I discovered lemmy back when reddit started to charge for their API. However upon taking a look at it, it seemed that apart from like 8 communities,there was not much going on elsewhere. Things seem to have changed since then, quite a lot of active communities these days. So how many users do yall reckon lemmy has now? Is it close to 5M? or perhaps even higher?
It’s about 50k active users. Communities are generally less important than instances.
Oh wow, if thats the case then I have overestimated the numbers by alot. Seems like we’re still in the nichest of the niche
It’s much bigger than it used to be, and is relatively stable now.
Keep in mind that these are active users, many networks with huge numbers have registered accounts, but most have no activity.
In any case, be the change you want to see, help the network grow by providing content and activity, you will always be welcomed.
I just created [email protected] but not taking signups so you have to use an account from a federated instance.
Quality > quantity. Lemmy still has some trolls and the usual misunderstandings, but people are here bc they want to be, not bc its the only option
I agree! I definitely prefer Lemmy over Reddit, for sure.
Can you ELI5 for me why Instances are more important than communities?
Doesn’t matter as much for lemm.ee as it’s more of a utility than an instance, but I see instances more like traditional “subreddits” and comms within them as “hashtags” and categories. Hexbear’s “games” comm is very different from Lemmy.mls, as an example.
If I could change one thing about lemmy. I kind of wish communities worked like channels in IRC. When servers are federated if I go to #games on my server and you go to #games on your server. It does it’s best to show the same content. So the instance is real but the community is vitrual abstracted by the protocol.
I feel like doing that automatically would just encourage instances to defederate if their larger communities didn’t like the cut of another instance’s jib. The culture clash would be harder to tolerate if content were mixed by default like that.
Maybe an easier way for end users to do it themselves? Like making a feed of multiple communities under one topic.
So, more like servers on discord?
Yep! Great example.