Active users as of June 25, 2023:
- lemmy.world (48k users): 13554 active users
- lemmy.ml (38k users): 4582 active users
- beehaw.org (11k users): 3743 active users
- feddit.de (6.7k users): 2320 active users
- sh.itjust.works (6.5k users): 2167 active users
- lemmy.ca (3.5k users): 1082 active users
Great to see all this growth and activity in different lemmy instances!
Good time to appreciate the lack of dominant centrality here compared to mastodon.
Mastodon’s flagship instance run by the BDFL,
mastodon.social, has~10times the monthly active users of the next biggest instance.Here, there isn’t really a flagship instance, as the devs don’t want their instance to be anything more than the one they happen to run, and it’s not the biggest, and the biggest is independent of the lemmy dev team and isn’t even that much bigger than the others.
That might also be a response to what users were asking for. Signing up for a server confused the shit out of everyone. It was to the point where Mastodon’s confusing onboarding process was frequently being covered by major media outlets across the globe.
Instead of continuing to iterate on sever selection experience, they just started to say “fuck it” and started dumping everyone into .social.
Which is the only way they’re ever going to work. It’s a major barrier to sign ups. If the fediverse is actually going to take off one of the Lemmy sites will have to become the dominant one
If the tools for discovering and subscribing to communities could be improved so it becomes dead easy to subscribe to communities on any instance from any instance, that might not need to happen.
Right now the process of having to search for each community and subscribe is too clunky. And if someone posts a link to another community it often comes up in a format that takes you to the other instance, where you have no account so can’t subscribe. We need a way to share links to other communities that incorporates an easy “subscribe” button that talks to your own instance.
It would be nice to have some index or search result page that lists communities on all instances, with a subscribe button next to each.
If these things can be smoothed out, it won’t matter too much which instance you have your account on, so that will be less of an obstacle to new users.