From 2,997 active users across all lemmy instances at the beginning of June, the number increased to 52,797 by June 30th. Source.
An active user on Lemmy is "someone who has posted or commented on our instance or community within the last given time frame.” Source. That means lurkers are not counted as active users. There are currently almost 200k total users spread across the top 10 non-bot lemmy instances.
We’re really building something here!
EDIT: Looking for a lemmy app? Here’s a whole list: https://lemmy.world/post/465785
I’m looking at the Lemmy instances webpage https://the-federation.info/platform/73
Why are so many instances closed for sign-ups? Doesn’t seem like a good thing for the potential July 1st deluge of new users.
Server costs and some instances (like beehaw.org) are particular about who they let in. That’s why I just refer people to lemmy.world since it’s the easiest instance to sign up with a lot of local content to draw in new users.
Probably to keep the instances from melting with the influx of new users if I had to guess
Bear in mind that this isn’t a commercial service. It’s all volunteer hobbyists at this point (sometimes helped by donations). Some instances are running on a Raspberry Pi in someone’s closet. Not all instances exist for the same purposes, and some don’t have the admin time to take care of a lot of new users.