this post was submitted on 10 Jul 2023
633 points (98.8% liked)

Fediverse

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611 users here now

A community to talk about the Fediverse and all it's related services using ActivityPub (Mastodon, Lemmy, KBin, etc).

If you wanted to get help with moderating your own community then head over to !moderators@lemmy.world!

Rules

Learn more at these websites: Join The Fediverse Wiki, Fediverse.info, Wikipedia Page, The Federation Info (Stats), FediDB (Stats), Sub Rehab (Reddit Migration)

founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
 

Current breakdown at the time of this post sorted by the number of monthly active users:

  1. lemmy.world: 101,013 total users / 27,472 active users
  2. lemmy.ml: 41,972 total users / 4,905 active users
  3. beehaw.org: 12,270 total users / 4,178 active users
  4. sh.itjust.works: 17,509 total users / 3,381 active users
  5. feddit.de: 8,675 total users / 2,935 active users
  6. lemm.ee: 10,348 total users / 2,751 active users
  7. lemmynsfw.com: 22,967 total users / 2,310 active users
  8. lemmy.fmhy.ml: 8,777 total users / 1,704 active users
  9. lemmy.ca: 5,072 total users / 1,656 active users
  10. programming.dev: 5,058 total users / 1,242 active users

Source: https://the-federation.info/platform/73

top 50 comments
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[–] Salvo@aussie.zone 37 points 2 years ago (1 children)

I think that Lemmy does need more of the right exposure.

If you search for any Lemmy content on Google or Duck-Duck-Go, you don’t get any good results. This is probably because most people use Apps or secure browsers that don’t allow tracking.

Maybe Duck-Duck-Go need to have a !bang search modifier for Lemmy. https://duckduckgo.com/bangs

[–] nemesis_aorta@lemmy.world 5 points 2 years ago

Maybe Duck-Duck-Go need to have a !bang search modifier for Lemmy. https://duckduckgo.com/bangs

Most likely not feasible, because what the bangs do is passing site:domain.com to the search result. As you know, Lemmy does not have a singular domain name so this won't work for it. As a matter of fact, there is a bang for Mastodon, but it only searches the biggest instance, mastodon.social.

[–] RatzChatsubo@lemm.ee 33 points 2 years ago (5 children)

I think I can confidently say now that this is a legit Reddit alternative

[–] rbos@lemmy.ca 4 points 2 years ago (2 children)

I confidently deleted my 33k karma, 12 year old reddit account yesterday. I agree.

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[–] MoonshineDegreaser@lemmy.world 4 points 2 years ago

I'm happy to see someone say that. Just made my account a minute ago

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[–] xantoxis@lemmy.one 27 points 2 years ago (19 children)

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.

[–] TheSpookiestUser@lemmy.world 39 points 2 years ago (10 children)

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.

[–] relative_iterator@sh.itjust.works 19 points 2 years ago (1 children)

Yeah as long as we have an active enough community here it doesn’t matter what goes on at reddit.

[–] _haha_oh_wow_@sh.itjust.works 6 points 2 years ago (2 children)

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.

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[–] Lemmylefty@lemmy.world 9 points 2 years ago (2 children)

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.

[–] knova@links.dartboard.social 4 points 2 years ago

Great analogy

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[–] deranger@lemmy.world 4 points 2 years ago (1 children)

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.

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[–] magnetosphere@kbin.social 7 points 2 years ago (4 children)

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.

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[–] ReallyKinda@kbin.social 4 points 2 years ago (1 children)

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.

[–] Xeelee@kbin.social 3 points 2 years ago

Exactly. I don't give a fuck about Reddit any more. I'd rather be in a niche community with (some) quality content than on some huge site with mainly reposts. We're not in competition with Reddit. Were trying to be a better alternative.

[–] Magiwarriorx@lemmy.world 3 points 2 years ago

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.

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[–] hiramfromthechi@lemmy.world 15 points 2 years ago

Doing course correction in fixing social media is a long game. It'll take a while, and there'll be turbulence, but this is a great start

[–] starman@programming.dev 14 points 2 years ago

Hello fellow programming.dev lemmings!

[–] SJ_Zero@lemmy.fbxl.net 11 points 2 years ago (1 children)

A quarter million users and that's not even with all the different instances.

Very cool. Just remember folks, don't forget to diversify and decentralize! These other instances have some interesting posts and conversations, and by spreading out we make sure no single instance or community can break the fediverse.

[–] FinalBoy1975@lemmy.world 4 points 2 years ago (4 children)

A lot of them also restrict content. There are disadvantages to joining smaller instances, depending on the philosophy of the person who runs the instance. There's even an instance that does not allow communities to be created on its own instance. It will accept applications from people who wish to create one, but they mostly reject applications on their own whim. I think the future of Lemmy as a Reddit alternative will rely on larger, freer instances to be supported well so they have room for growth and change. I have my personal preferences. I don't want content from exploding-heads, but I also want to see the content I want to see. Some smaller instances are restricting that content, almost seeming to be like cults in the making. There are small instances from which it is impossible to find and subscribe to communities from lemmy.world. You have to search for them on a larger instance, then copy and paste in the address bar in your browser. I imagine on a dedicated phone app that would not be possible. So, you can advocate for "spreading out" all you want. In the end, if the goal is to have a strong alternative to Reddit, spreading out is kind of pointless for a lot of users.

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[–] Jay@sh.itjust.works 10 points 2 years ago (10 children)

Sorry dude, you'll have to subtract one unfortunately. I created a NSFW account to have two different home feeds.

