Refer to title.
Kbin and probably kbin.social
The biggest growth will come from Reddit/Twitter. A huge chunk of users from both are young and become easily outraged over social issues.
Websites tend to grow in stages and at each stage they build momentum. If you kill momentum at a key point everyone can end up fleeing the website.
The developers of lemmy are tankies, idiologues can’t help themselves. As a result they’ll drop a comment supporting some abhorrent action from China/Russia or repost China/Russia state media propaganda and cause outrage at a key moment and lemmy will become a dirty word.
Aside from not having controversial admins it also has a much more Reddit like interface, which makes the transition much easier.
I’ve exclusively used it since I found it and now don’t feel like dipping into other ones yet. I also so far kind of like the dev. I’m just on that team for now, but we will see how things change. I’m hoping more work will be put into it to make it even better because I see potential.
Ngl I kinda love the whole tankie drama. It feels ripe for discourse. Though I did watch a fairly toxic debate on here where it turned into yelling, what was essentially the same points on both sides, at each other, without realizing they were actually kind of in agreement. To think any one human perspective is even remotely the right one is a pretty big oof ime. I think we can all agree that the people who came before us are not our goal, and we need to be better.
Well spreading the userbase is the ideal situation… when 1 becomes too big it gets an extreme server load and too much control over content created there… The whole idea of lemmy is to spread out… I can imagine if instance owners get this idea they would temporarily suspend account registration on their own trying to push alternative instances to maintain a good decentralized user base.
AFAIK CDN’s don’t do much to help with logged in traffic. Only users who are not logged in. Kbin.social is on Fastly infrastructure, so it’s likely to scale comparatively well.
It’s probably not desirable for it to get too big, but it should be able to absorb waves of Redditors who will then move on to other instances hopefully.
It probably would have been beehaw if they didnt defederate so early. Given the viewpoints of the people in charge there expressed in their comments on defederating and refederating, I suspect that Beehaw is going to have a consistent problem with constantly defederating and refederating.
Lemmy.world is most likely to grow the largest now because the barrier to entry is low compared to the other two. Additionally, the instance name gives the impression of a general or catchall instance moreso than lemmy.ml or beehaw.
Agreed on the name thing, but the UI there is terrible. kbin is the most old school reddit-like one I’ve seen (admittedly I haven’t seen much though) so I wonder if people will choose that in the end
Kbin has potential, I even tried to sign up for kbin but registration was disabled. So I just signed up to lemmy.world instead. Unless kbin is reopened for registration, I foresee many others doing exactly the same thing.
Beehaw wants a safe space. They don’t want diversity; just the very rigid thoughts and opinions of which the owner approves. For this reason they don’t want most people to subscribe. And that’s fine. Every community can make their own rules.
Of course, every instance has the right to preserve their own echo chamber. That is not a problem, but it could be later when users keep seeing communities from one instance go away and come back, or users get effectively “banned” from interacting with those communities because they signed up on the wrong instance. Even if they refederate, they’ll be seen as unreliable by everyone else.
Its like banning all people who drive a Toyota from parking in your parking lot because some people you don’t like drive a Toyota. Sure, you have the right to do that, but you will be losing out on the parking fare of those big communities of Toyota drivers, and even people who dont drive Toyotas but see you banning them. Then you get less traffic, less users, people leave, and it becomes a parking lot that is 98% empty.
This leads to hyper segmented communities, which have benefits, but normies don’t really like when a place only has 3 active users.
IMO, I hope none becomes “the biggest” or “the official”. It’s good for decentralization to have “competing” instances.
Biggest user base, or biggest in terms of posting? If it’s the latter, definitely lemmynsfw
there is lemmynsfw.com for you already