Current breakdown at the time of this post sorted by the number of monthly active users:
- lemmy.world: 101,013 total users / 27,472 active users
- lemmy.ml: 41,972 total users / 4,905 active users
- beehaw.org: 12,270 total users / 4,178 active users
- sh.itjust.works: 17,509 total users / 3,381 active users
- feddit.de: 8,675 total users / 2,935 active users
- lemm.ee: 10,348 total users / 2,751 active users
- lemmynsfw.com: 22,967 total users / 2,310 active users
- lemmy.fmhy.ml: 8,777 total users / 1,704 active users
- lemmy.ca: 5,072 total users / 1,656 active users
- programming.dev: 5,058 total users / 1,242 active users
Beehaw admins shot themselves in the foot, it was supposed to be the no.1 by now but they decided to persecute the left instead.
I actually quite like having Beehaw being proactive about their users’ safety/ mental well-being.
I wound up making a second account on Lemmy.world so I can see what’s going on in the larger Lemmy community, but I also appreciate being able to browse and post in a safer environment. I just wish the Lemmy back-end had more nuanced federation/ defederation options and better mod tools so I didn’t have to make a second account to browse the extended Lemmy community.
A genocide denier, impressive.
Edit because my first draft was just being sarcastic. I am pointing out how useless your comment was for discourse. The person you replied to never stated anything about communism, they were just pro-defederation for beehaw. They didn’t even specify “pro defederation from lemmygrad”, just that they like the heavy moderation. You then called them a red scare apologist for nonsensical reasons. So since you are pro-federation with lemmygrad, I jumped to the conclusion that you are a genocide denier, even though you never said anything of the sort. It’s useless conversation, it in no way moves the conversation forward, and all it does it make you feel superior.
I’m afraid I don’t have an account on beehaw and I don’t have any bookmarks either but essentially they pose themselves as “neutral” but they are the far-right definition of neutral. The first issue was their terrible excuse to defederate from lemmygrad, they weren’t sincere at all, they just kept making it look like they were doing some sort of “good thing”, from that point they kept removing any strongly left-wing comments and banning users who disagreed with the American narrative of world events.
That other reply/summary is a pretty biased hot take. Click on that user and see where he’s coming from and you might see why. I’m not on Beehaw, but I’ll take a shot at doing better.
Beehaw has the goal of being a “safe space” on the Internet: no harassment, no trolls, very supportive of marginalized groups, etc. So they’re heavily moderated, but they have (or, at least had) a small mod team.
When the Reddit exodus started, with the sudden flood of people to Lemmy overall, two of the bigger instances, .world and shit just works, had open/instant registrations without any verification. Apparently people were signing up on those two instances and harassing/trolling communities on Beehaw, and their small mod team was overwhelmed trying to keep everything within their stricter policies. They said the mod tools available to them currently don’t allow much granularity, so about the only thing they could do is defederate from the two instances, and that’s what they did.
They said they consider it temporary until the tools or situation improve to the point where they can better handle it.
I personally think their goal is noble, but I’ve never seen anyone succeed at making a completely safe space on the Internet, and I’m not sure a federated instance is the place to make one, but good on them for trying.
Not really. They never wanted a large instance and didn’t want to become a Reddit replacement. I see them more like a federated Tildes, honestly.
When I switched they were one of the biggest communities, I’m really surprised to see just HOW FAR they fell.
beehaw defederating from lemmygrad was the entire reason why I created an account on lemmy.world
To be fair it’s not really “falling” - Lemmy instances are not in competition with one another due to federation.
Understandably people want to feel like they “won” somehow, but this isn’t something you really need to worry about on the Fediverse, it’s more like everyone working alongside each other.
It doesn’t appear like they value growth for growth’s sake. And that’s cool because it lets them focus on other, arguably more important, stuff. Many of our preconceived notions about social networking don’t translate well to the federation model.
That’s pretty cool.
I’m truly not being a negative nancy but the last time I checked reddit had 400M user accounts. We should be comparing active user numbers, but either way, this is a drop in the bucket and reddit rightly does not consider Lemmy a threat to its supremacy at this point.
We’re doing great though! Good trajectory.
Do we know how many of those accounts are bots? I’m curious because I definitely ended up interacting with many many bots recently on that site.
