2y ago

Lemmy's total users surged from 156k to 240k in a single day today! What caused the jump?

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

136 comments

For me it was the total fuckery of the reddit owners. I quit twitter. I've put zuckbook on read only. I can do without reddit too. The internet needs to be de-oligarched.
- Hear Hear!
  I'm sick of the internet being only 5 websites!
  
  I miss when StumbleUpon

Someone mentioned it on a Reddit post about mods so I'm giving it a go. Stopped Twitter a while back and don't use Facebook. I like the concept of aggregated content around topics I'm interested in just not by evil companies.

I've noticed that Lemmy is getting more and more usable as more users join and add more content.
- A related contributing factor: as instances gain users, more federated content is showing up in all, so new users don’t have to jump through hoops to find it.
- Um, I am desperate for them to fix their main page algorithm. I browse Lemmy cause fuck Reddit, but the main page is mostly useless.
  
  Try sorting by "Top Day" if you haven't already until it's fixed.

I personally jumped ship because of the API pricing changes of Reddit.
I don't even use third party apps. It's just that I can't give an entity my business when they treat folks who volunteer to make their platform better like that.
- That's a good reason to jump ship. And wow, I think you missed out on not using the 3rd party apps, but they're coming to lemmy soon.
- I am the opposite. I had a Reddit login for years but never used it. When I found out about Apollo, I gave it another go and it quickly became my Number 1 Internet time sink.
  With Apollo no longer functional, Reddit (for me) is no longer functional.
  The fuckery was just the icing on the cake to force me to delete my account.
- Same here, I'm a software dev for a living and it resonated differently/pissed me off hearing about the API pricing changes and what happened with Apollo's developer

Ljdawson said he was making sync for Lemmy so I signed up
- Yuuuuup. Where sync goes, I go
- Same

In my opinion, the output of the disastrous Zoom meeting with the moderators & community of /r/Blind .
Reddit leadership made it clear that they have nothing but contempt for their users. They essentially refused to answer essential questions for the disabled Reddit community.
I guess Spez thinks nobody will care as long as they get their fill of GIFs and pics? I have no idea. I'm not closing out my account, but whatever reddit intended to sell to me, I'm not buying it.
- What happened to the blind community?
  
  It's terrible, but most of them have lost their sight.
  ( i am very sorry for this post)
- Is there a link to this, wasn't aware of a zoom meeting
  
  https://www.reddit.com/r/Blind/comments/14ds81l/rblinds_meetings_with_reddit_and_the_current/

Seems like reddit just fresher. Not clogged up with all the bullshit. Also I feel like I'm on the ground level of a reddit competitor that seems to be protected from corporate bullshit.

This is probably just the first big wave. The biggest will be when the apps themselves actually shut down - fence sitters will then have to make a choice to download the official app or try an alternative and I think a lot of people will be curious to see if the grass is greener.
- The grass is always greener where one side has grass and the other side is a desolate nuclear wasteland created by the incompetence of the land owner.

I've been thinking about joining for the last few weeks. The reason I did today was because the developer of my favorite app (sync) announced they would be releasing a lemmy version

I really hope Lemmy becomes a Reddit alternative. It really has so much potential. I wanna stay here.
- I have signed up to so many communities on here with the hope that once Lemmy gets bigger, I can leave the ones I don't actually want to be involved in. I also posted my first-ever meme. Let's contribute to make this a reddit alternative!
  
  This is the way
- When Digg put business above users and reddit growth exploded it (reddit) wasn't a great "alternative" at that time either. But at that time they were putting users first. Isn't that what makes this (lemmy) a great alternative?

Imdoingmypart.gif

I signed up and then went to bed. I'm assuming the world took that as a sign and followed me. Or perhaps I should cut down on the hard drugs, idk
- If you stay on them, you'll fit right in with a lot of the community

I'm just here so i don't get fined. created an account because the developer for my reddit app is working on One for lemmy. So figured I'd give this a try
- Which app is that? Sync?
  
