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10 days after 3rd party reddit app shutdown, Lemmy's top 10 instances combine for a thriving userbase of 234,000

Current breakdown at the time of this post sorted by the number of monthly active users:

  1. lemmy.world: 101,013 total users / 27,472 active users
  2. lemmy.ml: 41,972 total users / 4,905 active users
  3. beehaw.org: 12,270 total users / 4,178 active users
  4. sh.itjust.works: 17,509 total users / 3,381 active users
  5. feddit.de: 8,675 total users / 2,935 active users
  6. lemm.ee: 10,348 total users / 2,751 active users
  7. lemmynsfw.com: 22,967 total users / 2,310 active users
  8. lemmy.fmhy.ml: 8,777 total users / 1,704 active users
  9. lemmy.ca: 5,072 total users / 1,656 active users
  10. programming.dev: 5,058 total users / 1,242 active users

Source: the-federation.info/platform/73

Hextic ,

Came here right after Joey stopped working. Gave official app one good spin before deleting: virtually unusable.

sounddrill ,

I’m told it has improved greatly in these months but who’d want to use reddit now? Lol

Even then, it will never come close to something like infinity

Bdi89 ,

I’m one of those! Literally just joined for my first comment. :)

MargotRobbie ,
@MargotRobbie@lemmy.world avatar

And to think you thought you needed a John Oliver AMA. John Oliver don’t have anything on me.

“Barbie”, only in theaters July 21st.

MicroWave OP ,
@MicroWave@lemmy.world avatar

Margot, you are the best novelty account.

MargotRobbie ,
@MargotRobbie@lemmy.world avatar

I don’t know what you’re talking about, I’m just here to promote “Barbie”.

harry_h0udini911 ,

Glad, that Greedy man is zucking user base. Hehehe.

sennalonso1981 ,

Nice

ChexMax ,

Testing

jmoriarty ,

Also testing.

bladeiii ,

Third test…

spiritedaway ,

There’s a dedicated community you can use to do testing if needed !test

starman ,
@starman@programming.dev avatar

Hello fellow programming.dev lemmings!

Salvo ,
@Salvo@aussie.zone avatar

I think that Lemmy does need more of the right exposure.

If you search for any Lemmy content on Google or Duck-Duck-Go, you don’t get any good results. This is probably because most people use Apps or secure browsers that don’t allow tracking.

Maybe Duck-Duck-Go need to have a !bang search modifier for Lemmy. duckduckgo.com/bangs

nemesis_aorta ,

Maybe Duck-Duck-Go need to have a !bang search modifier for Lemmy. duckduckgo.com/bangs

Most likely not feasible, because what the bangs do is passing site:domain.com to the search result. As you know, Lemmy does not have a singular domain name so this won’t work for it. As a matter of fact, there is a bang for Mastodon, but it only searches the biggest instance, mastodon.social.

thedaly ,

Of the top five, sh.itjust.works seems to be the best. Definitely the instance that I would recommend to new users.

teraflopsweat ,

Why is that?

thedaly ,

Well I would recommend it since it works, hence the name, shitjustworks lol.

In all seriousness, you can’t start a new platform and simultaneously expect to exclude large segments of potential users. Shitjustworks seems to toe the line better than other instances. They ban spam/bots while still allowing most content.

Generally, I recommend avoiding the top two instances if you are considering creating an account, and I would recommend avoiding beehaw for other reasons. So that leaves you at shitjustworks.

TechyDad ,
@TechyDad@lemmy.world avatar

I’d second the recommendation to avoid BeeHaw. That’s where I started when I left Reddit. It’s not bad per se there. I wouldn’t say that they are rude or anything. The big problem is that they’ve decided to defederate from many other Lemmy instances.

In case anyone doesn’t understand federation, imagine if you signed up for an email address and then realized that, because the person running the email service decided so, you can’t email anyone at Gmail.com or Hotmail.com. If you have nobody you want to email there (no Lemmy communities you want to interact with there), then it’s not a problem. However, if you decide you really want to join a community there, it gets difficult.

I left BeeHaw and signed up for Lemmy.world.

thedaly ,

I don’t understand the big push to defederate from other instances when individual users can block instances as they please.

miridius ,

Individuals can’t block whole instances yet (apart from via a browser extension), once that feature arrives there will be a lot less call for defederation I expect.

thedaly ,

I didn’t know that. Thank you for clarifying.

mr_pip ,
@mr_pip@discuss.tchncs.de avatar

I‘m all with you on the beehaw topic, but please keep in mind to recommend smaller instances to newbies, because that‘s what federation is all about. Aside from load distribution (lots of instances are run by individuals or groups on small(ish) machines), you can avoid being independent on single large entities keeping their uptime etc.

