Spyke
lemmy.world

Whatever the number, I've definitely noticed in the past few days that there are getting to be enough people having conversations and posting content for this place to feel like a legit community instead of a ghost town. I'm really glad to see more people joining and taking part.

123

For example, your comment is the first one I have seen that has over 30 upvotes since I came on board a week back.

9

It's been amazing to feel like we're part of something that's growing so fast. I'll miss Reddit but I expect Lemmy will fill in the role sooner rather than later.

6
lemmy.world

I don't doubt there's a great amount of user growth, but it appears that many of those are account creation spam on instances with 1 active monthly user though.

Edit to add a comment I made on another post Basically there might be about 200k real users right now including lurkers, growing at a rate of basically 13.5k per day.

84
kbin.social

Yeah, no idea whether this is spammers trying to stake turf or someone trying to inflate the user count to stick it to reddit (or something) but the numbers from the 18th on are clearly inauthentic.

18
kbin.social

TBF reddit's numbers are also inauthentic.

Hell, fake it till you make it isn't that bad a strategy to attract new users.

Of course, you also need content. I hope people start making bots which steal content from reddit, which bots on reddit steal from twitter/insta/tiktok/snapchat. That way we can all cut out the middle-man.

On a side note, I think it's really cool that I'm on kbin and commenting on something on lemmy.

32

On a side note, I think it's really cool that I'm on kbin and commenting on something on lemmy.

It's also so well integrated, that I just realized I am on a Lemmy magazine/community.

14

What's really cool is that, on lemmy-based website at least, you can also follow PeerTube channels, and comment on videos.

Plus, there are Mastodon/Misskey/etc. fediverse microblogging users peppered all throughout these posts.

8
kbin.social

Conspiracy theory: what if Reddit is using it’s not army to make a bunch of dead/spam accounts to try to make Lemmy instances more expensive solely to try to price them out of their space so they can then turn and point to how “Reddit alternatives aren’t viable/stable.”

On one hand, that’s obviously stupid and not true. On the other hand, I can see Huffman being petty and malicious enough to do something like that.

10

Inactive accounts don't really add any expense. Creating a bot farm to create large amounts of artificial traffic to crush competitors would risk antitrust lawsuits that would actually cripple the company.

10
twistedtxbreply
lemmy.world

Yes, I expect some instances to have some difficulty coping with the traffic in July

I sometimes go to Reddit again, mostly by habit, but once Relay stops working, I'm done.

37

Thinking about how it will just disappear in thin air in little more than a week is a utter tragedy. The app is simply perfect

2
lemmy.world

I understand the bot concern, but when I look at the comment and active user figures, they're all in the same trendline of exponential growth. This is the exodus just beginning. Personally I'm finding Lemmy to be a refreshing alternative that serves far better than what Reddit has become. I think it's what we've all been waiting for, and the secret's starting to get out.

56

It's actually pretty badass to see how quick the response is developing and the awareness being so immediate. What's really cool is to see what gets done about a problem with full transparency, instead of Reddit Admins' chamber of secrets.

13

This is my first comment on Lemmy , excited to be here as we embark on a new journey away from Reddit.

I'm excited for Sync coming to lemmy , my go to app for reddit browsing was Sync.

And obligatory fuck spez

44

Just heard the news about Sync and instantly registered here. I'll still be hoping for Boost to cross over, but Sync is infinitely better than Reddit's app. A decent client was all that was missing for me to make the plunge, let's hope that's the case for more people.

And yes, fuck Spez

18
lemmy.world

Soon, the novelty accounts are going to start showing up here again.

something something undertaker mankind cage something.

43

I want to see shittywatercolors here in the fediverse!

Where are you shitty? We want your colors of water

17
rigattireply
lemmy.world

We'll know Lemmy truly is the future when we have the first shittymorph post.

16

I liked the part where Woody Rampart goes "It's Ramparting time!" and rammed all over his parts.

4

I got my old old OLD username...AIM style...hotmail account too lol. My Reddit name has sunk with the ship. It was just after cheezits anyway

3

How easy is it!

I just used my Reddit name and continued here.

No effort what so ever.

Bit to wrap my head around the idea of subs being completely different communities on different servers, but I LIKE that idea.... no Fascist Overlords to control the groupthink.

I guess (if this is how the Lemmyverse/Fediverse works) is some AWS/cloud instances are going to be spun up hard and fast!

39

Ngl, I'm gonna miss these early days I think. Hopefully we have instilled some type of decent, thoughtful culture on here that can keep us grounded and keep flourishing.

I really like getting in on these big threads later at night when everyone is chopping it up and making me think.