  Correct

Wanted to ditch Reddit following all the nonsense around their API changes, but still wanted Reddit-esque news aggregation + discussions from somewhere.
Googling for alternatives initially led me to Beehaw, but they don't have the sufficiently granular niche communities I wanted. Searching for communities I wanted to subscribe to led me here, and after refreshing myself on how the fediverse worked I realised I should just create a login here instead. So far, so good!

No idea myself but we have to remember that not all the users that come try this will stay, so I anticipate once the Reddit nonsense blows over the community will shrink a bit. I am going to stay, but I was "lemmy curious" before the reddit business.
- Someone made a great site for people coming from Reddit to find communitie they were a part of. https://sub.rehab/
- Most likely it's because of Reddi's bots, targeting all the other good options and making content pro-staying
  
  What do you mean?

I finally got lemmy to reset my password, so plan to use it more. Reddit takeover of subs was ridiculous, the surge is only going to continue

I'm attempting to move on from Reddit. Heard good things about Lemmy. I'm checking things out.

Hopefully is not an army of bots, but for me that's the most plausible explanation.
- No, it's most-definitely spez removing entire moderator teams of popular subreddits.
  
  I came too because off the newest anti user behavior of reddits CEO and Admins. Made an Account on feddit.de and now have access to all Communities in the Fediverse.
  I was using Infinity for reddit most of the past years and would not switch back to the awful reddit default Android App.
  The official lemmy App is not perfect. But all ready good enough to be used with mostly no bigger issues. Mostly lacking in some features compared to infinity.
- It likely is spam/bot accounts. Multiple admins of instances with open reg have commented/posted about having to fight bot sign-ups the past few days. The only fix that helped (they said) was to enable captcha. There's a git issue on the lemmy project mentioning that they are removing captcha, so the admins are particularly worried about that...
- Lemm.ee's admin said he had to defederate a lot of smaller instances because they were having trouble with bots
- It's definitely mostly bots. There's over 1 million accounts over all the instances now. I think out of a prediction maybe somewhere between 200k-400k are actual users. The rest is just bots plumping up those numbers.

The jump is caused by Spez being a twat.

I love this because more people will comment. A majority of my time on Reddit was reading through comments and hearing all of people’s interesting takes and learning random information. The daily increase is fun to watch especially since I’m not the one maintaining the servers!
- totally agree. I've been trying to engage more myself to encourage others to do the same
  
  yeah it's important that people post and comment. lurking is only good once there's a critical mass of content and engagement to sustain that kind of passive browsing. i hope new users will understand it's early days on this platform and content has to come from somewhere!
- Yeah I learned so much reading other people's comments, so I'm trying to recreate that on this site.

People that have ~1 week of ping time (as yours truly) are finally getting to their todo list item of checking alternatives to Reddit and making an account and first posts :)
- I love that analogy. Same for me, been meaning to check out Lemmy for weaks and just made an accont yesterday
  
  Yeah I am on the same boat, I found a lot of downtime at work today so I decided to check lemmy out and loving it so far.

I'm going back to some older style board websites. I'm looking for a reddit replacement (deleted account there) and never knew of this site. I heard about it from Shacknews.

I finally decided to make an account after a week of ignoring Reddit, what is going on over there is ridiculous at this point, Reddit should have just given 3rd party apps an exception and called it a day.
- Welcome!

This is my first post, I just signed up. I was on reddit from the early days. I liked it then a lot more. This has that feel. I also like that it is open source - hopefully that will bring more developers.
- I was there for the digg to reddit switch in 2010, and this drama feels just like déjà vu.
  
  Samesies. We came from Digg, stumbleupon, Fark, icanhascheezburger etc. time for a new frontier.

It's snowballing. A few friends tell a few friends, and so on, and so on, and so on...

