1y ago

lemmy.world leads the pack as the #1 most active instance, outpacing the next 5 non-bot instances combined!

Active users as of June 25, 2023:

lemmy.world (48k users): 13554 active users
lemmy.ml (38k users): 4582 active users
beehaw.org (11k users): 3743 active users
feddit.de (6.7k users): 2320 active users
sh.itjust.works (6.5k users): 2167 active users
lemmy.ca (3.5k users): 1082 active users

Great to see all this growth and activity in different lemmy instances!

Source: https://the-federation.info/platform/73

186 comments

That's great and imma let you finish but remember that decentralization is strength on the fediverse. Join or create other instances, join or create communities on other instances, thats our strength.
On the fediverse, instances come and go. I've seen big instances go down either permanently or temporarily, and ive also seen big communities decide they're turning off federation. The only way to be safe from that is to decentralize, so if something happens there's still something worth doing on the fediverse.
Besides that though, congratulations lemmy.world, I love to see the thrediverse Renaissance we're in, and nothing but love for the folks running this instance and the folks participating on it.
- Some of us were here before it blew up... lol.

Back in my day lemmy.ml was the biggest instance.
- Last Tuesday.
  
  y'all are cracking me up... time sure does fly by. i want to practice being present. that's what i should do.
- Account age: 1 week
  Yep checks out
  
  Now do me!

Also lemmy.world is extremely slow in pushing out messages to other instances, if at all. So leading the pack is not necessarily the best thing until you figure out scaling.
- Yeah, they should really consider not accepting new users until that is figured out, honestly. There are plenty of servers out there that people can join at this point. Too much centralization in a decentralized system for my liking regardless of instance scaling.
- Yeah, I've been missing a ton of comment replies from lemmy.world and it's frustrating. I am wondering if it's because they're still on 0.17.4 instead of 0.18.
  
  Yeah I think that's the main issue. Hopefully 18.1 can be released soon so they can upgrade too.
- Is that what's happening when I try to reply and it just loads forever?
  
  That should have been fixed about a week ago, hopefully it hasn't happened to you lately!
  Here's ruud's post explaining: https://lemmy.world/post/288652
  
  No I think that is just you telling lemmy.world the message which sometimes can get stuck. Only after the message was sent will other instances sync with lemmy.world if they are federated.
- The server has already been upgraded 3 times. I'm sure they'll upgrade again if they're seeing issues. They might not know if it's an external issue.
  
  It is likely a lemmy version difference.

Good. It is important to have different instances to distribute the load though. However, I hope there are not many people joining BeeHaw...
- I hope there are not many people joining BeeHaw…
  I don't hope that, exactly, I just hope that the people who join understand what they're getting (and, more importantly, what they aren't). I fully support a community with a different goal than most, and their goal seems like a wholesome one. I personally think it's doomed to failure, but I support them giving it a try. They're barely part of the fediverse though.
  
  I agree. That's the point of having different instances. Some of the original Lemmy instances had a very specific worldview and didn't want to hear much else. I'd prefer they stay there to live in their echo chamber and I leave them alone, than they come out and start demanding the rest of us bow to their authority.
  The broader fediverse sort of works that way. There's a fediverse that's really locked down, the sort of in between, and there's the wild west, and the three coexist in different ways. I can disagree with them, but it's their sandbox and I have mine and in that way we can coexist on the same platform
  
  There still some good instances that Beehaw is federated with, but my personal issue is that it feels very fragile. If a couple of bigots show up on other instances and the mods don't delete their posts right away, will Beehaw defederate from them? There is a line between protecting your users and barring them from accessing anything you don't approve of, and I think they need to figure out where they stand in regards to that line. Beehaw feels more like a small forum than a piece of something bigger.
  Defederating because of raiding, harassment, bots, etc is 100% understandable but it should not be done lightly.
- Looks like beehaw.org is shedding users. They've lost about a thousand users since defederating from lemmy.world and sh.itjust.works last week. Maybe a bunch of people weren't happy with that move.
  
  They’re probably ok with that
  
  since defederating from lemmy.world
  Oh. I think I maybe figured out why my subscriptions to beehaw communities are still pending.
  Dang it. Am I really going to have to write a thoughtful essay to get an account there? I hate writing. Thoughtfully, anyhow.
- Why not beehaw? Did something happen?
  
  They've defederated from both lemmy.world and sh.itjust.works. They're still a good community, but I don't consider them part of the fediverse at this point.
  
