Active users as of June 25, 2023:
- lemmy.world (48k users): 13554 active users
- lemmy.ml (38k users): 4582 active users
- beehaw.org (11k users): 3743 active users
- feddit.de (6.7k users): 2320 active users
- sh.itjust.works (6.5k users): 2167 active users
- lemmy.ca (3.5k users): 1082 active users
Great to see all this growth and activity in different lemmy instances!
Good. It is important to have different instances to distribute the load though. However, I hope there are not many people joining BeeHaw…
I hope there are not many people joining BeeHaw…
I don’t hope that, exactly, I just hope that the people who join understand what they’re getting (and, more importantly, what they aren’t). I fully support a community with a different goal than most, and their goal seems like a wholesome one. I personally think it’s doomed to failure, but I support them giving it a try. They’re barely part of the fediverse though.
More users does not ALWAYS mean a good thing.
Who is Lemmy? Is this an underground movement thing on the dark web or something?
Ian Fraser Kilmister (24 December 1945 – 28 December 2015), better known as Lemmy Kilmister or simply Lemmy, was an English musician. He was the founder, lead singer, bassist and primary songwriter of the rock band Motörhead, of which he was the only continuous member, and a member of Hawkwind from 1971 to 1975.
Good time to appreciate the lack of dominant centrality here compared to mastodon.
Mastodon’s flagship instance run by the BDFL,
mastodon.social, has~10times the monthly active users of the next biggest instance.Here, there isn’t really a flagship instance, as the devs don’t want their instance to be anything more than the one they happen to run, and it’s not the biggest, and the biggest is independent of the lemmy dev team and isn’t even that much bigger than the others.
It does appear that lemmy.world is heading in the same direction of mastodon.social though.
This dominance worries me a little. Luckily the communities are spread across instances fairly well
This dominance worries me a little.
I don’t think there’s much to worry about. Having large general instances is perfectly healthy and good for the Fediverse as that’s where people new to the Fediverse will land.
I predict that large niche instances will start popping up, one example already being programming.dev, and that’s simply because there are domains where you might need extra customization.
For example, one can imagine a mathematics & physics oriented instance where LaTeX is available, or a chess-only instance where you’d have things like chessboard.js to allow members to post chess diagrams etc… Basically a return to what we had with old-school forums except this time the instances would be federated.
For example, one can imagine a mathematics & physics oriented instance where LaTeX is available, or a chess-only instance where you’d have things like chessboard.js to allow members to post chess diagrams etc…
An interesting idea. But the problem with that is that the custom rendered content would not federate properly, so such communities would only really be usable to those on that instance, which destroys the whole point of being federated in the first place. Unless they were able to implement some sort of ‘graceful degradation’ so the content was enhanced on the main instance, but still serviceable on other instances.
What is the purpose of bots, other than spam, lemmy tools and 3rd party scrapers (if that’s a thing)?