/u/spez brought us here.
Thanks spez!
- Think he has an account here to check it out? I hope he does and sees this: Fuck. You.
- In another way: "Thank you and fuck you /u/spez, I hope your IPO crashes and burns."

It's the way tech disseminates into the world.
If you've been here for a month or more, you're a first adopter and the true heroes of our cause. You take up what makes no sense to -- what is untested and will likely be a waste of time.
These people then tell the early adopters, which is what you are if you've been here for a couple weeks.
Once we got on board, we told all our friends who join, and then the whole thing keeps snowballing.
Of course, Lemmy really has Reddit to thank for making us all balk enough to take a look at fediverse stuff. Mastodon really didn't do it for me when I checked on it a couple years ago, but this is awesome and totally makes sense.
Playing around with Pleroma now so I can follow users here!
- I joined this "fediverse" three days ago, what am I?

Reddit is fucked
All hail the new website

gaining critical mass?

Oh, that must have been me.

Hello and I'm with you too. I wish you success in developing Lemmy.

Reddit's meltdown
- Anything in particular happened over there?
  
  To make a long story short... Reddit's doing a DEEPLY UNPOPULAR API change that effectively wipes out 3rd party tools and clients, which sparked site-wide protests. Reddit's CEO is now having a pretty public meltdown and threatening moderators partaking in said protests. Lemmy popped up in a good number of discussions on Reddit in regards to the situation. Queue the start of a mass-exodus of Reddit users and mods to Lemmy

Wow, holy shit. Servers must be getting slammed with requests. Good thing there's lots of instances to spread the burden.

I joined a couple days ago. I decided to just sign up and jump in. Everyone else doing it, why can't I?
- Glad you made the switch

This instance gives a clue maybe?
https://fedidb.org/network/instance/lemmy.wiuf.net
It looks like it's only a day old and it has 11k users. There isn't any content on it either. There are a few instances like that, you can see them here: https://fedidb.org/software/lemmy. They all have low MAU, 10k or so users, and low Status Count.
Quite a few are showing about 10k new users in the past day or so. Probably they're small instances without bot protection or instances made to support bots.
- Can this be reported to those tech savvy enough to know what to do? Fantastic find. These instances might well be preparing bots for attack.

I’ve avoided Reddit since Sunday and am missing being able to see what’s going on without having to visit tech blogs/news sites/etc…
Decided might as well make the next jump and propel the death of Dig, I mean reddit
- Check this out! https://www.reddit.com/r/Infinity_For_Reddit/comments/14c2v5x/build_your_own_apk_with_your_personal_api_key_in/
  
  This is not the way. By using Reddit you are essentially giving money to the shareholders. You are fattening the rich. It is pathetic. Stop using reddit, fullstop.
  You are here on Lemmy. Help the community instead of trying to redirect traffic back to reddit...

A lot of us haven’t been able to create accounts due to high activity. It looks like account creation requests have finally started going through.

Some of the big things that happened in the past 24h or so:
r/LegalAdviceUK wants to move their 800k+ community to another platform. Their members might be testing Lemmy.
Apollo developer posted another lengthy post about Reddit and their leadership.
Also r/ModCoord has started recommending moderators to move their communities to other platforms, like Lemmy.
- Do you have a link to the new post by the Apollo dev?
  
  Here‘s a link where someone copied the post to kbin. There‘s also a link to reddit

Got sick of Reddit, looked for alternatives, found sub.rehab, found Lemmy was common… here I am.

Keep in mind too that the expiration date for many of the mainstream third party Reddit apps is June 30
Just think of the spike in users when that rolls around in 10 days
- Reddit is already turning into shit. Like literall shit, except it's digital shit, but still shit.
  Feeling horny? Visit r/horny. Oh wait, that's christian minecraft discussions!
  Wanna learn something new? Visit r/InterestingAsFuck. Oh wait, that's interesting porn positions!
  Wanna see what is going in gaming community? Just visit r/steam! Oh wait, it's choo choo shitwreck powered by steam engines!
  No wonder why people are looking for Reddit alternative, and Lemmy might be just the right option. :)
- Just think of the spike in users when that rolls around in 10 days
  I'm here now trying to get ahead of it.

