I think we’ll see another spike when the third-party apps are actually shut down.
Be prepared to answer so many questions from newcomers.
Today’s noobs are tomorrow’s participants and next months’ experts. Take it as a chance to be awesome to one another.
Speaking as a noob trying to see if I can respond from another server… Hi!
I spun up an instance for a friend group, to test it out, and while I think no one has a real clue what’s going on, it’s nice to have something new and positive. And since I or a friend control the server, no worries on the perverse incentives of the internet giants.
So, yeah, hopefully we can learn, and hopefully the ecosystem can grow.
I’ve been here six whole days, so I’m, like, some super veteran 🤣🤣
I actually like the less jaded attitude in most of the communities, though many are still very, very small (like single digits). I was part of Post.news when the Twitter exodus happened and had a fun time with it for a month; once it got populated the bigger voices/micro-blog celebrities pretty much drowned out the average user like me and I wandered away because there just wasn’t enough interaction on the average thread. Pretty much he twitter experience - too ephemeral to be a community. This (Lemmy/kbin) feels nice, though.
A general how-to for lemmy pinned to the top would do wonders.
For a good start, search this : lemmy.ml/…
author = @dessalines…
title ~ … update // version 0.16.3
or 0.17.4 etc …Or go to : join.lemmy.org … documentation
That’s why I’m here, the third party app I use is about to be shut down.
Is Boost shutting down?
Definitely, I remember mayayo (Boost’s dev) commenting that the update he pushed out recently was the last dance or something.
Can’t imagine how Boost would survive when many more successful third-party apps are going under.
I think I have seen Boost in the list of 3rd party apps that are shutting down at the end of the month
I already deleted my 3P app and was looking for an alternative. I wanted to be the one that ripped that band-aid off so it could scab up early. So far I’m liking these Lemmy servers. They are my polysporin :p
I think we’ll see another spike when the third-party apps are actually shut down.
It might turn into the Lemmy version of Eternal September.
I wonder how many people have accidentally signed up for more lemmy instances before they realized that wasn’t needed.
I signed up for a few different ones trying to find one with policies that I can agree with.
No reason not to.
To me it’s just another security layer. If one instance goes down, or an account gets hacked/banned etc I can just swap over to another one. Also I have different sets of subscriptions for each account, so if I’m looking for a different flavor of my feed I just swap to the associated account.
Empower the user!
Exactly, especially having different subscriptions for each account.
I’m only on one lemmy but I did sign on both lemmy and kbin before realizing they were connected.
Same here :) I consider it reserving my username for now.
It could come in handy not only as username reserve, just found out you can follow mastodon users from kbin (you can’t in lemmy), maybe it’s well know already but for me everything is still a discovery :D
I saw that one of the largest Lemmy’s hadn’t had 3 names taken that are high value (to me at least) so I snatched up the three I use often or really wanted. I’ve always dreamed of being one of the like [email protected] and now I am!
I did…lol
I 100% did this in Mastodon when I first signed up.
I’m still not sure what an instance is but I’ll sign up to some more of them if I can get more content.
nope you wont. If you signed up at an instance that hasnt defederated like beehaw then you will be able to see almost anything.
Yep, users registered @beehaw can’t see everything, but everybody else can see beehaw posts.
Can outsiders comment in beehaw posts?
As far as I understand yes they can.
If I’m wrong about this somebody will surely correct me.
It appears to me that since beehaw defederated, the beehaw communities still exist on the cut off instances (like Lemmy.world) and the instance still lets you interact with it, but your changes won’t be propagated back to beehaw or to other instances.
They can normally if their instance is not defederatd.
But if beehaw defederate some instance, only the one from their own instance can see and interact with their post.
So for example, I have an account in lemmy.world and posting it to beehaw tech community. Other user from lemmy.world can see my post and reply normally. But other user from other instances (including beehaw itself) can’t even see the post.
Basically like shadowban in reddit but for all users in an instance
No that’s literally what you don’t need to do. You only need one account, your instance will talk to other instances to bring you content from the whole network, to your one account. That includes the ability to comment on it, and interact with, etc.
An instance is just the word people use on the Fediverse for “Fediverse website”. It’s often preceded by the name of the platform the website is running, eg “Lemmy instance” or “Mastodon instance”.
It’s kind of like saying “WordPress website”.
Lemmy.ml, Lemmy.one, Lemmy.world, Lemmy.ca, beehaw.org, sh.itjust.works, etc are all different websites running Lemmy, so they’re Lemmy instances. Mastodon.social, mstdn.social, Mastodon.world, tenforward.social, etc. Are all just different websites running Mastodon.