  They defederated with the some of the largest instances that have open registration due to the influx of people causing issues in their own communities and the lack of mod tools to address the issue. People are still pissy about it despite beehaw admins stating they will lift the defederation once lemmy mod tools improve…
  
  Regardless of what happened, beehaw is not for everyone.
  They aim to be a safe haven for people that are afraid to be harassed for who they are. It's a noble goal IMO but to achieve that, they have to moderate their instance quite heavily.
  If you're not their target audience, you'll find it too restrictive.
  
  you might want to look at the list of instances they blocked (your lemmygrad.ml instance is on the list btw)
- As long as people understand the circumstances of that instance I have absolutely no problem with people finding the place they belong.
  I just hope there are not new users who don't realize they may not be federated with the larger community.
- Whats wrong with beehaw? I got a couple really active, good communities from there in my feed
  
  They block a shit ton of instances, not always for good reasons. Often to maintain an echo chamber.

More users does not ALWAYS mean a good thing.
- You are correct and Lemmy.World and others will experience growing pains and will have their own share of issues but the positive of this is that more users means more content.
- You are correct, but it at least shows that we are attracting more users (albeit, that doesn't mean quality).
  I believe its a positive thing though, as it shows that the "normies" are seriously considering alternatives; outside of us niche, nerds here for the tech and the anti-corpo mindset.
  
  Just showed up here. We'll see how long I stay, but hoping this will be my social media fix each morning. If there are enough folks who feel the same, it will be.
  
  Well said. A month ago, I couldn't even imagine leaving reddit because there was hardly a viable alternative.
  
  I am decidedly not a niche nerd here for tech reasons. I just got pretty fed up with Reddit and it’s ridiculousness. I’m a 40 year old mom just here to cruise around the internet and find interesting things. So you are correct - the “normies” are starting to look for alternatives!

I joined world because it was the little one, with like 100 active users according to the stats on the signup page. Hmph.
- I joined lemmy.world on June 7th before it started to blow up. Crazy how much it has changed in 19 days.
  
  Makes you wonder where we'll be in another 19!
- question - why is/was joining a little instance a good thing?
  
  The idea was to pick a smaller one to spread the load around and stop any one instance (at the time it looked like probably Beehaw or .ml) getting so big it became a "default" and thus accidentally centralising things and defeating the whole purpose of being here.
  I guess a lot of people had the same idea at roughly the same time as me though lol, and now we're stuck with some serious unforseen federation issues due to sheer size. Therewasanattempt.

Hello All, First time poster here. I would just like to say that i tried signing up for beehaw.org but they have some kind of purity test that reminds me of Reddit. Don’t ever sign up for beehaw, that is going to be one hell of a drama filled instance.
- Ironically all of the drama and complaining seems to be coming from instances outside of Beehaw, being dramatic and complaining about Beehaw. The content there is actually good.
  
  Really it's just drama caused by the platform not maturing yet. Beehaw's reasons behind defederating from large instances like lemmy.world are valid, but it's not like other instances made them do it. It's a choice they made to be able to create the space they want in lieu of proper mod tools. Hope they realise it won't be an overnight fix, and the longer they stick to their guns the greater the risk of their communities fizzling out, which would be a shame as I agree they are some of the best.
  
  I noticed the same thing about North Korea. You never hear anyone complaining about dictatorship inside the country.
- Drama? Ooooh brb
  
  Just remember to not piss in the popcorn.
- I tried to sign up for beehaw… they rejected my application. Glad they did, I really enjoy lemmy.world!

Good time to appreciate the lack of dominant centrality here compared to mastodon.
Mastodon's flagship instance run by the BDFL, mastodon.social, has ~10 times the monthly active users of the next biggest instance.
Here, there isn't really a flagship instance, as the devs don't want their instance to be anything more than the one they happen to run, and it's not the biggest, and the biggest is independent of the lemmy dev team and isn't even that much bigger than the others.
- It does appear that lemmy.world is heading in the same direction of mastodon.social though.
- That might also be a response to what users were asking for. Signing up for a server confused the shit out of everyone. It was to the point where Mastodon’s confusing onboarding process was frequently being covered by major media outlet across the globe.
  Instead of continuing to iterate on sever selection experience, they just started to say “fuck it” and started dumping everyone into .social.
  
  Which is the only way they're ever going to work. It's a major barrier to sign ups. If the fediverse is actually going to take off one of the Lemmy sites will have to become the dominant one

I'm reading from kbin.social. Does kbin get included in the stats?
- No, these stats are specifically how many users are active that have their accounts on Lemmy.world.
- Check this
  
  dang 49k users and 49k active users
  are these actually true?
- I don’t think so. At least not the stats page OP used. It’s only Lemmy instances and kbin is a different platform.

