The numbers are still quite low compared to what the activity now feels like. Two weeks ago I could easily read all posts and comments and now I can’t follow the many new posts ^^
I'm being a lot more active here than I was on Reddit. Trying to make sure it feels like a dynamic space for new redfugees :)
For some reason, same. I'm just, like, feel enthusiastic about Fediverse as a whole and Lemmy in particular.
Same here, I am just afraid this will stop after the first wave of enthusiasm.
I'm feeling the same way, but I suppose we'll soon see.
Even if the reddit exodus doesn't turn into another internet legend, I am enjoying having fun participating in a forum for the first time in a long time. Probably since reddit stopped feeling like one in the early 2010s.
I’ve got a ton of things to post that are either from my pulled down Reddit posts or stuff I had but never posted. Here, if anything I’m trying to pace my posts so that I don’t drown a community in just my threads.
50,000 people is a LOT of people. Keep in mind that a good chunk of the millions of users on reddit and other social media sites are either separated and isolated into smaller segments, or even then most people just lurk.
I looked at the participation (active user) rate, it shows above 20% in Beehaw and 7% overall in Lemmy. Normally subreddits of 3,000-6,000 are kind of slow and people post once in a while, most probably lurk.
Here, at least for now it's really buzzing, people get a sense that they can be heard and real conversations are happening.
Yeah, I'm usually just a lurker but Lemmy makes me want to take part of the experience. I really hope that it will take off in the long run.
You just got used to have millions of users on sub, and forgot that tens of thousands of users is a lot. Especially New users, who is going to read and comment a lot, compared to reddit with half of users being, like, not active at all.
Makes sense. A friend of me unfortunately turns Lemmy down because the largest instance has "only" 1.6k users
I’m going to bee honest, the mascot was a big factor in picking this instance for me.
So far it's not over run by assholes and brigades so I'm diggin it, even if content is sparse for now!
Wow beehaw really took off recently huh?
What this doesn't show is active users, just total. For quite some time we've been one of the most active large instances. I don't remember the exact timing, but we've held the spot of 3rd most active for some time, we just now have total users to match that.
I’ve known about Lemmy for a few months and just registered with Beehaw because it looked active and had a funny name.
What has been the biggest driver in activity? I’m curious how a community like Beehaw bootstraps itself into existence
It did! Look at us go! Yip-Bee-Kiyay!
I chose this platform after I realized I accidentally signed up for an Italian one instead, lol! Glad to bee here!
Hey the bee mascot is cute, who wouldn't join
Yeehaw Beehaw!
I chose not to sign up on lemmy.ml as it didn’t seem that they were looking to become “big”, and seems more focused on a specific niche. How come they are so popular despite those points?
People see that they have the highest user count and gravitate towards it. Most people don't really get how federation works, so they worry about getting "stuck" on an instance with no one to talk to
I think that it was also influenced by it being the developer's instance (thus kinda had some official-ness to it, combined with the domain name reflecting the name of the service) and people wanting to just give newcomers an easy onboard by directing them straight to a link rather than to join-lemmy where some people get confused about choosing an instance. I had seen it in a few subs on reddit where it was just people putting lemmy.ml rather than join lemmy to give someone alternatives to reddit.
If you imagine you're targeting reddit users looking for an alternative and you already know that some people get confused by choosing instances, you're potentially more influenced to just give them a link to one of the instances. Doesn't really matter where they sign up to an extent since it's all federated, just need to skip them past the part that might confuse them. Then if you're doing that, you're also making it more familiar to things they understand by using a domain that looks official. If you say, "Use Lemmy" and then put "beehaw.org", some might question why it's called Lemmy but the website is beehaw. You don't go to reddit.com but call it Linkit, so it may have seemed better to just use lemmy.ml to tell people to use Lemmy. Of course if you onboard people through join-lemmy then it better contextualizes names of instances that don't have lemmy in them, but I think people were just trying to find ways to spread the word without potentially confusing people with the federation aspect.
I to thought it wise to pick one with high numbers. It had nothing to do with being afraid of not having people to talk to though, as I understood that we'd all be connected. It was more a fear that an instance with 20 users might get shut down because the owner got bored. In my mind it seems less likely that a popular instance gets shut down.
So what happens to an account if an I stance goes away?
Most people don’t really get how federation works
This is 100% me, but my understanding is that you can see all community content and interact with everyone regardless of what server you're on, is that more or less correct? I went with beehaw because it seemed moderately popular (I'd read that servers can disappear, and figure more users=less likely?) and is focused on keeping out assholes, which I am 100% cool with.
I'm actually quite pleased to see lemmy.ml focus on what they want to focus on rather than being a general purpose instance like mastodon.social. I read their mission statement and they were pretty adamant that they want to see a variety of different instances - and we should! Reminds me of the golden forum days.
There's definitely a forum vibe here. You can already see that the different instancess (lemmy.ml, beehaw.org, lemmy.world, lemmy.one) have their own specificities. Very refreshing.
This is really cool, thanks for sharing! Do you plan to update it again in the future? I'd love to see what happens an about a month!
Poked my head in to the AMA and it's basically what I expected. To the surprise of no-one Spez is a tool and should go boil his ass.
Is there a time-series plot version of this? I always have difficulty really absorbing the data when it is animated like that.
Pretty cool to see it growing. I'd love to see where this is at in another month or two after reddit's latest clown changes.
I notice (and I realize it's most likely an issue at the source and not the fault of the creator) that some now-dead instances which were formerly top-10 aren't show here. Hexbear also isn't shown: while it (currently) doesn't federate, similarly to bakchodi, it is also a fork and so technically not Lemmy, but pretty much Lemmy.
I used https://the-federation.info/'s Lemmy page to determine the current top 10 Lemmy instances as of the 8th of June 2023. The website only has sorting function for the current data, and the instances have to opt in to be included. Therefore, it is likely that some instances are not included. Furthermore, the website seems to only contain data from the last year, so the website do not have documentation on the top instances prior to this period.
Dope! I wonder what the numbers would be for active users
Why is lemmygrad so popular?
If I remember my Lemmy history right (someone correct me)....
In the early days of Lemmy, everyone was on one instance (lemmy.ml). The founding Lemmy developers (and their friends, I guess) were tankies. At some point they decided to make Lemmy more attractive to the general population, and make the flagship lemmy.ml less overtly Marxist-Leninist/offputting. So they split lemmy.ml into 2: lemmy.ml for non-commie stuff, and lemmygrad.ml for commie stuff. Since the bulk of Lemmy users in the early days were still tankies (or their friends), they were still generally using both instances very heavily.
The day that lemmygrad.ml ceases to be the #2 instance and becomes just another niche-interest instance is the day we can say Lemmy has truly become mainstream, I think.
Nice work, Gabino! Thanks!
Did anyone else hear a horse race announcer while watching this? “And coming out of nowhere, it’s Beehaw! The crowd is stunned as Beehaw rockets to third place! This is one to keep an eye on, folks!”
Beehaw 🔛🔝
30k users? Doesn't lemmy.ml have around 1k users? Are those visitors numbers?
Or does it include other Fediverse users...
It is the amount of user accounts the instance have.
Yea. If the weekly/monthly user numbers are available, that'd be cool too. Tough to get a clear image during migrations though because signing up and never returning counts, I think, as a weekly/monthly active user in the time window.
Cool animation BTW!!
Go beehaw!!
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