The growth in 2025 has been staggering, ngl. And this is the kind of thing which converts from a trickle to a tsunami very quickly. It never happens with one shock. But a consistent amount of enshittification shocks. Reddit’s desperate struggle for profitability practically ensures those will keep happening, so this is all inevitable at this point. The only thing that is uncertain is whether digg can recapture the fleeing masses who are not cognizant of the dangers of corporate vc-backed enshittification yet, like bluesky did to Twitter.
But a consistent amount of enshittification shocks
I think the proper term is enshittification sharts
Yeah. Reddit is currently enshitifying in overdrive. They used to just do dumb features nobody wants, but now they are actively harming the base. The entire Luigi over-moderation this is just bad, and it feels like they want the formerly leftist site to go full maga now. and even if I do have to use it, the website often tends to not function properly these days, with the site constantly reloading, or voting functions to be broken. This is the year of lemmy.
The user growth we’re seeomg could result in an overwhelming flood of users at anytime. Which is why people should consider supporting the lemmy devs and instance admins either financially or through contributions so that the lemmy software and infrastructure is ready to handle the growth.
This seems unrealistic in my opinion. Normal people really don’t like to donate, unfortunately. I think that Lemmy needs to make it so anyone can easily self host an instance without too much fuss. Something like docker on an old laptop. I know they have docker containers for Lemmy already, but in my opinion, they aren’t simple enough to set up. And there should be an option to bundle it with a wireguard VPN tunnel, so that they really don’t need to fuff about with reverse proxy to browse on your phone. This way, the cost is distributed across all users. It should be that setting up a domain and port forwarding should be the largest hurdle.
Normal people really don’t like to donate,
I’m on a medium-small instance; if %5 of users donate a dollar a month, the hardware would likely be paid for.
If lemmy.world had %0.01 of users paying, they could probably cover their hardware, storage and network fees.
If you’re not paying the admin’s mortgage, it not that hard to chip in. Unlike the other “options”, no one is getting ad revenue or selling your data, if that’s not worth a cup of cheap coffee a month for 1:20 people they have their priorities in the wrong places. .
deleted by creator
The difference is the way it is run. You got it. And if one day Midwest.social starts doing things you hate and treating it’s users like crap, then come on over to lemmy.world or lemmy.ca, or one if the other thousands instances.
People hosting the database are not the owners of the platform unlike Reddit. They get to tell us how we can use it just because they host the database.
I’ve already moved at least once and have been very happy it was as easy as it is.
I’ve never moved, but I assume you just create a new account and start over. Or is there more you can do?
it’s possible to migrate your subs on lemmy
it’s possible to both migrate your subs and make a redirect on mastodon for followers, but the redirect requires the old server to remain in service.
Help retain users by discussing more than just politics
For real we need more uplifting subs, my feed is just Musk and Trump diarrhea.
be the change you want to see. Post and upvote.
Instructions not clear. Posted upvotes.
Yeah, I feel like people on here have a bad habit of relating even completely unrelated posts back to US politics. But if you keep reading the news then your brain tends to do that.
I think this is an artifact of what’s oddly the biggest weakness of the fediverse: decentralization.
When I used reddit back pre-api stuff, my front page was 100% niche subs I’d subscribed to, but those niches have trouble le growing here because there’s so many instances.
I was super active in the scuba subreddit. Here on Lemmy, there’s several scuba groups that tried to form, but none of them stuck because they were all on different instances instead of one central location where everyone could work together to make the community.
As a result, most of us haven’t been filtering out 99% of Lemmy because the 1% where we’d be active doesn’t exist. It’s like joining reddit and having your frontpage be /r/all. It’s a shitty experience that g9ves a lot of weight to political posts.
I don’t think the subs failed to get off the ground because of federation, I think they did because they didn’t have a dedicated person tirelessly filling them with posts and single-handedly carrying them. Because that’s still where we are population wise. 50k+ MAUs is very nice, but not nearly enough for niche subs to be self-sustaining. Look at any small but active Lemmy sub right now and it’s often a single person doing 90% of the posting. The only real way to get a new sub going is to be that person.
At least now we have stuff like Lemmy Federate and places like !newcommunities@lemmy.world and !communitypromo@lemmy.ca that are both fairly active, so getting a new sub off the ground should be much easier than two years ago.