TLDR: recommend smaller instances for load distribution to get the best out of a federated world!

miridius ,

I wouldn’t recommend small instances to newbies. New users will likely use the All feed a lot, until they discover the communities they like. And on a small instance the All feed isn’t going to have as many communities in it. Also the experience of searching for communities is worse on a smaller instance.

I think these aren’t problems for experienced users but I don’t think we want to expose newbies to them if we can help it.

mr_pip ,
@mr_pip@discuss.tchncs.de avatar

Do you mean local communities? If not, I do not understand your statement.
Also: can you explain how searching for communities is worse on smaller instances than on large ones? That does not make sense to me and does not reflect my experience at all.

thedaly ,

I run my own instance and the one thing I will say is that I don’t see as much content browsing all on my own instance versus all on lemmy.world. Not sure why that is.

miridius ,

So the way Lemmy works is that a instance will only know about (and have the content of) a community if a user on that instance is subscribed to it. So when you browse All or search, only those communities that someone on the instance is subscribed to are included in the results. On a smaller instance that’s naturally going to be fewer communities.

Now if you search for a specific community by its URL that the instance doesn’t yet know about, it will actually go and fetch it for the first time. What this looks like to the user though is that the search shows no results, then suddenly 5-10 seconds later the results change and the community appears. Which is not a great UX for someone new. So again on an instance with more people it’s a lot more likely that someone else has already searched for and subscribed to what you’re looking for so that you don’t see that issue

Robaque , (edited )

Why wouldn’t the All feed have as many communities on small instances? Does federation have to be ‘consensual’?

Also, I noticed I can reply to comments on this thread but not the post itself. Does this have to do with federation or is it a limitation of Jerboa or smthn?

(Also - TIL feddit.it is located in Finland!? 😅)

ryathal ,

All is based on every community that someone subscribed to on an instance, so smaller instances generally have less communities.

TassieTosser ,

Because that’s where the most active NCD community is.

suspecm ,
@suspecm@lemmy.world avatar

I did try to start with that. My first experience was in may I think and ironically enough, it did not work back then. Probably improved a lot since then.

Usernameblankface ,
@Usernameblankface@lemmy.world avatar

I’m currently starting out on Lemmy.world, any reason to switch over?

ryathal ,

Not really once you have an account. During the protest lemmy.world and ml were basically unusable though, but either they scaled or people left the servers.

bappity ,
@bappity@lemmy.world avatar

let’s shoot for 300k!!!

hiramfromthechi ,
@hiramfromthechi@lemmy.world avatar

Doing course correction in fixing social media is a long game. It’ll take a while, and there’ll be turbulence, but this is a great start

absGeekNZ ,
@absGeekNZ@lemmy.nz avatar

Lemmy.nz here

I think it is cool that it is coming up on nearly 2 million across all ~1200 instances.

pandas ,
@pandas@are.sexy avatar

@absGeekNZ @MicroWave very nice! also, greetings from mastodon!

MicroWave OP ,
@MicroWave@lemmy.world avatar

So cool that you commented from mastodon.

pandas ,
@pandas@are.sexy avatar

@MicroWave IKR! 😎I've also subscribed to all of my favorite lemmy/kbin subs and mags too on here, but my feed is a mess now haha 😅 . I think the coming mastodon updates will provide better interfaces for cross service usage. Can't wait for that feature-set to roll out 🤞!

MicroWave OP ,
@MicroWave@lemmy.world avatar

That’s great! I should play around with subscribing to lemmy with my mastodon account.

pandas ,
@pandas@are.sexy avatar

@MicroWave Definitely give it a try! Just don't go too wild with subs like I made the mistake of doing 🤣

jarfil ,

Some users have accounts on more than a single instance, some instances may be malicious, home to just spam/bot accounts.

Things are looking promising, but it’s still early.

BroccoliFarts ,

This is my account on this instance. Jerboa search doesn’t give me a ton of communities when I’m logged into my main lemmy.zip account. And I haven’t figured out a way to load a community manually on mobile that allows me to subscribe with my .zip account, so I add subscriptions infrequently on my laptop.

sylverstream ,

Kia ora from another lemmy.nz user :)

hardypart ,
@hardypart@feddit.de avatar

That number contains a huge number of bots. The active users number is a much better way to track the growth of the Threadiverse.

troyunrau ,
@troyunrau@lemmy.ca avatar

If you only include active last month, we are are at about 70k active users. Active meaning posted or commented.