39
piaille.fr

@MicroWave
There is a huge bot issue right now (started 3 days ago). All the numbers are worthless.

It’s a known issue, all admins should add captcha to the subscription page, delete the bots and re-compute the actual number of users. Unless we do that, we won’t have a correct number.

We can still look at the Monthly Active Users. Bots don’t post (yet)

35
zambonimanreply
lemmy.world

They're supposed to be bot posts. That's what lemmit.online is for. To copy Reddit content into communities on lemmit.online.

15
lemmy.world

Good to know. Also I have mixed feelings about this. It’s great to see more content but I would rather see more of original posts here than a copy from reddit.

6

I just blocked the sub and bot. Much like twitter/tumbler content on reddit I am not opposed to seeing it, but it needs to go through quality control to show up on my feed.

3
neroreply
lemmy.world

This is a bot made to repost from reddit to generate content for remade subs, thought i don’t know if that’s the right thing to do, it’s not made purely to spam communities afaik

15

I have mixed feelings about this. We should try to get more people here to make this content. Maybe it’s just me but I when I see a whole page with bot posts I stay away from that community. I would rather see posts from real users, engage with them, share my thoughts with the author and I am not able to do that if it’s a copy from somewhere else made by a bot

7
LUHGreply
lemmy.world

Bots get a bad rep. Bots are fantastic, it's just a shame they are prejuded to be bad. I'm sure signup has a bot mode on some instances.

6

I have no problem with bots in general (there were some really cool novelty ones on reddit, as well as moderation ones, etc). When large amounts of accounts are created for bots, it seems a bit shady, however. Will those be used to push political opinions and guerilla marketing as Lemmy gets bigger, or did someone just create a bunch of accounts to simulate conversations using an LLM?

6

Beep, beep, beep, beep. Please hold the reset button for 5 seconds. I'm stuck in a loop.

2

Line goes up?

You failed to continue multiplicative growth therefore your investors are going to pull their money... Wait there are no investors, there is no ipo. I'm going to donate 10$.

35
lemmy.world

the interface is just so clean. it feels like early internet and I love it.

33
Ekekoreply
lemmy.world

Exactly! I’m so happy it finally seems to be an alternative to Reddit, which has mutated into such a weird monster

13

I've tried moving away from Reddit several times with varying degrees of success, this time though it's felt really easy - the more i learn about Lemmy the more i like it and look forward to seeing it evolve. There are some really nice communities here too, feels like a lot of the most interesting people have come here but the spammers, bots and trolls haven't yet -- i'm sure it'll change as things grow but i'm going to enjoy it while it lasts.

3

Were you using new reddit? I don't find it that different from old.reddit (which is fine by me).

9
lemmy.world

we are already at over 1 million, there’s gonna be bot spam soon

32

I hate to break it to you about who or what is making up the majority of those 1 million "users" if you think the spam bots are coming "soon".

3

I’ve seen a single bot so far, but that doesn’t bode well for the future if it’s starting already.

2
lemmy.world

I think it's either bots or some spooky spammers that are falsely reporting the number of users. e.g. lemmy.k6qw.com currently claims to have 44k users with no posts...

30
memchrreply
lemmy.world

There are many more bad instances like this in the statistics. I think it will become a problem for Lemmy sooner or later.

11

Probably! But in the mean time I bet some real people will join just because they see the numbers going up.

10
lemmy.world

I believe instances can block other instances entirely, right? Or have I misunderstood that? This would mean none of those bots in there could ever post in our threads here. I'm sure there will be cooperation between the instances on this.

5

I think with the extreme novelty, there will be LOTS of devs trying out new scripts and auto-doings.

I suspect that will be learned pretty fast, published to a group, then many of the bots will simply die out.

9
lemmy.world

Apparently a lot of those bots are just farming reddit and reposting here. Which I think in the short term is a good thing. People are more likely to join/stay if they see content. On the other I hope lemmy has the tools to prevent bot content from overwhelming user generated posts to the point that it loses the authenticity.

21

That's an interesting take, but I could definitely see it working out. As long as the reposted content isn't ads or spam, it could help the fediverse have content while it grows.

6

I would love to have a bot/a few scripts to migrate a lot of the useful posts that were on reddit over here for a few of my hobby communities instead of having to move them manually. I can definitely see a lot of use cases for those.