Apologies for the inconvenience.

[–] Vex_Detrause@lemmy.ca 4 points 2 years ago (2 children)

Ummm. I have a friend that has a 2nd NSFW account too.

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[–] thedaly@reseed.it 9 points 2 years ago (4 children)

Of the top five, sh.itjust.works seems to be the best. Definitely the instance that I would recommend to new users.

[–] teraflopsweat@lemmy.world 6 points 2 years ago (2 children)
[–] thedaly@reseed.it 9 points 2 years ago (2 children)

Well I would recommend it since it works, hence the name, shitjustworks lol.

In all seriousness, you can't start a new platform and simultaneously expect to exclude large segments of potential users. Shitjustworks seems to toe the line better than other instances. They ban spam/bots while still allowing most content.

Generally, I recommend avoiding the top two instances if you are considering creating an account, and I would recommend avoiding beehaw for other reasons. So that leaves you at shitjustworks.

[–] TechyDad@lemmy.world 13 points 2 years ago (1 children)

I'd second the recommendation to avoid BeeHaw. That's where I started when I left Reddit. It's not bad per se there. I wouldn't say that they are rude or anything. The big problem is that they've decided to defederate from many other Lemmy instances.

In case anyone doesn't understand federation, imagine if you signed up for an email address and then realized that, because the person running the email service decided so, you can't email anyone at Gmail.com or Hotmail.com. If you have nobody you want to email there (no Lemmy communities you want to interact with there), then it's not a problem. However, if you decide you really want to join a community there, it gets difficult.

I left BeeHaw and signed up for Lemmy.world.

[–] thedaly@reseed.it 7 points 2 years ago (1 children)

I don't understand the big push to defederate from other instances when individual users can block instances as they please.

[–] miridius@lemmy.world 9 points 2 years ago (1 children)

Individuals can't block whole instances yet (apart from via a browser extension), once that feature arrives there will be a lot less call for defederation I expect.

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[–] mr_pip@discuss.tchncs.de 4 points 2 years ago (1 children)

I‘m all with you on the beehaw topic, but please keep in mind to recommend smaller instances to newbies,, because that‘s what federation is all about. Aside from load distribution (lots of instances are run by individuals or groups on small(ish) machines), you can avoid being independent on single large entities keeping their uptime etc.

TLDR: recommend smaller instances for load distribution to get the best out of a federated world!

[–] miridius@lemmy.world 7 points 2 years ago (2 children)

I wouldn't recommend small instances to newbies. New users will likely use the All feed a lot, until they discover the communities they like. And on a small instance the All feed isn't going to have as many communities in it. Also the experience of searching for communities is worse on a smaller instance.

I think these aren't problems for experienced users but I don't think we want to expose newbies to them if we can help it.

[–] mr_pip@discuss.tchncs.de 5 points 2 years ago (2 children)

Do you mean local communities? If not, I do not understand your statement.
Also: can you explain how searching for communities is worse on smaller instances than on large ones? That does not make sense to me and does not reflect my experience at all.

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[–] Robaque@feddit.it 4 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) (1 children)

Why wouldn't the All feed have as many communities on small instances? Does federation have to be 'consensual'?

Also, I noticed I can reply to comments on this thread but not the post itself. Does this have to do with federation or is it a limitation of Jerboa or smthn?

(Also - TIL feddit.it is located in Finland!? 😅)

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[–] SageWaterDragon@lemmy.world 8 points 2 years ago (8 children)

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.

[–] javasux@lemmy.world 4 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) (1 children)

I'm just looking forward to the meme subreddits becoming less outdated. Feels like 2017 in here

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[–] MargotRobbie@lemmy.world 8 points 2 years ago (2 children)

And to think you thought you needed a John Oliver AMA. John Oliver don't have anything on me.

"Barbie", only in theaters July 21st.

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[–] FxtrtTngoWhisky@lemmy.world 7 points 2 years ago (7 children)

In looking for a replacement for Reddit, I came across this. I'm hopefully optimistic. The last straw for me in a long list of issues that I have with Reddit came yesterday. Lemmy has a long way to go, but I'm moving away from Reddit and will become active here.

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[–] absGeekNZ@lemmy.nz 7 points 2 years ago (12 children)

Lemmy.nz here

I think it is cool that it is coming up on nearly 2 million across all ~1200 instances.

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great. slowly transitioning into Lemmy from now on becuz fuck reddit

[–] ColonelSanders@lemmy.world 6 points 2 years ago (5 children)

Not to be the fly in the ointment, but you can't really just add those up and expect that number to be accurate if we're trying to look at unique users within the fediverse. If I had to hazard a guess, a not-so-insignificant chunk of those probably overlap (i.e. users who have made multiple accounts across several instances). I have made an account across lemmy.world, lemmy.ml, kbin and fedia just as backups in case one instance fails. I might be an extreme case having 4, but pretty sure it's becoming increasingly common for people to have at least 2 accounts (1 on a different instance).

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[–] Epicurus0319@lemmy.world 4 points 2 years ago (7 children)

We should spread out across it, if the lemmy.world hack and the fact that its admins are even flirting with the idea of fedding with threads are any indication

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[–] Bdi89@lemmy.world 4 points 2 years ago

I'm one of those! Literally just joined for my first comment. :)

[–] joolez@discuss.tchncs.de 3 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago)

90% 2nd accounts on lemmynsfw.

[–] wilberfan@lemmy.world 3 points 2 years ago (1 children)

Wait, subtract one: I'm on both .world and .ee

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