Lemmy.world grew from about 51k users when third-party reddit apps started to shut down to about 84.8k users at the time of this post.
Definitely felt some growing pains in the past few days, but it’s great to see the platform more active now that things have become more stable.
So, welcome reddit expats!
Friendly reminder that lemmy is still being actively developed. There will be many performance improvements in the future, as well as UI and whatnot. Stick around, create content and engage with your communities.
Agreed! The only way to make sure that we can hit “critical mass” (the point in which content is relatively the same as on Reddit), is to continue what we did over there, and more. Most of us were lurkers on Reddit (me included). We now have to generate the content that most bots, mods, and superuser did for us. This allows us to get the links and content that we enjoyed reading and interacting with on Reddit.
I was using Bacon Reader for Android for the last 10 years. For me it was the only way of using Reddit. I’m now checking Lemmy. I hope we can build a vibrant community here. I’m not coming back to Reddit.
RiF being killed was the last straw for me and Reddit.
They just don’t care so long as they are making money. I was doxxed twice last year thanks to two different user on a fandom I moderated. They didn’t care that I was openly DOXed, pretty much them saying that it wasn’t their problem.
They just don’t care about people, just how much trouble they will get in and how much money is to be made.
So this whole “only money matters” ideal is a symptom of a larger issue that is going to get worse.
Nice growth, looks to be slowing down a little - I wonder how much is related to the poor performance last few days
I am one of those users.
Don’t even feel the need to go back to reddit. This platform is going to take off.
I feel it, can barely reply from all the errors being thrown.
Popular instances like lemmy.world have felt a lot of growing pains recently.
I’ve made a secondary account at sh.itjust.works for enhanced shit posting capabilities, since it seems to be more responsive at the moment.
I feel bad for the lemmy.world admins that have to keep up with the software needed and costs accrued to handle the world knocking on their doorstep. I hope advertisers hit them up soon so their bills become easier to pay. While advertising was annoying on reddit, I’m more than willing to put up with it on this instance of lemmy, the admins have earned it.
I hope advertisers
I think this is an unpopular stance here. I’m not certain how else admins keep things running, but my limited time on Lemmy suggests people are hostile to ad-influence on how things run.
Ruud also runs Mastodon.world which has 160k+ users and manages to survive on donations alone. Not sure where the cutoff point is for when that is no longer viable, if there is one. Mastodon.social is huge and takes sponsorships and also gets some grant money I believe. They don’t run ads per se though and claim all sponsors accept contracts stating Mastodon is not going to be run in a way that is influenced by sponsors.
Just stop accepting new people
There’s no reason to not push them towards other instances
I’m beginning to feel this way too. We need to distribute the load, especially at this early stage.
What is also missing from the big picture is a dedicated “About” link in the navbar of Lemmy instances, providing users with a statement of detailed information on the people/organizations behind a given instance, its location in the world, its hardware, etc. A byline in the front page sidebar isn’t enough.
Please just donate… No need to invite ads here.
Unfortunately, the reality is that it may become necessary.
Donations can be a saving grace if enough people donate regularly. But such is dependent on people’s willingness, their own financial stability, and how stressed servers are (how much it’ll cost to upgrade and/or maintain infrastructure.)
It’s great if it’s viable. Means there’s less outside influence. But that’s if.
As far as I’m aware, Wikipedia has been able to maintain it purely off donations. But I’m not sure if Lemmy could.
Maybe? One thing Lemmy does have going for it is that the majority of users seem to be aware how… Fragile? the fediverses can be. There’s arguably more passion behind the users and maybe willing to throw support out.
But hard to say.
Most importantly: Lemmy instances are not being run for profit. There is no need to make exorbitant amounts of money to pay shareholders. Right now it’s enough to cover hosting costs, in the future you probably want to be able to pay a couple of people as well.
Commercial instances are not off the table, but I hope we can avoid it. If it happens, I hope it will not be about profiting directly from the users, but instead through e.g. professional services. Imagine a company that hosts instances for entities that are willing to pay (I see this especially in the microblogging/Mastodon space, where for instance governments want to run their own instance).
Or maybe nonprofit organizations. Though I’m having a harder time imagining why they’d need a social network site, especially if it’s federated with our shit posting “sublemmies” or whatever we’re calling them here.
NLnet already sponsors the development of Lemmy. They donate money when certain roadmap items are achieved (which has slowed down due to the efforts to make Lemmy scale). NLnet sponsors organizations and people that contribute to an open information society.
Places like Lemmy are not just shit posting. Just look at the immense value of the content at reddit. Google became so useless when the blackout happened. LLMs like GPT4 are trained for a large part on this human generated content. It’s absolutely vital that this information is not controlled by a handful large corporations as it is now. Federated social media could break this pattern and bring back a free and open internet.
With care and love we can build a new and better reddit
So what’s happening over at Reddit? I assume all is still well over there. But after ten plus years, I actually haven’t been over there since Apollo died because I’ve just been busy and scrolling here before bed instead of the old Reddit browser.
I assume it’s business as usual and it didn’t implode, but honestly it’s been like three days since I’ve been there and that’s probably one of my longer streaks without casually browsing at some point in the day.
Yeah, basically nothing has changed. However, after switching to Lemmy I’ve noticed the quality of the content is higher
I use wefwef and for me the scrolling is similar to Apollo and scratches the itch. I am struggling, though, with subscribing to communities and curating my feed. But also remembering my Reddit feed took years to curate so trying to be patient. I just find more hoops to jump through here to get to the content I want to view (discounting the bugginess of things because I understand it’s new and they’re sorting it out still).
Bummer there wasn’t a bigger visible hit to Reddit for their shenanigans, but I am glad that more content creators have migrated and more interesting things are also appearing in the feed I have been working on here. It is very green and clunky, but also feels fresh!
Well I tried lemmy a number of years ago and it was a ghost town. I hardly found anything I wanted to read and Reddit had it all. Now I’m back and I’ve noticed a lot more content. Others might notice too when they come to check it out. From this, I suspect we will see growth.
I mostly visited r/All so the “All” feed works for me
This feels like Reddit from 2010. Not the interface, but like the feel of discovering a new link aggregator.
The bean posts are definitely more thoughtful here.
That’s impressive! It also definitely explains why lemmy.world has been slow to respond in my Lemmy app.
Can’t recommend spinning up a second account on a smaller instance enough. It’s made the experience so much faster than it was using my account on .world
I wish more of the apps let you enter a custom server URL which would encourage this aspect of the fediverse. I currently use connect for lemmy, its great but only has 3 static server options.
The 3 options are just shortcuts. You can type in any server you want.
You can add custom instances on Liftoff (!liftoff@lemmy.world). It has .world, .ml, and beehaw as the defaults but you can add instances manually as well. I’m using it right now and added lemm.ee
you absolutely can in connect, just tap the text field and enter in the domain
Which lemmy would you recommend? I chose world because I thought it’s the international version since there’s no lemmy specific for my country.
Mali and Estonia seem popular for some reason.
I’m posting from my secondary account on lemm.ee , which is a another nice general purpose server that’s very responsive performance wise.
I’m on lemmy.one and have had zero issues
Truly have no idea if this or other similar projects will succeed long-term, but I do think that any alternative puts much needed pressure on social media companies to stop sucking ass.
Here’s to hoping it keeps growing. Gonna need content other than beans though.
Every platform has their “bean” content. I spent enough time on Reddit to have dealt with the constant “the narwhal bacons at midnight” comments we used to deal with.
“Midnight chili better with rice 5/7”
I remember that time, it wasn’t as cringe while it was happening… I think… I hope
Chili does sound like it’d be better with rice though.