If you assume 90% are lurking and not active, then that value can be as high as 700k. But likely 2M is off target.

absGeekNZ ,
@absGeekNZ@lemmy.nz avatar

90-9-1 rule says that you may in fact be correct.

90% are probably lurkers. But there is a good argument to be made that a lot of the recent growth is from the 9% of contributors on Reddit, and some of the 1% also.

Currently I suspect that much less than 90% here are lurkers, but that should balance out over time just due to how social communities work.

troyunrau ,
@troyunrau@lemmy.ca avatar

You’re likely correct on all of your assumptions, in my opinion :)

SJ_Zero ,
@SJ_Zero@lemmy.fbxl.net avatar

A quarter million users and that’s not even with all the different instances.

Very cool. Just remember folks, don’t forget to diversify and decentralize! These other instances have some interesting posts and conversations, and by spreading out we make sure no single instance or community can break the fediverse.

FinalBoy1975 ,

A lot of them also restrict content. There are disadvantages to joining smaller instances, depending on the philosophy of the person who runs the instance. There’s even an instance that does not allow communities to be created on its own instance. It will accept applications from people who wish to create one, but they mostly reject applications on their own whim. I think the future of Lemmy as a Reddit alternative will rely on larger, freer instances to be supported well so they have room for growth and change. I have my personal preferences. I don’t want content from exploding-heads, but I also want to see the content I want to see. Some smaller instances are restricting that content, almost seeming to be like cults in the making. There are small instances from which it is impossible to find and subscribe to communities from lemmy.world. You have to search for them on a larger instance, then copy and paste in the address bar in your browser. I imagine on a dedicated phone app that would not be possible. So, you can advocate for “spreading out” all you want. In the end, if the goal is to have a strong alternative to Reddit, spreading out is kind of pointless for a lot of users.

DrSteveBrule ,

I think there are some good reasons for servers restricting content. programming.dev is one of the biggest examples of this by not allowing users to create communities, however if you wish to moderate a community or ask for someone else to moderate one, and it falls within the interests of the server, there is a good chance it will be created. It might be obvious with that server, but it is almost all content relating to software development. It doesn’t really make sense to create a community of cooking recipes there, especially since several others exist within other servers. The biggest advantage to this in my opinion is that there aren’t dozens of empty communities. If you look at some of the bigger servers that allow users to create their own, there are tons of communities with 0 posts. I think its good that some servers out there allow users to create any community, but it makes sense for many servers to not.

FinalBoy1975 ,

deleted_by_author

    •
    DrSteveBrule ,

    I wasn’t trying to create an argument, just pointing out not all of those instances are bad. No I didn’t assume that was all of what you meant. To me, it seemed like you didn’t understand the goal of instances like programming.dev. I try to keep in mind that many people are still brand new to Lemmy and wanted to offer counterpoints to your original comment. I wasn’t trying to nitpick your comment, sorry if you got the wrong idea.

    Picklerbug ,

    This is amazing

    RatzChatsubo ,

    I think I can confidently say now that this is a legit Reddit alternative

    cantstopthesignal ,

    Quickly approaching the same amount of new content created. Better memes too

    BroccoliFarts ,

    I think, because it’s a new platform that most of us want to see succeed, everyone is far more active to ensure the communities get established. If there’s a couple of days without a post in one of the 3d printing communities I subscribe to, someone will post a random print they find useful or ask a question about a new filament to keep it active. This low stress discussion is great.

    The 3d printing community on that other site ais great, but sometimes it feels like posts don’t gain traction unless it’s on a 1 cubic meter Voron that can print PEEK (translation: very expensive/unique). On the Lemmy communities, there’s more discussions on Enders and Anycubics (translation: most common budget printers).

    Meowoem ,

    Yeah I’ve genuinely not missed it, been just over two weeks and I’ve been having so much fun here I haven’t once found myself at a loose end wondering whats happening on Reddit

    Which is surprising considering i still run quite a few subs I started and mod a few medium sized ones, when I get back home in a couple of weeks I’ll convert my bots to message me via lemmy instead and I really don’t think I’ll be going back

    rbos ,
    @rbos@lemmy.ca avatar

    I confidently deleted my 33k karma, 12 year old reddit account yesterday. I agree.

    RatzChatsubo ,

    Mr big shot over here. I don’t think I ever looked at my karma over there

    rbos ,
    @rbos@lemmy.ca avatar

    I took note of it before I left. Other people mentioned it. I didn’t think it would be as big as it was. Kinda cool. Never cared about it enough to check.

    MoonshineDegreaser ,
    @MoonshineDegreaser@lemmy.world avatar

    I’m happy to see someone say that. Just made my account a minute ago

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