Fediverse websites have the ability to request and mirror content in an ongoing manner from users or groups (which is what a Lemmy community is, a Fediverse group managed by a Lemmy server) on other Fediverse websites. From other “instances”. This gives an imperfect illusion of everyone being in the same place, when we’re actually spread across a dozen (or over 10,000,of you count the entire Fediverse) websites or more.
I signed up to 3 lemmy instances but I settled for kbin now, should I delete the other accounts?
I doubt this matters much. The posts/comments probably tax the database more than just the userdata.
I love Lemmy, but as others have already said, the vast majority of these signups are likely bots. Pretty spooky.
Bots and multi-accounts. I had one reddit account with no alts. Here I have like 6 accounts because of all the federated / non federated bs.
I have a similar thing going. Have 3 accounts, one on lemmy.world, one on kbin.social, and one on beehaw.org.
I can’t imagine being that unlucky with your instances, maybe you’re running into bugs or the less intuitive parts of Lemmy (like how links to posts and communities don’t work how you’d expect them to)
It was mostly bugs/stability issues for me.
I created a lemmy account, but I’ve never actually been able to log into it. I even tried creating another account on lemmy, no dice.
Created a kbin account, but then found out that they were defederated temporarily due to the influx, and they had some really annoying cloudflare stuff on
Created a fedia account, but posts from other instances were delayed by like 6-8 hours, and fedia itself was (and still is) a relatively small instance.
Kbin has since refederated so it’s working the best for me.
Couldn’t figure out a good way to get mastadon to mesh with the ui of other instances so I created a mastadon account. Then I realized I’d gone down a rabbit hole of porn so my mastadon feed was taken over by nsfw stuff, so I made a new non-horny mastadon account.
That’s seven. If beehaw ever defederates from kbin, I might make an eighth so I can participate there (unless fedia starts becoming better at updating).
3 of them were defederated by beehaw but I also have a beehaw account and then 2 others just in case… But I am sure I’m not the only one like this. So the total lemmy numbers are probably inflated… not that reddit numbers aren’t also inflated.
Yeah, same here. I created one on lemmy.one… realized lemmy.world is open and has more traffic right now, so I created a new one here. I also have a kbin user for similar reasons. But still, the content flow does seem to be slowly increasing.
I have 2 accounts, lemmy and kbin.
There are probably many people with multiple accounts, for example due to reasons like UI-preferences. I prefer the lemmy.world one.
Im a newbie, why do you have so many accounts? Isn’t it bothersome to switch between them for whatever you are using them for?
To each their own I guess. It’s not bothersome for me to switch accounts as I normally browse each lemmy locally to make sure I’m seeing as many of the comments as possible. I never really subscribed to the “subscribe/follow” feature of reddit. I liked my front page and all my niche communities separate so when I want to read about xxx I go to xxx subreddit and read all the top posts then move to my next subreddit. To many things fall through the cracks of the front page IMO. But to each their own, again. There is no reason to run lemmy like I do vs one account if it is working for you as is.
why would you think they’re all bots?
There was supposedly a post the other day about a bug that would let people creat a ton of accounts using a bot. My understanding is that pretty much the next day the amount of new users increased immensely, so the timing of it so seems a little suspect
The number of users increased immensely the next day because Hexbear.net migrated to upstream Lemmy and their users/stats started being tracked. This newest wave of users does seem to me like bots, specially because they are signing up to instances where little to no activity is happening, but who knows.
Hexbear is part of Lemmy? How could I have known this if someone linked me directly to Hexbear? I’m trying to understand this whole federation thing, I’m not used to it at all. Also, what do you mean with “upstream Lemmy”?
To my understanding, Hexbear forked (copied and modified) an older version of Lemmy and tweaked it to some of their preferences by adding their own code so they were kind of like a cousin of Lemmy. Migrating to upstream Lemmy means they’ve switched back to the original Lemmy project and installed one of the newer versions without their own modifications, or at least with few enough that it appears to be running Lemmy when probed by whoever is compiling these numbers.
I think they have federation turned off on their server so you still can’t follow a Hexbear community from another server, but theoretically if they changed their settings to allow federation, you’d be able to follow their communities just like any other server that runs Lemmy or is compatible with Lemmy through ActivityPub.
As for how to tell Hexbear runs Lemmy, if you scroll down to the bottom of their site it has links to Lemmy documentation, the code used specifically by Hexbear, and Join Lemmy which gives you a hint even before clicking on the code link to see for yourself.
Did he say “all”?
Calm down folks, these are bot signups: https://lemm.ee/post/177673
The active user-count increased by ~10% over the last 2d while registered user count increased 400%. The registered user growth is absolutely not “real”. Now… 10% over 2d is still massive growth… Lemmy IS growing. But it’s not doubling every 24h.
