2y ago

Lemmy's total users continues to surge to over 1.1 million, up from 740k yesterday!

Source: https://lemmy.fediverse.observer/dailystats&days=7

162 comments

Can you please stop posting users numbers until the bot situation is under control? Putting it like you're doing is misleading, half of them are bots (if not more).
- When will the bot situation be under control?
  I’m not denying the bot situation. These posts are for record keeping, and people in this thread seem aware of the bot situation. We need to get more eyes on this.
  You’re welcome to start a conversation about how to solve the bot issue. I’d love to participate.
  
  Post user activity instead? That has been suggested many times already as a far more reliable metric.
  Not knowing when the bots will be under control is NOT a good reason to post misleading info, and you should know it.
  
  Are you a bot microwave?
- If you can't use critical thinking skills to analyze these numbers and understand bots are included, idk what to tell you bro. We can't censor the world cause of a few dumb people.
  With that said user activity, number of posts, number of comments submitted per day would be a nice metric to look at.
  
  If you don't know what misleading means, idk what to tell you "bro"

Tbh it seems to be mostly bots adding to that growth. Don't get me wrong, I'd like to see the fediverse grow, but if it's overrun with bots... no one will want to stick around.
- So far it looks like most of the bots are just signing up - not posting anything.
  
  The calm before the storm
- Why do you say it's mostly bots?
  
  There was an exploit released a few days back that could make thousands extremely fast (unsure of the number).The two top user instances at this point have 50k new users a piece, and 10 users active, lol.
  
  I also suspect they’re all bots.
  I joined when users were 10k and I didn’t see any increase in engagement including comments and upvotes.
- Reddit's mostly bots too, and the rest are scroll zombies. We just need to hope that people who generate content and discussion show up too; just a few thousand would be enough to get the ball rolling.

I realized yesterday that i haven't been on Reddit for 3 days, but have been on Lemmy every day. It's refreshing.
- Same. I'm barely checking reddit now.

It's mostly bots, but so is Reddit. The real question is, how many of these are active participants and contributors who'll generate content and start communities?
- I’ve been posting like a madman. I hope to kickstart some activity. If this place looks halfway attractive on July 1st, it should bring in enough new posters from 3PA to make more communities self sustaining.
  I had to leave behind a few communities that were small even on reddit, and hope to rebuild them better here.
  
  Yeah, having enough activity is the only way we can make this place a viable Reddit alternative. That, and good third-party apps for a better mobile experience than Reddit. That alone could give the platform a serious edge, especially since 3PA users were some of the most active people on Reddit.
- I came here four days ago and I've been commenting and voting on everything I see. I haven't made any new posts but I've been pretty active otherwise.
  
  Super important to make this place a viable alternative, rather than just another graveyard.
- I think it will be similar to reddit, where a small percentage of people produce content while the majority lurk. I used to lurk a lot on reddit, but I hope to change that here (I feel it's important to be active to help drive activity).
  
  That's going to be any platform, really. I feel like there might be more content posters here literally for the reason of boosting it and hopefully having a competitor on equal grounds to reddit. Right now, reddit is still winning in content and features, but it obviously has been around for longer and has a massive user base. It will take time, but with enough motivation provided by the despise of spez, it's possible. I don't think it will take down reddit, but it will make reddit no longer the only option.
- I’m not a bot, I used to post on Reddit only occasionally, (I was more of a lurker) and I only accessed it through the Apollo app. I strongly believe in the concept of decentralized platforms, and Apollo made Reddit more user-friendly by streamlining the tools, and reducing the number of ads. I recently joined Lemmy a few days ago and I already feel a surge of energy from enthusiastic migrant users like myself. If I thought my increased involvement here would contribute to meaningful discussions within the community, I will try to be more engaged. I hope that the influx of reddit users, including myself, can provide the boost that Lemmy needed without overwhelming the ‘instances’ themselves.
  
  I'm not a bot
  That's exactly what a bot would say, a-ha!
  But no seriously, I hope there's enough of us here to make a meaningful difference; enough to give the internet a new 'front page'.
- undefined> how many of these are active participants and contributors who’ll generate content and start communities?
  count me in!

