The user count at the moment of this post stands at 33279 and continues to grow!
To take the #1 spot from lemmy.ml (36185 users and no longer growing), lemmy.world just needs about 3000 new users. Given the current growth rate, it should be another day or two.
We’re building something here!
There will be another spike on July 1st IMO, that’s when reddit 3rd party apps will stop working, after that things should settle, it’s possible some people will go back to reddit but things should normalize after that.
Unless some other big corp decides to sh*it on their users like reddit is doing lol.
There’s a greater likelihood that the content creators are the ones moving. Most of the reddit power users likely used third party apps. Most of the reddit power users are also the ones who wrote most of the comments worth reading.
So if on june 1 most of the reddit power users flee, reddit’s enshitification will have reached a terminal stage. Eventually, reddit will stop having things worth reading, and the lurkers will all move over.
I think we’re in for a long decline of reddit a la facebook. However unlike facebook, there isn’t a market of old people/foreign markets that can fill their user numbers.
What really hurts so much about this is that Reddit is effectively a modern Alexandrian Library, and it’s burning. There’s so much content there that’s vitally important and it could all go up in smoke. Anybody know any full archival projects?
I know r/DataHoarder is working hard for it, dunno where they are storing all the data tho.
Many of datahoarders initiatives are pointless at best. Hoarding reddits data across a thousand personal hard drives that are inaccessible to anyone else is of extremely limited value. I’ve watched them perform the same action over and over, but most of the time that data never ends up in a new home. It just rots at someone’s house.
I think the biggest reddit archive initiative is led by ArchiveTeam Warrior and the data after processing ends up being accessible on Internet Archive. I’ve seen this initiative posted on DataHoarder two weeks ago.
During the protest I’ve seen several people saying they didn’t even know 3rd party apps existed, I believe we seriously underestimate the amount of people who don’t care about anything as long as they get their daily “dose” of memes.
Many power users have moved already, more will follow, but the masses? Reddit is infested with reposting bots but most people don’t even notice, they have so much content in there that it will last them for years, even if all content creators left, not to mention AI.
That’s not to say reddit will never die, but I believe it’ll take a much longer time than we think.
I honestly don’t care. If we make this thing here work, let the bots have reddit. As long as the old discussions aren’t deleted, it can be tiktok 2 for all I care (if this here growth into what it seems to grow into).
So for me, while I knew of the 3PAs I didn’t start using them until the uproar. And when I did switch, I was like “how the hell did I stay on the official app for so long!”
I don’t think reddit will ever actually die. I’ll probably still even check it for information I need if it’s a community that didn’t move since I have a few eSports I follow and people post tournament threads on Reddit and no where else. But hoping that people move over still. Unfortunately it’s a sub that’s been re-opened and lots of users aren’t even “redditors”. A lot are on Reddit for the specific topic :/
I don’t think Reddit will go through a dramatic death as Digg did. Digg v4, as many old timers remember, happened in a different era with a different mix of users.
Reddit will slowly become what their management always wanted it to become: a bastard child of facebook. Some may stay because of habit, some simply won’t care, it’s all the casual crowd Spez is betting on.
That also means it will die a slow death where big flashy subs will be inundated with recycled memes and botspam despite the effort of some with good intentions that still hang into that platform.
If any those become disillusioned and look for another place, Lemmy/Kbin can become that second home.
I agree, I know people irl who will be quitting on the 1st once they can’t use Apollo.
I think the biggest issue to user growth will be getting the word out that this place exists. Like a lot of people, I’m trying to find a more ethical alternative to Reddit and had no idea kbin was a thing.
It seems that Kbin is also the better entry point for most former reddit users because even if it has different instances too, it’s not that spread out like Lemmy is so new users have less to worry about and can discover the Fediverse more as they go
I have little understanding of the technical details of Lemmy, but I’m having a hard time understanding how it can scale. How do you build something like /r/funny with 40 million subscribers when the biggest Lemmy instance seems to be suffering at 30k users?
As far as I can see while users can subscribe to communities on different instances, communities themselves are locked to a single instance. How could a multi million strong community grow here?
First of all, as a software engineer I’m — well, “impressed” is the wrong word because I remember how efficient software used to be in the '90s — I’m “satisfied” with how well Lemmy instances are scaling. Even the largest instances are running on single, fairly-small servers.
Keep in mind that this is all alpha software and not only likely very unoptimized but also pretty buggy, so the surprisingly few problems there have been are more likely due to that than to real issues of scale.
Second, and more importantly, remember that having really big instances is “doing it wrong” to begin with. The intended design of Lemmy (and Fediverse services in general) is to have a whole lot of small instances, not a few big ones.
I guess my question is that you can’t really control if a community grows to be huge or not. You can control who can create an account your instance, but unless you defederate, what happens if 20 million accounts subscribe to a single community? How is that load handled? Does it just collapse the entire instance under it’s weight? Or is the fediverse just inherently built to stifle community growth past a certain scale?
I would hope that an instance/magazine that can’t handle 20m users will have some sort of manual approval or other filter like Beehaw does. Beehaw defederated because they needed to breathe. Same with any other instance that begins to near its limit.
I was more referring about impacts of non-local users browsing communities on other instances. Which instance handles that load? If I browse lemmy.ml communities on my lemmy.world account am I impacting lemmy.world or lemmy.ml? What happens when all 35k lemmy.world users browse a lemmy.ml community because it’s the most popular one? Does lemmy.ml need to support all their own users + any non-local visitors?
That’s why I mentioned Beehaw. Beehaw defederated for this reason.