Also nobody should want that anyway lmao
I think it’s just bots. Look at this instance: https://picify.podycust.co.uk/ 7k users, no interactions
Yeah, I’m trying to track where these new accounts are being created, because they’re not at top lemmy instances like lemmy.world or beehaw.org, which have validation measures at signup.
I believe most accounts created in the last 48 hours are bot accounts. Here is the list of top 20 fastest growing instances. Looks like 15 out of 20 were created in the last few days and has almost no active users.
@2014MU69 @MicroWave
Lemmy’s first big bot campaign, yay.Bots only target successful platforms and mastodon has survived many bot campaigns, so I’m not too worried by this. But let’s give a hug to our admins. When all those accounts start spamming, they’ll need to do a lot of mitigation. Especially if the bots come from many different domains. (and also because lemmy moderation tools are not great)
@[email protected] - thanks for the info.
@[email protected] - you think we’re about to see many of them defederated?
@MicroWave
Yes, when your server is getting swarmed in spam, you first fediblock (or at least limit, when limit is supported like on mastodon).Then you ask the admin of the instance what’s going on. You can also help them clean up the bots.
Then you can federate again once you’re 100% sure the bots are gone.
When the number of bots is high compared to the number of users, that’s even more reasons to block fast
That instance’s real url (at least in the DB) is
lemmy.podycust.co.uk.parapheum.comis another one that has a similar situation, they have ~5k new accounts in the past days and very little activity on their instance other than the admins. I have sent messages to the admins of both instances making sure they are aware of the situation…For fun here are the numbers of their users that show up on my instance (because they have participated somewhere my instance is federated with) compared to beehaw which has about 12.5k users:
lemmy=# select count(*) from person where instance_id = (select id from instance where domain = 'beehaw.org'); count ------- 3496 (1 row) lemmy=# select count(*) from person where instance_id = (select id from instance where domain = 'lemmy.podycust.co.uk'); count ------- 6 (1 row) lemmy=# select count(*) from person where instance_id = (select id from instance where domain = 'parapheum.com'); count ------- 3 (1 row)Seems pretty concerning.
Makes it easy to defederate from them at least
It’s like that plot in Silicon Valley. Kinda concerning.
I wonder if there’s a scope to auto delete accounts that are created by never return after x weeks. Or a measure of active daily unique users by IP address…
Yeah, I think monthly active users is a better metric because I’ve head about some automated mass sign ups that have been happening.
What’s the point? Why do this?
Scams. If one account creates 1000 spam posts, you ban that account and they are all gone. If 1000 accounts create 1 spam message each, the admin has a mess
Someone was bored and playing around, who knows. We need a better metric for number of users in any case
There’s no way these are not bot accounts. I heard there’s a lot of instances with no sign-up validation that are just being flooded by requests.
But why tho
I know Lemmy.world shut down registration for a short time due to spam flooding. Why? Scams of course.
I hadn’t even heard of Lemmy until a few days ago. Maybe it’ll ride the momentum. End of the month there will probably be another influx, considering the reddit changes.
Let’s hope so! Some of the communities are a bit empty still. Hopefully it’ll change. :)
I heard of Tildes first. Tried it, didn’t get it, didn’t like the UI and just gave up on it. Saw someone mention Lemmy in a Reddit thread about the blackouts. Googled it, got confused, went to join, got really confused, made accounts on 3 different instances due to aforementioned confusion, started scrolling, haven’t stopped in over a week. I like it here
I was turned off of Tildes because of the fact that (at least when I tried it) they hadn’t implemented automated password changing, you had to message an actual person.
I think that is beautiful, in its own unique way.
I’m quite impressed how quickly the site is stabilizing in spite of continuing to grow so rapidly. I’d say it’s 10 times more navigable than when I first signed up, and I’ve only doubled my competency at interfacing with it.
IIRC, the Lemmy.world administrators had a big post that basically said: “Woops, we were still in debug-mode when we launched”.
When they changed the settings to production-mode sometime this weekend (thereby generating far fewer logs on the server’s backend), the response speed of the website went into high-speed.
It wasn’t just logs. Turning debug off let a lot of the federation functions work in the background instead of causing a long pause every time someone posted, voted, etc.
If true that’s hilarious.
Was wondering why the site had been performing unusually well today. Part of me was worried that everybody got fed up of the lag, abandoned ship and went back to Reddit.
I remember the days when everybody flocked to Voat in the midst of the Ellen Pao revolt, and then the site crumpled under its own freaking weight. It’s refreshing by comparison to see 360k users flock to Lemmy when the platform struggled to even break over a thousand just three weeks ago.
