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.
- A general how-to for lemmy pinned to the top would do wonders.
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 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.
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.
I did....lol
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.
- 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 100% did this in Mastodon when I first signed up.
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.
- 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 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)
- 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?
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
- 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.
That instance's real url (at least in the DB) is lemmy.podycust.co.uk. parapheum.com is 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
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...
It’s like that plot in Silicon Valley. Kinda concerning.
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 a better metric would be the number of comments in the Fediverse. Until bots arrive, that would better estimate the growth of actual userbase.

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.

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
Eh, just signed up and while my cns may which I was a bot, I’m very much still human.

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.

Okay but seriously 🤖🤖🤖🤖🤖

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.

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.
- 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.
- 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

Remember to donate to your instance and the lemmy project if you have the means!

I was in your comments last night with the 240k and was floored. The fact it jumped overnight by ANOTHER 120k is mind-blowing.

This. Is. Awesome.

These numbers are kinda mind boggling. Thoughts on where we'll be in a couple weeks?
- Millions, hopefully

Long live Lemmy!

Sorry, that was me adding some testing accounts 😔

Diaspora, here, we, come!

I have not heard that name in a long while now. What happened to it?
- Same. It's on the Fediverse stats page though. Second largest app after Mastodon.

Lemmy's a grower, not a shower

Please shower though.
Lmao extremely apt as someone who was trying (and failing) to get an account setup during the fist day of the reddit blackout

Hooray!

This is insane

"May you live in interesting times" is finally not a threat anymore. I love how we're witnessing the rise of a new internet thing.

Happy to be here posting with you folks. I have a feeling it's going to be quite the ride in the near future.

Line go up babieeeee!

Ha! Line go brrrrrrr.

Hope the trend continues, but easy to quadruple on small numbers.

I love seeing these charts. If it continues like that, we might hit a million by the 1st of July.

Mind boggling to think that could happen already.

Fantastic growth, hopefully it continues!

This is great, happy to be on Lemmy :)

Welcome! Thoughts so far?
- Thanks, it's been great, I already was using Libreddit and Boost to browse Reddit and Libreddit is similar to Lemmy. I also joined the Mastodon bandwagon and currently selfhosting an instance so I kinda know the quirks of federation.
  
  Glad to see that my favorite subs are coming here too, makes it more of a smooth transition.

Good for Lemmy.

Awesome!! I love Lemmy. I have an account on there too and I check it quite a bit.

I just joined yesterday. This place is too bare-bones tbh. So many basic features lacking.

Sure, it's early days with Lemmy. I think it does a pretty decent job considering the orders of magnitude difference in dev time between Reddit and Lemmy.

Lemmy's total users continues to soar from 240k yesterday to 360k today! Basically quadrupling in the past 4 days

Hooray!