It's awesome to see the growth, but as a small question, why don't all the instances upgrade to version 0.18? Maybe that version isn't stable enough?
- 0.18 removed checks and balances to limit bot signups. lemmy.world won't upgrade until this is in place.
  
  Thanks!!
  
  Yep, so now I need to put up with Jerboa whining at me every time I log in. Just the latest in what's likely to be a long line of teething problems. It's really unfortunate that the same guy is one of the primary devs of both the Lemmy server and the android client, as it allows him to use one to put pressure on the other. He could E.G. make it so Jerboa refuses to connect to any instance that refuses to update rather than just displaying an annoying dialog like it currently does.
- To clarify the vague "checks and balances" statement that you were given, it was the captcha feature. It will be added back in 0.18.1

lemmy.world is probably leading because it’s easy to sign up
- I mean, i would rather have an easy sign up then go through a shitty purity test like beehaw.org makes you go through.
  
  I wrote 2 short paragraphs for the Beehaw entry and a week later was denied. By that point I was already on Lemmy.World.
  I really don't know what else they wanted me to say to be honest. I'd be interested in seeing some accepted applications but seems excessive.
  
  Exactly! Or a waitlist like lemmy.ml. There’s probably going to be some issues with so many people in this instance, but it’s better than an echo chamber.
  
  Jesus you're bitter
- However is been just "spinning" on yrying to sign up for over a week for me...so I ended up going with lemm.ee instead
  
  You need to verify your email address
- I'm here because there's less censorship
  
  Literally why I came to Lemmy as a whole.

Too bad the users are partially yelling into the void: https://lemmy.world/post/609080 Hope it gets fixed.
- Are they? I see tons of Lemmy.world posts (including this one) using my sh.itjust.works account.
- Except, apparently, we are the void. Probably why most people on this instance haven't noticed a problem.
  
  Do we want to be the void?
- To bad they are still on 17.4 and not 18. Getting rid of web sockets really helped with the jumping around seen when viewing all
  
  I thought content moving around and making me accidentally click stuff was supposed to be a "feature." I guess that's good news that it's a bug.
- Is this just because we are a version back? That's gonna get fixed soon.

We did it Reddit!

NGL I thought Blajah would be higher given that 196 moved there
- I kind of feel we're riding the sweet spot on size right now. Seems like a solid amount of content but we've not had so many new users that there's been any sudden cultural shift.
- Probably a couple hundred dedicated posters. So many 196 memes on my feed and I don't even know what 196 stands for.
  
  196 is the apartment of awesome!
  Welcome to the party!
  Share something while you're here it's the rule.
  We've got Blahaj, memes, LGBTQ+, and no tankies.
  We recently had to change venue due to reddit shenanigans, but the party don't stop until it all stops

This dominance worries me a little. Luckily the communities are spread across instances fairly well
- This dominance worries me a little.
  I don't think there's much to worry about. Having large general instances is perfectly healthy and good for the Fediverse as that's where people new to the Fediverse will land.
  I predict that large niche instances will start popping up, one example already being programming.dev, and that's simply because there are domains where you might need extra customization.
  For example, one can imagine a mathematics & physics oriented instance where LaTeX is available, or a chess-only instance where you'd have things like chessboard.js to allow members to post chess diagrams etc... Basically a return to what we had with old-school forums except this time the instances would be federated.
  
  Just from my own subscriptions there's also startrek.website and dormi.zone (which is for the game Warframe). I think having an instance function like that is pretty awesome, if I want Star Trek or Warframe related content I know exactly where to go now.
  
  For example, one can imagine a mathematics & physics oriented instance where LaTeX is available, or a chess-only instance where you’d have things like chessboard.js to allow members to post chess diagrams etc…
  An interesting idea. But the problem with that is that the custom rendered content would not federate properly, so such communities would only really be usable to those on that instance, which destroys the whole point of being federated in the first place. Unless they were able to implement some sort of 'graceful degradation' so the content was enhanced on the main instance, but still serviceable on other instances.
- Taking lessons from mastodon, I think server costs can really affect an instance's decision of how many users and how fast to register them. Can't blame them. lemmy.world just happens to have a pro admin who also runs mastodon.world.
  
  oh yeah i remember mastodon.world, was my first ever instance i was on until i began to host my own instance.

