact you. If you then decided to set up a gmail account, you would only be able to get the account [email protected] if no one else had taken it. The name "fred" is not reserved for you across all email providers.

Federated platforms like Lemmy (which Beehaw is part of) work the same way. Your account is not @CobolSailor but @[email protected]. If Beehaw went under and no longer existed, you can go and sign up on another server, e.g. lemmy.ml. But you could only use @[email protected] if it was not taken by someone else, it's not reserved for you across all servers - and can't be, because there is no central server keeping track.

Does that explain it?