Help retain users by discussing more than just politics
One of the things I feel like Lemmy is still missing or is under developed is the niche hobbyist and tech help communities. I’m referring to places users can go to ask questions and start to build up a knowledge base of sorts that people will find and reference. Kind of like how if you want to actually find useful information for something, you used to add “Reddit” to every search to get meaningful results. Hopefully, that can become Lemmy. Assuming of course search engines even index Lemmy well enough
One way to start could be just having people post small tutorials or solutions for popular problems or topics in respective communities. I know the internet has changed a lot but “back in the old days” that was a great way to get engagement going at least on tech forums.
Worth noting is that what counts as an “active user” has changed between now and then. During the Reddit API exodus, an “active user” was a user who had posted or commented in the past month. Now, it includes users who have voted. If the 54k MAU record was set using the first algorithm, it is likely that the MAU using the new algorithm (which includes voting) would have been much higher.
Huzzah, us lurkers now count towards the global stats!
I think that change was done way back when. Do you have a reference for the algorithm change? I tried a quick search and came out empty.
The change was merged in Dec 2023 (see here). The Reddit Exodus was in summer 2023.
Lemmy is more polished and populated now than before. Hope influx stays and we got all the real people from reddit and bots stay there.
Downloading an app instead of using the web gui helped me a lot, almost gave up on Lemmy couple days ago. But some of these apps are so well made. Really shows commitment
Yep. I can’t use the web, only Thunder. If I could use my keyboard to navigate it fully, I probably would be more on web though.
You know it’s bad for Reddit when people were even talking about going back to Digg
I’ll just say, the more I hang around Lemmy, the more I enjoy the genuine conversations. It feels like less snark, less joke replies, and just a generally more community-type feeling. Reminds me of when I first tried Reddit after leaving Digg way back when.
Hopefully, us exiles can leave the Reddit back at Reddit.
I like a lot of things here better than Reddit. For one thing, I don’t see the stupid buzzwords like literally or cringe in 98% of all posts. There’s no hivemind here…yet. And hopefully there won’t be.
Also not the same 5 memes repeated for 15 years.
I feel the exact same, and I’ve been hanging around here for almost two years (the great 3rd party app exodus of ‘23).
This place feels more like a community filled with people versus a firehose of internet wrapped in layers of corporate and right wing BS.
Reddit was almost exclusively read-only for me. Here, I am commenting all the time.
I find a bunch of snark here, but it absolutely feels more genuine. With reddit it felt like half the comments I saw were from bots. More than half, maybe.
I hate everyone on lemmy but at least I’m hating people
Aw. We hate you too.
Is there a live chart available?
There’s two at fediverse observer and fedidb.
There are dozens of us.
I am one of the proud new users, and this is great to see!
I’m calling this one the exodus of st mangione
Luigi Migratione
The MAU of lemmy.world is ~18,600 which is a bit greater than the combined MAU of the next 7 instances (a big help here is lemm.ee which has ~7000 MAU). This is a really healthy spread of users and it means we don’t lose lemmy if the biggest instance goes down.
Compare that to Mastodon, where mastodon.social has more MAU (~372,000) than the combined MAU of the next 30 instances at least (I gave up counting). Thats not healthy for the ecosystem. Though tbf the total MAU of mastodon is ~899,000 so without mastodon.social they will still have ~527,000 but it will be very spread out.
I think the biggest instance, lemmy.world, not being operated by the Lemmy devs is also a good health indicator - on every other Fedi service I can think of, the server run by the devs is the biggest by far.
think the biggest instance, lemmy.world, not being operated by the Lemmy devs is also a good health indicator
Doubly so considering how the main devs manage their instance according to their highly controversial political views LMAO
Woo! That’s awesome. I am seeing quite a few more people.
We are already successful, I’m seeing stories, news articles, and videos that normally would never get pushed to the top. We can actually talk about things without overwhelming censorship, strange algorithms, or ads.
We can actually talk about things without overwhelming censorship, strange algorithms, or ads.
Its still a shame that I will never recommend this place to anyone I know until the community changes here.
Its a bit chicken and the egg cause we likely need one for the other. But with the users proclivity for bans, and blocks you end up with a user base even smaller and discussion that more feels like a battle to be right most of the time because intellectual superiority is looked up to rather than conversation.