6

I don't understand. Are you claiming that the first 150k users that signed up are all real and that since the rate of growth has increased exponentially that it couldn't possibly be real users signing up? I don't dispute that some of it is bots for sure. There are clearly places that have 20k users and 2 posts and stuff like that that are very suspicious. But I don't think it's at all reasonable to assert that all of the growth that has occurred are bots. There is absolutely no evidence to suggest that. In fact, I would argue that the amount of activity (posts and comments) increasing alongside the user count is evidence to the contrary. I understand that bots can make posts too, but apart from the obviously labelled bots that are reposting content from reddit and stuff like that, I haven't seen any bot spam accounts posting links to suspicious sites or anything like that at all. Unless you're claiming that the bots are posting normal looking comments so that people think they are human? I don't understand.

7

before lemmy blew up the count was 150k but many joined in the last few days. sure many are boys but until an effective way to filter them out is there we can't know the precise numbers.

4
lemmy.world

I don't see the proof in that link, although maybe I'm missing something, it just seems to imply that is the case.

4
Senokirreply
lemmy.world

Agreed. It's literally just them saying "there are a lot of new users and theoretically they could all be bots, therefore they are all bots".

5

Captions and applications are not default enabled on an instance. There is no rate limit on the creation of accounts. Many new instances have 0 posts but 10,000 or 20,000+ user accounts. Startrek.website purged something like 20K fake accounts from their instance after enabling registration protections.

Active users will always be the better metric.

2
yiffit.net

Notice the disparity between monthly active users and registered users. These are bots. I'm very tempted to block these instances outright.

29

Just block them. going to have to with the number of bots on it.

14

Might be necessary. I don’t see any good coming from hundreds of thousands of bots.

5

I've been on Lemmy since last Monday (like 10 days). It's meteoric!

Back then, simply posting ANYTHING automatically meant you made the front page.

18
lemmy.world

This is my first post on Lemmy and I just want to say that I'm so happy to be here guys. Finally my dream of seeing a decentralized social media platform gaining unprecedented traction is coming true.

28
lemmy.world

This has been a dream of mine as well! I kept saying “why hasn’t someone created a better social media platform, especially an anonymous one like Reddit?” I didn’t know Lemmy existed until I went to post a negative review for Reddit and saw it plugged in someone else’s negative review for Reddit. I’m so happy it exists!

12

I'm about to go drop a negative review and share Kbin there too!

2
RQG
lemmy.world

I'm super excited for Sync for Lemmy.

Also tinfoil hat on for a second. If there are really as many bots as people keep suggerting. Who has an interest in sabotaging lemmy?

But then it's probably the same bits which are everywhere now interested in lemmy because it gained users.

25

I assume its a target for bots because its a lie hanging fruit.

Also it's harder to find bots down the road

6
lemmy.world

So now I just gotta build up a new feed from scratch, that's the part that sucks the most. So many nice niche communities I've discovered over the years on reddit... But it was time, reddit has been going downhill for years.

24

I'm in the middle of doing the same. Its a shame when you go through your list of subreddits and can't find an equivelant community on here. Nevermind niche subs, there will still be plenty of 1mil+ subs which are missing from here.

Nor do I want to create and be the only mod of about 20 different subs. I feel like that requires a special sort of person lol.

13

I am building my wall of Subscribe Pendings, which I tend to like a butterfly collection.

8

Far and away the biggest problem at the moment, lol.

13

replace the "1" in the url with "0" -- so "/page/1" turns into "/page/0"

it's an easy bandaid until they fix it!

8

Just a wild guess - but those "front page" algos must be tough to master, especially when a site doesn't have real data to play with. I'm sure the situation will improve soon!

5
lemmy.world

Honestly the only thing missing now is a good app for iOS. However I’ve been using the mobile browser version and it works just fine. I hope Apollo’s dev sees an opportunity here and goes for it.

23
pieplotreply
lemmy.world

How are you using the browser version? I just can't browse /all without having a new post pushing down the feed every 5 seconds I find it unusable.

5

set it to new instead of active on the top. Active refreshes whenever a comment is made while new only refreshes when a new topic is made.

5

You should grab memmy and join their discord. They've posted some screenshots of what the UI overhaul will look like in the short term and it looks incredible. If you love Apollo, it should be a pretty easy transition

2

I'm sure it will happen. There are already a few apps for Lemmy, and I know Sync is in development. I'd be rather surprised if no other apps are coming..

I don't use iOS, but I know there's an app for it, named Mlem. You could give that a shot, even if it's just a placeholder while you wait for something better. :)

1

The situation has worsened. I counted about 2 million new "users" in 3 days.

2
lemmy.world

Love it, and we’re not even at 1st July, when all 3rd party apps stop working (shame or not I still go back to reddit with Apollo to enjoy the drama).

