Lemmy.world grew from about 51k users when third-party reddit apps started to shut down to about 84.8k users at the time of this post.
Definitely felt some growing pains in the past few days, but it’s great to see the platform more active now that things have become more stable.
So, welcome reddit expats!
There’s an inevitable adaptation and learning period for everyone, including smaller instances, but I think we should really be emphasizing the decentralization aspects of the Fediverse. Ruud and others are doing all they can to keep up, but everyone trying to consolidate onto lemmy.world isn’t great for anyone and only leads to even greater cost and technical pressures.
Someone suggested that we should use this to find instances nearer to us. I did that and it has been running a lot smoother on my end apart from the occasional loading issues on subs in Lemmy.world.
There’s definitely some getting used to for new immigrants like us from Reddit. The nature of Fediverse forces us to give up on the concept of “karma” and be ready to hop from one instance to another at any given time. The good thing is we’ll be seeing much fewer karma-farming bots, which I assume would be an even much bigger issue on Reddit now that so many of the genuine users have left. Shitty mods, rampant bots, subs going dark/NSFW. What a shit show.
Honestly, one of the largest problems with the current instance system is the lack of an ability to either export an account or link accounts between several instances. Once those types of features are added, I think Lemmy will be a lot more tolerable to new users.