I still think a community of people competing to be the most right in every comment section does not lead to actual community and doesn’t even help provide facts or info to most communities when there are not many niches to which people in here can participate in. Objective facts work best not in fandoms but in crafts. Like what glue doesn’t melt Styrofoam when doing prop building not which show or game is best.
I may be alone in this but I yearn for “the normies”.
this is a problem with fediverse in general imho.
the tools admins and users have are blunt (defederate or block). with all sorts of content moderation policies and opinions you will inevitably end up either alienated from everyone or surrounded by people that think and talk just like you.
fediverse does offer many advantages… creating a better online “town square” is just not going to be one of them.
a community of people competing to be the most right in every comment section
I think this depends highly on the type of community. (Although clearly I’m doing it to you right now. Sorry.)
Highly political topics and such are the worst, probably. But others where people come because of a shared interest, like a sport or food or animal or something, a hobby, I think tend to be more chill and mellow.
You would think. I still won’t go back to the gardening community. And will probably just stop participating in anything around here.
The problem is that there is still to few others than those types. The topic seems secondary. The mellow places are where it’s empty.
Maybe it also depends on the topic. But there are always gonna be annoying people everywhere you go in life. 🥲
The topic was how much they hoped my garden withered because I couldn’t afford to fully mulch all of it and was saying I was having to constantly weed the edge of my garden.
They proceeded to gleefully wish harm upon me and hardship for not doing or being exactly like them and as I begged for help from others to not feel alone was told I likely deserved it.Yeah people are truly awful everywhere and not working on getting better.
That sucks. I’m sorry that happened =(
It was like that for me on the Marvel Rivals subreddit on Reddit. I didn’t like all the smurfs (new accounts made by higher ranked players in lower ranked lobbies) but when I complained about it and said lower ranked or more casual players deserve to have fun, too, a bunch of people diminished my experiences, gleefully said they smurf, it’s a skill issue, it’s not a real problem (despite me checking enemy user profiles and sure enough, they’re all experts at this game with barely any time played and all wins in their competitive matches), just to not play, etc. It’s like pro basketball players dunking on little kid community games. They deserve to have fun, too!
Don’t have any advice or anything, and what I said may not have made any sense to people who don’t play the game, just empathizing on how much the internet sucks sometimes and your comment reminded me of that. Now I’m angry just remembering it lol.
Sorry. But yeah. Don’t have an answer but it’s a mess for being a new memeber when it feels communities don’t care to remember that people have to start somewhere.
Sorry that it happened to you too.
Jesus. That’s so obnoxiously mean. Sorry to hear you had this experience. I hope you don’t take it to heart when people say things like that to you. It’s hard not to, but please don’t think their words have any meaning.
🩵 All the best!
where can I check these status? Which website do you use?
The one shown is from join-lemmy:
https://join-lemmy.org/instances
Also of interest for people that love statistics (which I do):
https://fedidb.org/software/lemmy
https://lemmy.fediverse.observer/stats
EDIT: As you can see, the Fediverse being what it is, it’s basically impossible to get an exact, definitive count, so the numbers will always be a bit fuzzy. But they clearly show trends
So by my math and some googling, that’s about 0.00005% of Reddit’s MAU.
On the one hand, cool, growth is growth.
On the other hand maybe it’s… healthy to stop looking at Lemmy as an “alternative” to anything and start thinking about it as this small forum you like to use sometimes. Worked for me in the 90s, works for me now.
Totally, we don’t want numbers for the sake of numbers. We need passionate people who are ready to ditch other mainstream ones for federated alternatives. Then only we can grow.
I super agree, would rather have one decent regular than a thousand average redditors who don’t fit the vibe around here
I hope they feel welcomed here to stick around. I’ve quit Reddirt in 2023 during the API exodus, came to Lemmy and never looked back.
Samesies. About the only thing I ever go back for is askhistorians
About the only thing I ever go back for
Honestly, I miss some subs. But I just cut my losses. The usability and UI of the site went to shit. The toxicity was horrible. The site policies went to shit. No third party apps. No point.
I only come back to answer necrobumps and one time to update my own post that was a support question where I managed to figure out the answer. I don’t want to leave behind those forum posts like in XKCD where they have the same issue but don’t answer anything. 😅