I might jump ship in order to bring balance to the force

man all I did was make a couple of comments on reddit.

now they just need to update to 0.18. I've been back on lemmy.ml since the update. The scrolling kills it for me.
- They're not updating til 0.18.1 comes. The lemmy devs got rid of captcha in 0.18 and lemmy.world devs asked if they could add it back in 0.18.1 and they agreed so once that happens it will update. Said there would be too many bots without captcha.

What counts as an active user? Voting? Commenting? Posting?
- What counts as an active user? Voting? Commenting? Posting?
  Submitting a comment or post. AFAIK upvoting/downvoting doesn't count, at least for Lemmy's numbers.
  Kbin is looser with the definition, I think they even count accounts that simply vote among active users.
- Probably logging and clicking a post or two

Now show us a chart differentiating between robots and sentient users.
- Like there are sentient users on social media sites.

Thwe number #1 uswer of Lemm Worlkd is horses who are forcesd to horse by peple who rider horses in HoirseWOrld.,HELOM

how does kbin.social compare?
- https://the-federation.info/platform/184
  
  Wow kbin is blowing up faster than I thought.
  
  That shows kbin.social at 43.9k users with 43.9k active users. Not sure if kbin counts active users the same way lemmy does.

Love seeing the growth!

its a monopoly stooop it

how cool is that!

It's great to see Lemmy world growing so fast! As I'm still trying to grasp how to the Fediverse works in practice, how much does one need to 'trust' the lemmy instance?
If the instance is shut down or the owner enacts policies the community doesn't agree with, what happens to all of the content and communities in the instance?

Poggers!

Great, but all this activity also has a subtle downside. Lemmy.world is by far the slowest federating instance I see on the Lemmyverse. It typically takes hours for posts and comments to reach my instance.
Hopefully improvements to Lemmy will make federation faster and more efficient. Sidekiq seems to do a good job on large Mastodon instances.

Geddit.social has 200,000 users!

What's the number #6 instance?

I guess the percentage of inactive lemmy.ml user is higher due to the higher percentage of older accounts.
- Probably a decent number of them like me where when I signed up there back then it was basically just lemmy.ml and lemmygrad.ml to pick from. Now that there are other options I created accounts on a couple other instances for redundancy (plus at the time lemmy.ml was buckling under the load) as well as having content and moderation rules I liked better. I'd bet a large number of those inactive accounts are actually active on lemmy, just on different instances.

We're winning, lenny!

If every lemmy.world active user committed to just 2 posts and 2 comments per day there would be 27,000 new posts and comments to read daily, or more than 1,000 per hour on average.
- This is my second post today. Doing my part.

Don’t upgrade to 0.18.0, @ruud@lemmy.world!
- I've personally been having a better time with 0.18 on lemmy.ml than with 0.17.4.
- What else other than the missing captcha makes it a lot of issues?
  
  Currently there are 15 lemmy-ui bugs open, and 20 lemmy backend bugs open, against 0.18.0.
  lemmy backend bugs
  lemmy-ui bugs
  Upgrading my instance to 0.18.0 has caused a lot of problems. One major issue is the main web UI won't even load (returns a blank page with just text Server error), unless you manually remove the site's image icon via a SQL query in the Postgres database. So, upgrade to 0.18.0 at your own risk.
  Also, this is not intended as a criticism to anyone. Just a warning that 0.18.0 is a bit unstable and waiting for 0.18.1+ is a safer option for the larger hosted communities (my opinion).
- Why not?
  
  No captcha at signup to slow down bots in 0.18. Lemmy.world admin is waiting until it's added back in to upgrade.
  https://lemmy.world/post/469761
- Devs will be addressing the submitted captcha fix after the weekend (they said so on GitHub). So I hope 0.18.1 drops early next week. They wanted 0.18 released before 3rd party apps die, so I presume having the largest instance holding back will give them a reason to push it before the end of the week.
  
  I hope it is released soon as well. I'm hoping some of the other open issues are addressed.

Who is Lemmy? Is this an underground movement thing on the dark web or something?
- Ian Fraser Kilmister (24 December 1945 – 28 December 2015), better known as Lemmy Kilmister or simply Lemmy, was an English musician. He was the founder, lead singer, bassist and primary songwriter of the rock band Motörhead, of which he was the only continuous member, and a member of Hawkwind from 1971 to 1975.

What is the purpose of bots, other than spam, lemmy tools and 3rd party scrapers (if that’s a thing)?
- Propaganda, brigading, post votes manipulation, and once accounts are "established" they could be sold for astroturfing.
  
  I've noticed weird vote counts, and sometimes it's clearly a bug. But do you think a small number of downvotes that make no sense would be bots? Or just trolls?
- Eventually, to use humans as Duracells
  
  Woah

186 comments