My first lemmy post. Here as a reddit refugee. Looking forward to watching a new community develop as reddit seems intent to go down the road of enshitification. I bailed on FB and Instagram as they enshitified. Reddit looks to be next.
- My first as well. Been on Reddit for a long enough to remember the DIGG exodus when they killed themselves. Interesting to see it happen again.
- Never thought reddit would go down that path, but glad we have alternatives now.
- im also a reddit refugee.

once a few of the reddit mobile apps switch users will flood in.
- Sync's dev is making a Fediverse app, and a ton of Apollo-inspired apps will eventually show up for iOS. Christian joining in on the fun would be sick, but...honestly, I highly doubt it.
- Hope @ruud is prepared for Jun 30 when RIF will go down... redditors will flood us

I just joined. Done with that godforsaken website Reddit. It’s taking a little getting used to, but I know I eventually will get a hang of it. I’m willing to put my time into this.

As has been asked every time, how many are bots?
- Yeah there are some irresponsible instance owners out there letting bots register.
  
  yeah, the largest one is k6qw, with 52 thousand users, but only 4 users online atm compared to lemmy.world, 42.8 thousand users, 5.63 thousand online
  edit: source: https://lemmy.fediverse.observer/list
  
  Many were probably set up expressly for one user. They may be just newbies who followed an install guide but without any clue about how to administer a server. Is there no way to contact these owners? Refreshing a user dB is simple.
- Not me lol
  
  Welcome, non-bot!
  
  Me either. I am a human person just like all of you!
- I guess it's kind of like the saying bad ice effects both teams. Both reddit and the federation are going to have bots. Competitors aren't differentiating bot accounts vs user accounts, so why should the federation?
  How many people browsed reddit without an account, but made one for lemmy to show support?
  At least one.
  
  I'm sure that reddit and others are aware of bots and doing things to control that situation.

Welcome all you noobs
(don't hit me, I just got here too)
- Yeah, I'm here since we were at 5-10k.... Like, two weeks ago lol
  
  Lol it's seriously crazy how much less active this place felt a couple of weeks ago. I can't imagine what it's like to be someone who was here years ago.
  
  Is.. is this an OG?

Yes. This is the future I want. I hope to help make the lemmyverse a verse worth inhabiting.
- Well they have porn so I'm here for it
- Yeah I agree I'm already donating to lemmy hopefully more people can join in on that and make the fediverse a better place.

Me here, fuck u/spez🖕
- Fuck him!
  
  I got a kick out of knowing he had millions of fuck /u/spez tags. He must know he's a bellend before being rich. His disaster bunker article was absolutely hilarious.

Every time I read these posts I can't help but be sceptical: It's bots, bots everywhere.
- not a bot
  
  That's exactly what a bot would be programmed to say.
  j/k. Er, sort of.
- More bot activity is still a good sign too, I think. They're following us to this boat just like they did with reddit.

I also made a new account yesterday cause I noticed that it already looked much better than when I last checked. If some of my niche hobby subs move over here I‘d definitely spend more time in the ‘verse.
Performance and design are other big factors I‘m not a fan of right now, I hope someone with expertise in these fields can help the project out, but it‘s already servicable.
- Create your own niche communities then! If others find that it exists, they’ll post to it. If everyone waits for someone else to start the niche community, no one will start the niche community.
  What niche hobbies are you waiting on communities for?
  
  Some (more) niche community-driven subs of games I‘m playing like summoner school or ADC mains for instance. I‘m patient enough to wait for them (and other features) to come around but I‘m not the right person to make them.
- Yeah, I can't wait until more of my gardening and home improvement people move over here.
  
  Which gardening subs are you part? Also, what are they called on Lemmy?

Now we just need to move all content from Reddit to here, so that when you research something on google, lemmy would have the answer instead of Reddit.

There are dozens of us! Baker's dozens! (We come in 13s)

I'm one of them. Hello!
- im another one.
  
  And me - hello all.

Count me in.

To the moon XD

Can't wait to see this chart come July 1st and the days the follow!

It's a good thing but also might not be good if hosting costs become unsustainable. I hope we can cope.
- Maybe for a time we could donate. But longterm I think advertisers and REASONABLY priced API access might make sense.
  Also it might be better to host the pictures externally. And run the pict-rs server as an imgur alternative or even use imgur and giphy as a hoster. They have pretty decent prices.
  Edit: To all the downvoters. Do you really think a site that manages hundreds of thousands of accounts and pictures is indefinitely going to be run without problems by a few guys for free?

Yeehaw!

Keep in mind, there's a known issue with bot registration spam so take total user count stat with a big chunk of salt:
https://botsin.space/@threadcount/110581723322900741
Daily active users is a better measure:
https://lemmy.fediverse.observer/dailystats (site stability is iffy right now, but refresh a couple times and it should load eventually)
- The lemmy.dbzer0.com instance admin is working on some code to try to monitor the bot situation:
  https://github.com/db0/lemmy-overseer

thats good

Ahh bots, the bane of the internet.