I use RIF exclusively on mobile. I never use reddit from my computer. The interface isn't all that different from RIF when on mobile, so I'm giving it a shot. Lots of the other places listed as "reddit alternatives" were mostly just discussion and not community focused and link sharing sites. I like it so far. (my first post!)

Unfortunately, such a huge spike is probably because of a bot campaign…

Soon we will look back amazed at these growing little numbers. They're growing quickly but I expect it to grow by one or two more orders of magnitude over the coming months!

spez's continued jackassery. I made the switch about 24h ago.
- The post by the Apollo creator was the final nail for me. It really laid everything out there pretty well. Let it go be Tumblr somewhere
  
  I saw that post too. I can’t even begin to imagine the July 1st surge when all 3rd party reddit apps are forced to shut down.

For me, LJ Dawson, the Dev of Sync for Reddit posted that he is making a Lemmy app. I was planning on leaving Reddit at the end of June, so I signed up! I'm extremely happy to be here!
Edited: messed up posting the Dev's name. Thanks @DTFpanda@lemmy.world

Everyone figuring out /u/spez is full of shit

Stopped using reddit after 12 years when the blackout began, and kept up with the developments through the tech news. Removing the mods and screwing around with things just because they're mad about a protest was the last straw, so now here I am!

not that surprising really - many, MANY people are fed up with centralized link aggregation/social media/reddit in general & the fediverse is an excellent option
- I'm tired of capitalism and greed ruining everything I love!

meeee

There was a post that has code snippet that tells lemmy admins to turn on email verification and captcha.
And then lemmy.world admin turned off signup for a little while to clean up bot accounts.
Then account numbers jumped 84k in one day.
Coincidence? I don't think so.
- I left something out
  The code snippet was 24 lines of Python code that demonstrate how to generate random username and password and call lemmy's API to register account.

People are tired of Reddit's abusive policies and of not be heard, and this is our response. I will keep use Reddit thanks to an user which made this, and thanks to the dev of Infinity for make it open source: https://www.reddit.com/r/Infinity_For_Reddit/comments/14c2v5x/build_your_own_apk_with_your_personal_api_key_in/
But I will remain here on Lemmy with Jerboa and see how it evolves.
- You could've always done this, infinity has always been open source. However using this just means that you and others will be paying reddits ridiculous pricing for their own api access JUST to use infinity. Which iirc is gonna be around $25 a month per user depending on amount of use. Everytime you open that app itll be charging you for data..
  This seems popular to some users now but I don't see it going over to well when the bill comes due. Id rather take my chances going all in on Lemmy and helping support an instance with a community. Decentralization ftw.
  
  I already know which this has been always possible, but an user published how to do not so much time ago. If you have unlimited plan data, like most people, that fact wouldn't be a concern so please don't spread misinformation just to scare people into not using Reddit anymore. The API use is free to regular users and with their limitation reasonable for just one user. And if not were of that way, which highly doubt it, would charged to the ISP then or no problems if you have unlimited data plan, or limitate their data usage with apps with a bunch of open source tools which allow that.
  And all of that which has solutions, only in case that this you said about 25$ would be charged for the current free API 100 request per minute, would be true, and I didn't saw any official announce of Reddit. They plan to enter in stock market soon, I highly believe that they will not start to charge 25$ to every users by the use fo the current free API of 100 request per minutes, that would be so much having in count the last polemic with their abusive practicals, and people would be in a massive exodus, even higher than current happening now with a lot of people comming to Lemmy, which is great and I love that fact. They have to care about for their users, because the users decisions as a colective affects to their inversors, and they will take care about them more, we already saw it...
  
  It's actually free to use the API below a certain limit. If you are a lurker or casual user you'll be fine.

136 comments