Spez really screwed the pooch on this one.
I think a better metric would be the number of comments in the Fediverse. Until bots arrive, that would better estimate the growth of actual userbase.
Okay but seriously 🤖🤖🤖🤖🤖
About 20k are probably from hexbear, which migrated from their own distant fork of lemmy to the current version, so now they show up in a lot of trackers. They still haven’t enabled federation yet though.
It’s all bots…(probably)
Not that sure. Maybe a big chunk of it are, but there is a lot of people like me coming from reddit that signed yesterday, after doing some research and watching how things were here and on kbin.
Regarding the bots issues, new signups at lemmy.world were closed yesterday for several hours because of attempts to create spammy accounts. So maybe a mix of real accounts and spammy ones.
Yes it is. The top 20 fastest growing instances on https://fedidb.org/current-events/threadiverse could be suffering from bot signup. Bit of a bummer.
10,000 users and only 7 posts and a dozen comments: https://lemmy.podycust.co.uk/communities
I also signed up yesterday. This is my very first comment/post. This is all a bit new and ngl - slightly intimidating. I’ll go back to lurking and trying to get a better feel for the whole thing before I participate more.
Edit: To be fair, I wasn’t all that participatory on that OTHER site either. After 12 years, I walked away with (4,528·14,039) on my profile. So don’t expect much lol.
It’s all good, as long as we have actual people here (I was pretty much a hard lurker on reddit as well lol)
I actually signed up for an account here and am commenting and posted once vs being a massive lurker on Reddit, I’m disabled and bed bound and spend hours daily online. Didn’t feel like Reddit really needed me to chip in and since it hurts to type I generally just lurked there.
Hopefully they develop a way for you to post by voice to Lemmy. It’s great to have you on board!
Awww thanks, I’ve tried dictation but it is so frustrating, it doesn’t help I tend to use a wider vocabulary… Plus as a consumer I much, much prefer reading to listening. It’s why I enjoyed old.reddit, clean text.
Easier to suck it up and type sometimes. Or be more patient with dictation.
I’ve been using reddit since before it supported the ability to leave comments, and I haven’t been back since the 12th, except to see if/where my most-visited subs are migrating and to watch the occasional trainwreck caused by reddit admins stepping on their own dicks.
So far Lemmy/Kbin/etc has been scratching the itch with the bonus of having a better community. I think you’ll be fine here.
Just signed up myself, it does feel like with guidance from Reddit migration threads it’s easy enough to sign up, but navigation still feels a little confusing, so maybe some signing up but just lurking or not bothering to continue
Eh, just signed up and while my cns may which I was a bot, I’m very much still human.
I think a measure of success is how quality the content is. Even if there was only 2 people on here, If the content was good I would visit every day.
Back in my days we visited forums in personal home pages with about 3-4 strangers and we liked it!
I knew all 20 people on the forum I used to frequent!
I honestly prefer this way more!
Thoughts on the quality of content thus far?
I don’t have an issue with content personally, just find if a bit confusing at times.
But you’re the self proclaimed TechExpert.
I like how the home page pulls in content from across a lot of different sources.
Yes, but it can also be argued that the higher the number of users, the higher the chances of insightful discussions taking place. We have a reason to rejoice at this surge as more users generally means more frequent engagement with all the content here, which itself fosters further and deeper engagement.
Thats true until you introduce algorithmic recommendation.
I think part of the reason this is working for me so well, is that I’m not being encouraged to passively doom-scroll by an algo that knows exactly how to keep me just the right amount of engaged, but never satisfied.
Very well said. With that, I agree.
the inverse could be true. a lot of people with interests not aligned with mine upvoting stuff I don’t care about is just noise
Fair point, I suppose.
It’s almost at 500k now.
Which website are you using to track that? I’m still seeing 364k.
I’m not sure what @political_avacado is using, but:
Fedidb.org (https://fedidb.org/software/):
- Lemmy - 452k
- KBin - 43k
The different sites scrape roughly the same data but not all communities “opt in” to sharing data. The Kbin data is very similar between fediverse.observer and fedidb.org, but the Lemmy count is markedly different.
I think the trend is more important though; both are growing rapidly. I prefer the Kbin interface myself but as Lemmy & Kbin do essentially the same thing, we’re looking at 500k overall in the “threadiverse”
EDIT: Also it’s worth pointing out that is user accounts, not unique users. Many noobs like me created multiple accounts - one on each instance; I think I have 4 (but 1 is on a site that doesn’t seem to be captured by the DB tools as it’s so new). Also there will be some spam bots in the number. But the trend shows rapid growth which is great.
