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!
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.
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!
Account age: 2 years
Ok grandpa time to get you back to your home.
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
Thanks for the link, unfortunately this is still affecting me. I’m gonna make an account on another instance for the time being
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.
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
Perfectly put.
As an aside, I feel like this was the situation in the early formation of the US. Different communities and different states had different views about what should be illegal, but they all wanted the freedom to pursue their individual ways of life. There were basic tenants that everyone generally agreed to, but we created a paradigm where states could do different things, and you could move freely between them to trade and interact.
I feel like people have lost sight of that. Too many want to legislate their view of how people should live - to force everyone to live that way - instead of all of us during l supporting the right of others to do something different within those broader societal bounds.
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.
I agree with you. And, honestly, I don’t think they did it lightly after reading their post about it. It’s just that they’re dedicated to creating a safe space for their members, and they couldn’t figure out how to do that with the mod tools they have and the influx of trolls from the open instances.
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.
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.
I thought they planned to refrigerate with those instances once mods tools are a little more developed
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…
They kept saying that they need more moderation tools. Does anyone know what they wanted that Lemmy doesn’t already offer?
A big one is probably mods being able to mark posts as nsfw, ability to set posting restrictions for users with new accounts, less buggy mod queue. As of right now it’s not really feasible for a small team to moderate a large community on lemmy. There was a multitude of tools on Reddit that existed that made larger communities run smoothly, nearly all of which just don’t exist here yet. Just general growing pains of a new platform I think.
True, but even a “large” beehaw community is small by Reddit’s standards. Couldn’t they just appoint more moderators? Lemmy allows mods to create more mods for a community.
I think the biggest issue they had highlighted (that I witnessed myself, unfortunately) mainly was people with clear bad faith intentions entering beehaw’s spaces designated for discussions of and about vulnerable communities and individuals that beehaw wants to make sure to protect as part of their community ethos. Discussions that were calm and respectful and didn’t devolve into chaos previously due to the barrier blocks in their community quickly fell apart due to large swaths of users who were able to enter the community without any barriers that would have been stopped quickly if they had tried to sign up to beehaw. Like, a lot of it was really was the lack of post restrictions within their local communities. An example off the top of my head, beehaw requires you to fill out a form to basically make sure you are wanting to join in line with their community policies. For those that get the false impression that they are asking for a large essay or were asking for censorship and get dissuaded because of that, beehaws admin seem to feel that is a good deterrent to those who wouldn’t engage in good faith within their community anyway. And it seemed to work on its own, but it quickly fell apart as huge amounts of signups began the surge across the two instances they defederated. Individuals who began to cause problems and enter the communities to troll, were almost all from those instances. It was a matter of they literally can only ban and delete, and with how the modding system in lemmy current system is, it was a losing game of whack a mole they currently cannot win.
Ohhh, that’s good to hear. I didn’t know about that last part. Hopefully this will get resolved so they can be more open while still doing their own thing.
The weird stuff that happens after defederation seems to me to be one of those wonky things that might keep users away from this kind of platform. Especially with a lot of the intro guides to the fediverse saying things like “it doesn’t matter which instance you choose, you can go still go to any community.”
Maybe as the instances deals with growing pains and communities get better moderation, defederation can become more of a last resort so these places can feel more connected.
I wonder, if lemmy.world is so unsafe, why are you here?
Where did I say it was unsafe? I was pointing out the dishonesty people have been showing in regards to discussing the reason why beehaw chose to defederate.
Where did I say it was unsafe?
Beehaw did imply that, the communication with Ruud was poor, and their “moderation” excuse is simply them acting in bad faith and you seem to agree with them.
They might have implied as such (I don’t personally think they did, but such an observation is objective.), but I myself didn’t in the post above, and to say I did is dishonest. For the record, I believe they did what they had to do with the limited options they currently have. And I did not like it. Hence why I made an account on here as well. It’s not a fascist regime, and I was pointing out the fact that the people acting like it is are being ridiculous. I directly witnessed the reasons why they defederated and quite ironically, an immense rise of interactions escalating precisely like this causing issues in their own communities and limited staffing to address such (especially towards the vulnerable minority communities beehaw wants to protect in ways reddit did not) in a short amount of time is quite exactly why they chose to defederate. Have a lovely day.
😅
I don’t think it helps your argument when you’re the same one qualifying those who, rightfully, think that Beehaw’s move is a dick move, as people being:
dishonest
and
still pissy about it
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)
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.
I’ve been using it for about a week now, and it already is.
Of course, there’s a handful of subreddits that I miss and feel the urge to go back to every now and then, but I realize that there is enough content on Lemmy to satisfy me during my coffee breaks. And it’s enough to keep me from going back.
Same here. I go to Reddit for a specific thing and forget I’m not on lemmy, see some promoted post or whatever, and wonder who would even dare post that shit here, then remember and switch back.