Also, we don’t need 400 million users to have a variety of communities with good discussion and content - a few million is more than enough, probably.

20

I keep seeing new communities daily and we're already the size of a decent city and much larger than the city I grew up in. We had all types from punks to queer kids to commies and fascists. We've got enough users to fill any niche I can think of and probably a lot more. And we're still growing, I don't remember reddit when it was this young, but there's a bit of an early 4chan (minus all the racism and homophobia and hate) vibe going on that I totally dig!

5
lemmy.world

Unfortunately most of the communities I'm interested in are ghost towns

18
TheFencereply
lemmy.world

The best way to solve that is post some links and get the ball rolling. Can't get engagement without something to engage with. (I am guilty of not posting links myself lol)

17
small44reply
lemmy.world

I'm doing that but I don't know for how long if I'm the only one doing the effort

1
XYZinfernoreply
lemmy.world

Unfortunately, there's no real way of knowing. But for any community someone's gotta take that initial leap of faith and build it up from just a few people, even if it sounds like you're talking to yourself sometimes. At least until like-minded people start to show up and be drawn in to what you've built.

Even for the community that I'm trying to start up here, !presidents, it might just be my friend and I making posts, and it might stay that way for weeks, or possibly months. But that's a possibility you have to be okay with when starting up a community.

Try and talk to other individuals who are as passionate about your community's premise as you are. Friends you know irl, or people you've met in a similar community on Reddit. Having even just a few other people to engage with can make the process seem a lot less lonely and futile.

9

Man, it's difficult trying to jump-start a community. Here I am, sitting over at !adopted in case it ever takes off several months or years from now. Maybe !adoption would've been a better bet haha.

2
lemmy.world

I just joined lemmy and this is the first social media service where I could grab my short username instead of a longer one no one uses I'm very glad

17

You could always host your own instance and be the only user with your special user and connect to other instances' communities.

6
williamreply
lemmy.world

I typed my old Reddit username in at first then said “wait a minute…”, somehow nobody took my simple first name in the first several hundred thousand accounts created!

4

Usernames only have to be unique on each instance, kind of like email. Even if Lemmy is growing exponentially, not all that growth will be on lemmy.world.

3

I've always been able to grab my username. Of course, I originally (in a different context) tried "timholt", which was taken, then "thetimholt", which was also taken.

3
lemmy.world

I wonder if these are real users or if someone wrote a script to register users via the lemmy API… 🤔

15
cdipierrreply
lemmy.world

I can confirm that after a week of people posting links, I - a real user - finally took the plunge to sign up today.

-Sincerely, cdipierr-bot

12

HELLO A REAL USER. I AM ALSO A REAL USER AND LIKE TO DO NORMAL HUMAN THINGS LIKE CONSUME, SCROLL, LIE MOTIONLESS FOR 8 HOURS, AND MANY OTHER NORMAL HUMAN ACTIVITIES. I PARTICULARLY ENJOY THE HUMAN ACTIVI

Segmentation Fault

6
Slashzeroreply
lemmy.world

I self host! Very nice having an instance all to myself.

17
lemmy.world

I'm planning to self host - but just have one question, mostly a confirmation, as long as you're not hosting communities, you can comment and interact with others, without needing other instances to explicitly sync with your insurance, right?

I kind of want my own instance just to control what communities I sync for my own account, but not going to host any myself, so defederation of some instances doesn't affect me (unless I myself want to block them)

11
lemmy.world

Do the big instances need to give permission, to your self-hosted instance, to read and post on their communities?

Do those instance owners need to manually approve access from some unknown small instance?

2

No. In both cases, they'd either have to manually block federation to your instance, or be operating on a whitelist-only federation basis.

Once you spin up your own instance and browse around a bit/subscribe to some communities, wait a bit, and then click on the "Instances" link at the bottom of the page and you'll see a bunch of instances that will have automatically federated.

1
sayitghoulreply
lemmy.world

How do you self host? Is the always free AWS package an option to do this?

2
SolidGruereply
lemmy.world

I aim to self-host myself, one of these days. I'm having analysis paralysis picking a VPS tho, because I'll want to move my other online socials there too.

5
gruereply
lemmy.world

Use Docker or Ansible or something, so that migrating between VPSs is easy.

(Also, if you're solid, what does that make me?!)

7

(Also, if you’re solid, what does that make me?!)

Liquid, Gas or Plasma, mate. 🙃

2

i really love the smaller communities, going to be so interesting to see how they all evolve and interact. Anyone that hasn't i really recommend going to the various other smaller instances just to look and get a feel for them, it's a great way to find interesting communities and you can subscribe from the instance you're on (assuming its federated).

