Lemmy growth is crazy!
Blahaj zone (the Calckey instance) has been running for around 6 months now. We’ve had a slow but constant growth of new members, with a big spike when Calckey drew a lot of attention. And as a result, even though we’re not a huge instance, we are one of the larger Calckey derived instances around.
lemmy.blahaj.zone on the other hand has seen crazy growth! In the last week, our lemmy instance has gone from almost no members, to nearly as many users as our Calckey instance. The mind blowing part though, is that the lemmy instance isn’t even close to being one of the largest lemmy instances. We don’t even appear on the first page of Fediverse Observer! And the sheer number of lemmy instances online now is huge compared to where it was a couple of weeks ago.
And that’s before we even talk about kbin and the threadiverse as a whole, of which Lemmy is only a part
I can honestly say that this whole thing has shifted my view of just what the future of the fediverse might be. I assumed it would always be microblogging centric, but now, I question that…
So, I’ve been through a few of these tectonic plate shifts in my life on the internet, and I know that there will be others older than me with even more experience or alternate experiences along similar themes.
I am not even kind of an early adopter online. I tend to find something I’m comfortable with and stick with it for quite some time, and it takes a number of “throwing my hands up in disgust” events to get me to consider a change. From my own timeline of use, it was AOL as the “front page of the internet”, followed by 4chan for a very short while, followed by Digg, followed by reddit, and now it’s starting to feel like we’re on the brink of another plate shift. Is this something on that sort of scale? No idea. It would take someone with a far keener eye for these things to tell you for sure, but I can confidently say that if someone like me is here, then I’m certainly not the only one, and that means something’s up.
Make of all of that what you will, but it’s going to be increasingly interesting to see where this goes in both the short and the long term.
I’m the exact same way, and in all my time online this has seemed like the most likely event to topple Reddit. The exclusion of third party apps is the most tangible change to the average user, so unless Reddit can match Apollo or RiF in quality (or close enough for now), I think a lot of people are going to be leaving the platform on July 1st.
Time will tell though. I see a lot of talk about leaving Reddit but so far most of my subs haven’t made an effort to migrate over. This could be the next “Voat migration” and just as easily fade away.