It’s been nice to be able to reclaim yet another part of my life from advertisements and incessant tracking.
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!
Well said. A month ago, I couldn’t even imagine leaving reddit because there was hardly a viable alternative.
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.
Drama? Ooooh brb
Just remember to not piss in the popcorn.
And stop pooping for 3 days before entering
I tried to sign up for beehaw… they rejected my application. Glad they did, I really enjoy lemmy.world!
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.
I think I read about future plans for being able to move an account to a different instance? I don’t know if that’s a possibility but I would be willing to move to keep things spread out, or create a new account if it was necessary. I know a lot of people wouldn’t want that hassle but I’m glad to have a forum alternative to reddit and probably enough people feel that way to help make this work well into the future.
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.
The very same thing happened to me. It’s amazing to me how fast Lemmy.world has grown in the few weeks I’ve been here!
Same for me. The only thing beehaw now has that interests me is the technology community, which seems fairly active. Other than that it died for me there. For what? Because they couldn’t deal with a few trolls? And they want their own walled garden for site applications?
In contrast, I wrote two lines basically saying “like your vibe and the growth of your community” and was approved within a few hours maybe less.
This is more or less what i said in my purity test to them and got rejected. They should figure their shit out before beehaw crashes and burns.
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.
I’m on my secondary account because of some 0.17.4 vs mobile app compatibility issues, but my accepted application read “I like your moderation philosophy”
That was it.
That was all I wrote.
Jesus you’re bitter
That’s not a nice thing to say to Jesus.
Bitter about what? Beehaw is literally running a purity test in order to let you sign up. You sound much more bitter for me telling the truth than i am.
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
how does censorship in federation work? for example, my account is in beehaw and I posted censored content on a less censored instance, will beehaw able to track it and block my account?
Literally why I came to Lemmy as a whole.
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?
Looks kinda funky. I’m not sure if kbin data is accurate.
I’m unsure about the accuracy that depends on how they count active users, if upvoting and downvoting something counts as activity, then probably. It would certainly be different if they also showed “active today” stats in addition to monthly and bi-yearly stats.
Good time to appreciate the lack of dominant centrality here compared to mastodon.
Mastodon’s flagship instance run by the BDFL,
mastodon.social, has~10times 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.
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
If the tools for discovering and subscribing to communities could be improved so it becomes dead easy to subscribe to communities on any instance from any instance, that might not need to happen.
Right now the process of having to search for each community and subscribe is too clunky. And if someone posts a link to another community it often comes up in a format that takes you to the other instance, where you have no account so can’t subscribe. We need a way to share links to other communities that incorporates an easy “subscribe” button that talks to your own instance.
It would be nice to have some index or search result page that lists communities on all instances, with a subscribe button next to each.
If these things can be smoothed out, it won’t matter too much which instance you have your account on, so that will be less of an obstacle to new users.
Lemmyverse.net does that really well, I think. At the top you can click the house icon and put in your instance, then whatever community you search for or find by scrolling through the list, you can just click on and subscribe
Yes, that is good, though there seems to be a bug in version 0.18 which means that when you click through the Subscribe button doesn’t show up (just the word “Subscribe” where it should be), so you end up having to search for the community anyway to subscribe. Once that bug is fixed though it will be nice and convenient.
Edit: I found another workaround: If when you first click through to the community the Subscribe button isn’t shown (for me it just shows the word “Subscribe” but it’s not a button), then change the “Hot/Active/New/etc.” dropdown to a different value. This refreshes the page and the Subscribe button appears.
It does appear that lemmy.world is heading in the same direction of mastodon.social though.
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?
No, of course not, but I’m willing to be patient. This place grew very fast, and Lemmy itself was a tiny place before all of this. I remember the old days of reddit, too, and how sketch everything was. I hope it doesn’t take very long for basic issues like this to get fixed by the people who know how to do that (which definitely is not me), and I’m okay with mostly chatting amongst ourselves for a bit. (TBF though, I do get responses back from people on other instances, so my messages appear to be getting through eventually.) I’m excited for this thing to work, and feel impatient myself at times, but there is a whole heck of a lot of work that will need to be done to make this place fully functional. This is just one of many issues, and I am here for the ride!
Embrace the void. The void is comfy
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.
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.
Try Liftoff it’s a pretty sweet app
Hmm, I can’t seem to find that anywhere. I checked the play store and f-droid but it’s not in either one, at least not under the name liftoff.
you can install apk from their Github page https://github.com/liftoff-app/liftoff/releases
You can use the website for the meantime. It’s fairly responsively designed.
ahh fun, it won’t even let me log in.
Using Liftoff on Android works well for me
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
We did it Reddit!
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.
Good point. I think it could still work well if the processing is done on the server, ie the specialized Lemmy instance processes the LaTeX equation and replaces it with a generated PNG.
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.
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