I kinda don’t agree that that would provide any valuable insight unless you factor in the ease of access to the internet and speeds and availability of smartphones and computers across the world back when reddit was in its infancy
Personally I don’t care if I’m talking to millions of people vs hundreds of thousands as long as there are enough people to make it feel alive and like a community.
Some thoughts on that, Reddit has half a billion monthly active users. Lemmy has about 50k monthly active users. That’s .01% or one ten thousandth. We won’t be displacing Reddit anytime soon, but then we don’t want to. That’s the main problem with Reddit, it’s too damn big and too damn corporate. The main thing is Lemmy sees enough growth to stay relevant and viable. It doesn’t have to compete with anyone.
I did rm -r * / the first time I ever jailbroke an iPhone by spazzing and hitting enter before I’d finished typing the full command. (I’m terrible at mobile typing.) I’ll never forget the full body sweat that put me in immediately.
Did that once many years ago on a Linux system, wanted to delete a directory tree, but I was logged in as root and didn’t realize I was at the root prompt. Wiped out the whole drive. Not a big deal since it was just a test install so I was being careless anyway.
Back then Linux didn’t protect root from making stupid mistakes. I think now you need another switch to actually delete the root directory. I’ve since gone to using FreeBSD mainly and I haven’t tried it there, but I think at root as root you can still wipe the drive with that command. FreeBSD is less idiot proof than Linux. I think iOS is based on BSD Unix, isn’t it?
I don’t need Lemmy to compete with or kill Reddit. All I wanted was any one platform to get enough of an influx of users to be self-sustaining even after the outrage started to die down, which appears to have been successful.
I agree. Just give me some decent posts and discussion. For niche things I can go to a big platform with all the users. For my daily browsing, I appreciate a small but active community.
Yeah as long as we have an active enough community here it doesn’t matter what goes on at reddit.
It kinda does in that when things worsen, more people come to Lemmy, but I agree that Lemmy’s success doesn’t depend on reddit’s demise.
What it really needed was a good app.
It’s still glitchy though… like on memmy, if you swipe too far to downvote, and go back, the color for upvote is still the downvote color
I tried a few different apps but I settled on just using the mobile website on my phone. The interface is solid even there, which I think is a great feat.
I agree, reddit got too big to be fun. That said lemmy still needs to get bigger in order for communities to actually thrive.
I disagree. What made Reddit for me is that there were so many people on it, than any niche hobby had it’s own space.
Sure the main big subreddits were shit shows, but the hobby subreddits were great! Something that still isn’t a thing for Lemmy. Specialization.
I still find myself checking Reddit out for subreddits on specific niche games for example.
Like there is literally a subreddit for almost anything. Robot vacuums. Sins of a Solar Empire. Crusader kings. Fish tanks. MotoGP.
Things that probably will take a while to get running on Lemmy.
Right now Lemmy is too “general” for me to really have a feed of things I actually care about.
Exactly. I don’t want or need to build another McDonalds or Starbucks; I just want to go to the Mom and Pop down the road without worrying if they’ll tank.
It’s a hard habit to break, because we’ve been trained to think this way for years, but try to remember: we don’t need to attract millions of users to be valuable. This isn’t a commercial enterprise. We don’t sell advertising. We don’t measure success by the number of eyeballs we can promise paying customers.
What matters now is the quality of conversation. In fact, that’s the ONLY measure of any consequence. It’s strange, because in the past, someone’s often tried to use services like this as a way to make money, or as a way to make something else they were selling more attractive. We expected it. It was always in the back of our heads. It even got to the point that if a company did something that wasn’t an effort to increase profitability, we criticized them. Generosity, real generosity, was alien to us.
It’s hard to wrap your head around the idea that people volunteer their time and money to build and maintain the fediverse, simply because they want us to be able to communicate. That’s it. There’s no hidden agenda. There’s no quest for profit at our expense.
I’m perfectly fine with the fediverse growing slowly. I don’t want it to be strained beyond what the mods can handle. Bigger isn’t necessarily better.
I personally don’t derive any value from high quality conversations about topics I don’t care about. That’s why I need these millions of users, so that there are people I can talk with. About topics I care about. I’m willing to go on a limb here an say that your interests and mine don’t fully align.