1

I'm really not sure these are spam bots. I suspect it's actually mostly people playing with the exploit that was recently posted on their personal instance. Definitely still bots though.

15

I joined in the last few days. Seems like this site has much better content. Less bots and reposts. Plus, the user base seems a lot more intelligent in general at this point.

14
lemmy.world

Oh man, I hope this server can maintain. Support if you can. There is no CEO but there is a server admin who has to pay for us to be on it. No centralization means its up to us to keep it going. I don't know the history of lemmy world and I'd hate to see it go because it was too expensive for it's popularity. Something to think about.

14

No one asked me I just want new people remember that it takes all of us to do it and not just our meta data being exploited.

3

The good news is that bots seem to be joining particular instances made for them. This will make preventing them from ruining the fediverse easy, just defederate from instances like k6qw.

If they start joining instances such as this one, then that is its own issue, but each instance can solve it to their own needs. I'm not too worried about bots on Lemmy at all really.

13

@MicroWave the fact that there are almost a million people that are users on lemmy shows that there are a million more on the fediverse as a whole. i am very glad lemmy federated on activitypub. so i can use mastodon to communicate to lemmy communities.

13

Fuck you Spez, most may be bots right now but those bad boys will eventually become real users.

10
kbin.social

Unfortunately looks like a massive amount of bots. 40k for lemmy.k6qw.com and only one post.

8
TrevMDreply
kbin.social

Sounds like a good candidate for defederation tbh

11

My understanding is that at least some of these instances are probably being attacked by bots that are auto-signing-up accounts on instances with open aign-up, because someone looking into it said that the instances are also banning a bunch of them. Probably not complicit (though that will presumably also be a long-term concern to deal with).

The instance admin at lemmy.dbzer0.com was apparently working on some kind of tool to monitor it. Had a start on GitHub, IIRC.

3

"Sync for reddit" was one of the more popular Android apps for reddit

14

Holy cow. That is insane growth. I love it! Happy to see such a large influx of users. Hopefully most stay.

8

I think it's possible to belong to more than one form of social media, it isn't an either/or situation. Also it's way too early to project how any of this is going to end, it reminds me of the early days of the internet in miniature as people scrambled around trying new things. I say throw everything at the wall and lets see what sticks and if beehaw makes people happy and gives people that don't feel safe other places somewhere that they can be online I think it's great. Not everything is for everyone and that's OK, if we all liked the same thing vanilla would be the only ice cream flavor.

8
lemmy.world

Just arrived here, does anyone know how to change the interface language? It presumed I wanted the language from my region, but I prefer English.

7

Click on your profile, and go to settings. Then change interface language to English. But this seems like the wrong kind of thread for posting support questions.

-1
lemmy.world

Hello everyone! Waiting for the mobile app so i can leave reddit for good

6
SSTFreply
lemmy.world

On phone by default, the theme follows your phone. Set the phone to dark mode and it should switch.

If it isn’t or if you’re on PC go to themes in your user settings and manually change it.

4
lemmy.world

Lemmy will be like what LibreOffice was to OpenOffice. I can feel it.

4

While I do think actual users is making good progress, I really hope most of those users aren't bots.

3
kbin.social

TBH - I don't understand how people use Lemmy. It auto-updates and scrolls every few seconds if I try to look at anything that isn't a stale feed from 3 days ago. I know it'll get better but you have to REALLY want to be there to stick it out which will turn off many new users.

3
talreply
kbin.social

The patch to fix that is in and the next release includes it. Could also use kbin, which doesn't have the issue, though it has its own quirks, like squashed previews.

If your platform has support from a third-party app, could also use that.

9

I think squashed previews has already been fixed! It's a fast moving world here in the fediverse!

4
lemmy.world

Maybe adding some Cloudflare service or similar would benefit Lemmy. I think Kbin has it but that is moot as long as other instances don't.

3

First comment on lemmy. It's exciting, but like, difficult. I can't be the only one who thinks it's too complicated. Reddit had one subreddit per thing. Here, there's infinite instances with so many of the same subreddit.

2
lemmy.world

Does this include people like me creating sign ups for different feds? I have lemmy.world and kbin atm, but may try others.

2

I hope that Infinity will come to lemmy, that would be pretty cool as its my client of choice.

2

That is quite the spike in growth. I'm new too. It's good to see places like this get attention.

2
timespacereply
lemmy.world

…what? Isn’t the whole point of lemmy to be federated?

2

I am against defederating instances for political reason like beehaw is doing. But defederating instances infested with bots is fine in my book.

1