Lest not forget that Reddit used bots when it went live to drive users there. I don't know what I mean it was just a thought.
- Hell yeah brother, cheers from Iraq
  
  So how's Iraq going?

A million of us, a million of us!
- Man, this shit is growing really fast. I would be super interested to see daily active users

While this is good, I can't help but feel that the branding of the decentralised social media ecosystem is hurting the growth a little bit. The -verse suffix, imo, is just too tainted from all the cryptobro metaverse scams and really makes this seem like some crypto scam as opposed to an alternative to the current crumbling social media platforms.
Regardless, I hope this ecosystem does take off, as it does seem useful and interesting.
- If it means anything, universe and multiverse are the first that come to my mind.
  
  That's fair. Maybe I'm just chronically online, but it really skeeves me out how eerily similar some of the terms here are to crypto scams. Not saying this is one, obviously- as far as I can tell, there really isn't any monetary incentive to run an instance-, but the language used at the moment can get uncomfortably close, which definitely might push people away.
  
  angry Spiderverse noises
- You're really denouncing an entire decentralized open source eco system cause you don't like that verse is a suffix that can be used for multiple things?
  Jfc.
  
  Please read what I said again. I don't have an issue with the ecosystem, and I said as much in the original post. I have an issue with the branding of the ecosystem and am concerned that it's hampering growth because of its associations with venture capitalists/crypto scams/metaverse scams, etc.

Any idea why I can't create a new post? It just spins forever the past 2 days.
- It might depend what instance you signed up through/device you use. I was having troubles from desktop with lemmy.world, but they did some tech voodoo magic for the server it's hosted on so it's been mostly smooth all week. It's consistently worked pretty well from the jerboa app for me tho
- Seems to occur in older browsers for some reason, although Lemmy in general can be laggy with posting.
  By any chance, are you using an older browser?
- That's strange. Post your question here and see how that goes: https://lemmy.world/c/nostupidquestions
  
  Stupid answers, on the other hand… I only tease, this really cracked me up.
  
  Well the point is that I can't post, that's why I had to comment in a random thread 😄

Will there be a point when the number of new users will need to be controlled?
- hey boss...
  yea?
  remember that Lemmy thing you made a few years ago?
  yea
  more people use it than live on earth...
  what? it was just last month that it went over 1 mil!
  uh-huh
  so you're telling me there's more that 10 billion users?
  15 billion as of 2 hours ago.
  the heck?

Let's goooooooooo

Just joined today!

This shit grows fast lol
reddit is no more
- We did it Lemmy! Reddit is no more! 😎

Can anyone explain what the point is of creating an instance and filling it with bots? Seems like it just costs money and time but with no benefit? Is it for a future spam campaign?
- Is it for a future spam campaign?
  Yes.

Unfortunately, some of those users are bringing the worst of Reddit with them. Their is an explosion of low value cutesy comments.
- Eh, I don't mind.
  Edit: thanks for the gold kind sir
  Edit: wow who would have thought such a simple comment would blow up?
  
  [removed]
- Yeah, fucking migrants. Only bringing problems.
  (/s, just to be sure)
- Meh, people will soon figure out they don't get any karma from it so (hopefully) people will stop going for the low hanging fruit
- Just like the old Digg migration days. Soon you will forget about those Diggers and accept them as your own.
  
  With all the bots, there's still an explosion of user activity. Each time the bots are mentioned, you can also look up by instance and track the user activity, which has a growth trendline that looks very similar to all the other metrics that are gaining.
- There

I've tried Lemmy a bit last night. I know Lemmy threads can be searched and browsed here and I'm not sure it matter, but if it does I hope it's Kbin that wins the mass adoption war. I'm finding the Kbin UI experience more enjoyable. I also appreciate the way it combines a microblog tweet like feature with reddit type usage into the same platform.
- What's "here?" I'm viewing your comment using Jerboa logged into @lemmy.world, LOL.
  That said, I ought to try out kbin at some point.
- From what i've heard it doesn't matter who wins. Kbin can interact with posts on lemmy and lemmy can interact with posts on kbin.
  
  Yes but kbin at the moment is more user friendly so if someone from reddit who is not tech savvy tries to migrate to fediverse, kbin would be a much more convincing option, especially since no one really realize there other instances of kbin much like lemmy and everybody just goes to kbin.social. So no choice paralysis about which instance to join which I reckon is the big part of the problem of transitioning from reddit.

This is bananas.
Also spez is a pedophile fuck him

162 comments