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.
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.
wefwef has this feature!
you absolutely can in connect, just tap the text field and enter in the domain
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
Oh yeah I’ve done the same thing. My primary is on Lemmy.world I’m posting this from my secondary account, Sh.itjust.works is relatively fast for me and a lot less error prone I’ve noticed.
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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.
You can check out this page that keeps an updated list of “recommended” instances based on their performance and various other stats. Take a peek and see if their rules sound like something you want to be part of.
I’m on lemmy.one and have had zero issues
I’m posting from my secondary account on lemm.ee , which is a another nice general purpose server that’s very responsive performance wise.
Someone shared this instance map yesterday. It’s not a complete map of instances as far as I can tell, but perhaps it can help you find a smaller one closer to you.
Mali and Estonia seem popular for some reason.
If I had to guess, the latter is because of lemm.ee, whose admin is from there (according to GitHub).
I’m on Lemm.ee it’s been good to me. Ran smooth during the migration.
Yeah I’m happy with the performance on lemm.ee so far. I was on lemmy.world but I kept running to “failed to fetch” errors and overall slowness. I’m not surprised, given by how many users are on lemmy.world, but it goes to show the importance of decentralization for Lemmy (and the fediverse in general).
This, but also an instance with a good ping, close to your house.
Things are working so much better now that I switch. It was just a nightmare on world.
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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.
Similar for me but, Apollo. Reddit was only tolerable because of Apollo, and now that it’s gone, I am too. wefwef is quite close to it though. Im enjoying it so far.
That’s the app I used exclusively. Have you found a Lemmy app that is similar? I’ve tried Jerboa, Connect and Liftoff, but I’m still looking for something comparable to BaconReader.
Same. Used AlienBlue for a short while until I got an Android phone. Then moved to Bacon Reader for the following decade.
Reddit is effectively dead to me. Without BR there is simply no way for me to interact with the site, plus I go out of my way to avoid reddit.com in search results.
Maybe it doesn’t matter, but I like to think it does for their traffic statistics.
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
The bean posts are definitely more thoughtful here.
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!
This feels like Reddit from 2010. Not the interface, but like the feel of discovering a new link aggregator.
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
I have just missed discourse with real humans.
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.
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.
Wikipedia is able to pull that off because wikipedia is a digital encyclopedia, not a social forum to add comments to or respond at a massive scale like lemmy is or reddit was. A majority of services either get their revenue from ads, or they start off not doing that but eventually have to cave in and let ads in.
I think ads can be annoying sometimes, but if they’re done in a similar way reddit did them before their downfall, then it would be tolerable and at least give the lemmy.world admins enough money to cover server running costs
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.
Try another instance, as close to your home as possible.
You can browse the map here https://lemmy.fediverse.observer/map
Good idea, opened up another account with our northern Canadian brother sh.itjust.works/ for backup
Yeah, I also have one on lemmy.ca, the ping is more consistent (both are 2-3ms).
I paused using lemmy.ml because 90% of the time it doesn’t work
I tried changing my profile picture on both desktop and mobile and keep getting thrown an error :/
Well at least it’s not something that super important
I can wait
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.
Oh I agree, it’s more that lemmy doesn’t really have “big engagement” content yet to spread out amongst the beans. Even text-based posts would do wonders. Mid-profile AMAs or a good asklemmy post going viral and hitting some of the content creators on other sites would really help boost this as a true alternative.
For my part I just hope my niche communities migrate over so the twelve of us that play ToME can geek out about the updates.
“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.
I’m about to unsub from lemmyshitposts for a good while. Still sticking around though, this place is home ✌️
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 fuckin love this place
Nice growth, looks to be slowing down a little - I wonder how much is related to the poor performance last few days
It will just encourage others to find a home on other instances which is good for the fediverse ecosystem it’s not a bad thing :)
Right now it seems a lot of people sticking around know what they’re signing up for with things in development. I’m all for a robust community of open-source trailblazers who are happy to be here.
Also the bean memes are not helping 🤣
Not to get political but
B E A N S
With care and love we can build a new and better reddit
Reddit feels like a dinosaur now to me.
But dinosaurs are cool. Don’t compare Reddit to a dinosaur.
Seems like they aren’t handling the load well.
There’s an inevitable adaptation and learning period for everyone, including smaller instances, but I think we should really be emphasizing the decentralization aspects of the Fediverse. Ruud and others are doing all they can to keep up, but everyone trying to consolidate onto lemmy.world isn’t great for anyone and only leads to even greater cost and technical pressures.
If you think this is bad, you should have seen Reddit when the Digg migration happened.
Tell me about this “Digg.” It sounds so familiar, but I don’t think I actually ever used anything called Digg.
Digg.com was a link aggregate site that predated Reddit, and was more attractive to users based solely upon its relatively sleek UI.
After some years of success, Digg made several changes: obfuscation up votes and removing down votes, and a new UI to match the reduced features. As a result the majority of the Digg user base and content creator sphere migrated to Reddit.
This resultant swell in Reddits userbase led to app creators brisging the gaps between reddits relatively brutalistic UI and the experience sought by laymen (i.e. non programmers crowd). As you have seen the decision to alienate third party applications has led to a new backlash against Reddit.
A lot of this sounds familiar.
I just wonder of this is actually going to have a similar effect. Controversial decision but I’m pretty used to seeing companies get away with shitty choices.
IMO, what reddit has done is much worse than what digg did but their user base is also significantly larger than digg’s was. I hope that reddit will see a hit but I expect they will survive this.
I do wonder how many content creators and moderators they are losing though. It she’s likely that content creators and moderators were probably more reliant on third party apps than general users.
Potentially. Though Reddit claims that the vast majority (like 90+%) used the official app. Of course, if such was true then you’d expect they wouldn’t pull the rug out from under everyone.
I can believe a majority used the official up. Maybe even a supermajority. 80% maybe.
But throwing a fit over 1-10% of your user base and doubling down when that low percentage doesn’t agree? I dunno.
It’s a big enough number that made them want to kill the third-party apps but it’s small enough that they felt they could survive the backlash.
I guess time will tell. Personally, I wouldn’t continue moderating without third party apps given the lack of tools. I hadn’t moderated anything in a while but the third party tools were always so much better when I did moderate things.
Hail Satan.
That’s great but 66.6%? Time to conspire!
Praise be to the dark lord!
I actually don’t on’t mind the smaller user base on Lemmy at all.
First work day since shutdown, I survived without Reddit, I’m sure I can continue doing so. Lemmy has plenty of potential yet already “good enough” to take Reddit’s place.
That’s the funniest thing - I’m one of those senile Digg to Reddit people. Digg to Reddit was something I felt and dreaded. Reddit to Lemmy was a relief. There is not as much to click but everything is worth a click.
Beans
It is important to distribute newly joining users evenly among different servers to enhance server performance and maintain decentralization
