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.
Am I content?
🔫 Always have been
Do you wanna be?
We are all content on this blessed day!
IDK, do you have something interesting to share?
I dunno, I could probably google and find a joke thats not too funny
Then you’re ready.
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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
broke: register on one of the main instances
woke: register on a small but well-run instance
bespoke: spin up your own instanceWhat are the space/bandwidth requirements? I’ve got plenty of space on my NAS, sounds like it could be a decent project.
i had mine up for about a week, been running lcs for quite a few days, and both actively use other spaces (like this one) and post a lot in the ones on my instance. currently i’m sitting at 4.5 GB for pictrs (not a typo, that’s what the picture server is called), 2.3 GB for the postgres database, and 5.4 GB for docker. total disk usage is about 14 GB for now, i expect it to grow in the future but idk yet how fast it will be. people are reporting about 100 MB a day since the reddit migration, and tbh that might check out.
if you’re hosting it on your own nas you’re probably gonna be fine space-wise. i’d just recommend to layer a vpn and/or a cache in-between – i don’t know exactly how to do this, i went straight for the cloud route, but i have seen people in [email protected] doing that, and the lemmy admin matrix chat is nice too.
just fyi, your instance does have to be reachable on a domain if you want federation to work. also, keep everything you can on the defaults and only change things one by one, the error messages are not very helpful. i spent like a day trying to debug why lemmy wasn’t starting up at first, turns out i just had an instance name longer than 20 characters.
i spent like a day trying to debug why lemmy wasn’t starting up at first, turns out i just had an instance name longer than 20 characters.
I was also bitten in the ass by this, it’s why my instance is on a one-character subdomain.
I’ve had my own instance running on a puny 1VCPU/1G RAM instance at Vultr since the beginning of June and the resource usage has been negligible. Drive space is the largest resource it’s consumed, it’s at about 12GB of drive space consumed in a month.
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 ([email protected]). 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
Thunder allows this and has good performance. It’s on the IzzyOnDroid f-droid repo but hasn’t hit playstore yet.
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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.
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Things are working so much better now that I switch. It was just a nightmare on world.
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if you are reading reddit only then I recommend to use libreddit.hu Doing this wouldn’t give reddit their juicy traffic
Or even better: install the libredirect extension to do this automatically, not just for reddit.
woah this is sick, thanks!
Yeah trying to keep Reddit activity to a minimum myself. Not missing it tbh, other than troubleshooting posts through the years lol
If you have a problem post it to lemmy. We can try help.
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.
FYI, you can patch RiF with Revanced to use your own OAuth token. I did it, and it works, but I’m not actually using it anymore/haven’t been to reddit for a while.
I just did it as more of a “Fuck you, I won’t do what you tell me” thing than anything else.
I deleted RiF and removed all shorcuts and icons that lead to reddit
I’m going with a mixture of cold turkey and “out of sight, out of mind”
Thankfully lemmy helps.
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.
Wefwef is amazing, how can someone make it so quickly while the reddit app sucks?
Wefwef is a labor of the love and passion of its creator. I’m guessing the Reddit app devs are burned out and constantly getting requests like “How can we integrate Blockchain into the app?” and “Is it possible to add ads to the comment section?”
Also a fellow ex-Bacon Reader user, same deal. So far I’m using Connect for Lemmy to try to get a similar feel, what app are you using?
Jerboa is the closest I have tried to the Bacon Reader experience.
I’m using Jerboa. Its good and its very similar to Bacon Reader. I’m just missing the bacon reader setting “hide read posts” and the hability to swipe to navigate and read posts.
Connect has both ;)
Liftup, which is somewhat close to BaconReader too. Couldn’t use Jerboa due to it not connecting to lemmy.world at the time I joined.
Tried wefwef too and it’s great, but the iOS-adjacent UX is not right for me.
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.
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.
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.
I mostly visited r/All so the “All” feed works for me
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 have just missed discourse with real humans.
I feel it, can barely reply from all the errors being thrown.
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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.
Just joined their patreon today!
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.
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.
I hate to be the one to say this, but yeah, there’s a big reason why they shouldn’t be pushed to another server, at least not right now at this switchover from Reddit point in time.
Most normal everyday people don’t even know what federation is, and tend to not like it when they find out, as it causes extra work on their part.
They just want a central location where everyone is socializing together, and don’t care at all about the fediverse, except as maybe an escape hatch if some c-suite type goes evil.
There’s already a hurdle people jump over on change in general, so we should minimize the effort of that change and coming over to Lemmy from Reddit.
Edit: typos
I created an
instanceuser on programming.dev and have had almost no issues seeing other posts.You don’t need to understand how it all works to use it
with this pace of growth i wouldn’t blame them if they got advertisements. and i believe that most people here use adblock anyway
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
That’s really neat but the closest servers are private, lol.
I wouldn’t sweat so much picking a close server as long as it has enough users to be around for a while, reasonable rules, and isn’t under too much strain. Just by getting off the big servers, you’ll have a much faster experience and access to the same content.
I moved from lemmy.world to this one that specializes in my interests, and it’s running great.
Those are good tips, thanks, I found a smaller one recently and it’s MUCH better, things are actually loading now, lol.
It’s comfy; my setup almost never fails to load or post anything after load-balancing myself elsewhere.
Good tips! I should have explained a bit more, but by getting a server as close as possible, your ping should theoretically be lower than an instance that’s far from you (I know, the internet is not a straight line to the server).
The best way to test this is by pinging the server in a CMD prompt/terminal.
Indeed. If I remember correctly VLemmy is in Ireland, and yet I’ve gotten consistently fast responses from it except during server upgrades. I think the size of the instance really does matter here.
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
I paused using lemmy.ml because 90% of the time it doesn’t work
I fuckin love this place
I am one of those users.
Don’t even feel the need to go back to reddit. This platform is going to take off.
Already has. A can of fucking beans had 5k+ upvotes.
6k now.
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 ✌️
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.
Hell yeah, let’s keep it up! :D
Hail Satan.
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
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.
Someone suggested that we should use this to find instances nearer to us. I did that and it has been running a lot smoother on my end apart from the occasional loading issues on subs in Lemmy.world.
There’s definitely some getting used to for new immigrants like us from Reddit. The nature of Fediverse forces us to give up on the concept of “karma” and be ready to hop from one instance to another at any given time. The good thing is we’ll be seeing much fewer karma-farming bots, which I assume would be an even much bigger issue on Reddit now that so many of the genuine users have left. Shitty mods, rampant bots, subs going dark/NSFW. What a shitshow.
Honestly, one of the largest problems with the current instance system is the lack of an ability to either export an account or link accounts between several instances. Once those types of features are added, I think Lemmy will be a lot more tolerable to new users.
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.
Any lemmy.world user who feels comfortable using the lemmy explorer to subscribe to communities via URL should heavily consider moving to a smaller instance and subscribing to everything they want. It’ll be a much snappier experience, and will very slightly reduce lag for everyone else.
You can find instances by server location here (just change the software to Lemmy at the top), by user count here, or just look at the official instance list.
