Just wait until Reddit cuts off API access for all those millions of people using iOS/Android apps.
I've been on Reddit since 2005 but Federated social media is the future.
this post was submitted on 23 Apr 2023
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Oh yeah, once those stop working I think a lot of people will start looking at alternatives. Might be a tiny percentage of overall userbase that moves, but it could be a huge influx from Lemmy perspective.
That's great to see! And it's been steady and significant, I believe many instances doubled since last year.
I would be interested to see the methodology of this site, like how they list new servers (I see an 'Add' button, probably also scrapes for federation?) and tally totals. I don't have time to verify numbers, but it seems to be solid, which is good. They've:
- [correctly, but interestingly] included the completely unfederated bakchodi instance
- [correctly] removed the dead wolfballs instance around February (surprisingly it had dropped to 7th highest listed on join-lemmy.org by the time the announcement was made, I was expecting a bigger hit to stats as it was 3rd/4th about a year ago)
- [correctly, but counter-productively] excluded hexbear.net, which is run on a diverged fork based on Lemmy, but are actively trying to re-converge and federate with the main Lemmy network.
It's a bit hard to compare the stats from hexbear.net (especially since I don't know how they count them sending huge numbers of posts off the site to a backup to try and make the site run faster) but here's a summary, assuming no huge unlisted instance has shown up since:
Posts count:
- hexbear: 260.6K
- lemmy.ml: 74.0K
- lemmygrad.ml: 40.9K
- bakchodi: 19.2K
- feddit.it: 3.27K [might not be exactly 5th place, I don't have time to check all of them, but the huge drop is clear]
Users/month:
- hexbear: [unknown, but high]
- lemmy.ml: 279
- lemmygrad.ml: 273
- bakchodi: 134
- feddit.it: 35 [again, might not be 5th]
So when I bring these edge cases up, they aren't trivial. They're literally two of the biggest four instances by far. Deciding if they count or not, due to their federation status, matters, especially Hexbear as they appear willing and likely to eventually federate, and to upstream their code improvements in order to re-converge. So they realistically might become part of the wider Lemmy community.
It's going to be interesting to see how things scale up if there is going to be a significant influx of users with Reddit making changes. Mastodon went through some growing pains during Twitter migrations. ActivityPub can also have problems with content that gets popular and gets shared massively. I expect there are going to be lots of interesting problems to solve as the network starts scaling up.
What exactly is hexbear?
It's a progressive political community, based on a fork of lemmy. They added a bunch of features unique to the fork that means that it's no longer compatible with lemmy. However, hexbear is something like 10 times the size of the largest lemmy instance, and probably has more users than the rest of lemmy combined.
They're also working at making their fork compatible with lemmy again, so ultimately, they will start federating with lemmy and the rest of the fediverse
It looks like development on it has stopped for more than a year? Or am I missing something?
A site where you can't post a picture of an ice cream
Great news.
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