In the case of social network like this, bigger generally is better for the users. The thing that made Reddit great was that whatever your niece interest, there was a community of thousands of other interested people. There was so much information and advice on whatever obscure topic.
There’s a reason why there’s only around 10 really popular social networks and it’s certainly not that those platforms are any good. The network effect is important.
Agreed on the need to adjust mindset. Initially I behaved similarly to how I did on that other site until I realized that Lemmy is different and that’s ok. It’s a lot smaller and federation has its advantages and drawbacks and we’ll see it in action soon enough. Many seek the comfort of the familiar and are not always finding it. Start by appreciating the hard work that has allowed many of us to transition here quite easily. Take a deep breath, look around and realize that we are now playing a different game.
Coming from the non-profit world, it is never that easy. Even when there is no one officially making any money, there are people who will see it as a way to make some bank. There is also a drawback in that not making money can and will affect the amount of time people can put in unless there is a fair way to get them compensation. Volunteering also brings a huge amount of interpersonal and inter-organizational drama. That is why grassroots organizations and movements have a habit of fracturing into smaller groups.
At the same time, there is power in goodwill and being non-profit. You just really need to be careful in vetting your instance and keep an eye on issues in a way people not used to this type of world are not familiar with.
But I wouldn’t be here if I didn’t have a belief that it could be successful enough as a community. I also wouldn’t have been working in the NGO world for the past decade if I didn’t believe in that. But let’s not have too rosy glasses on. Growing slowly will also give this community a chance to work out the kinks and not die in a blaze of fire.
Or my personal favorite: karmawhoring bots reposting content stolen from other peoples’ OnlyFans accounts.
I’m truly not being a negative nancy but the last time I checked reddit had 400M user accounts. We should be comparing active user numbers, but either way, this is a drop in the bucket and reddit rightly does not consider Lemmy a threat to its supremacy at this point.
Even when considering accounts across all lemmy instances, it still only combines for a total of 2 million. But overall I’m optimistic about lemmy’s trajectory too.
I went back onto Reddit today and like 20 posts in popular had 5k+ comments. I really miss the variety but, we’ll get there.
I think the stat is actually 430M monthly active users. https://www.businessofapps.com/data/reddit-statistics/
It’s nuts.
Quite–that’s why active is a better metric. And as others have stated, metrics maybe don’t even matter; or they misrepresent.
My point was only for those who want to know the fate it Lemmy as it compares to Reddit: Reddit doesn’t care right now. They’re not going to feel the pain of the bleed for quite a while yet
On a user-driven platform, not all users are created equal. Lurkers bring little to no value to the platform beyond clicks. There might be a huge engagement difference on a per user basis.
Moreover… I just want my niche communities to be active. We will never have Reddit’s archive of content, but we can get to a point where the Lemmy’s corpus of knowledge grows to at the same rate as Reddit’s. I don’t know how many users it’ll take to achieve that; 500k? 1m? 2m? 10m? No one knows that number, but to me that is the number to beat.
I mean, it’s more of a threat than it was. In all likelihood, this won’t be the last time reddit does something to really anger it’s userbase. There is a much higher chance of people leaving in future incidents if there is an alternative platform with enough users to actually have the content people want.
All i know is I spend half my time on lemmy/kbin now blocking stuff because it’s just stupid meme after meme after meme.
That wasn’t the case a few weeks ago.
You could also subscribe to the stuff you want and switch your main feed from all to subs. Whitelist instead of blacklist
I have high hopes for Lemmy, but I don’t think that having a lot of users is going to be a super positive thing in the long term. It’d be great if it could feel like younger Reddit for longer than younger Reddit did, you know? Stay at least a little under the radar.
Rather have 240k users here than 240m on reddit.
Sometimes it’s the quality of the shit posts and not the post shits.
I’m surprised how lively it feels here. It’s amazing that it feels nearly as fell as reddit with not even 1% of the user base.
I think the users on here tend to be active on the site in general rather than just a few specific subreddits. And also the small amount of users all interacting on the same communities gives the entire site the feeling that smaller subreddits used to have. Which was always infinitely better than big subreddits will millions of users, infested with bots.
