Hot damn, in just over a week. Data from https://the-federation.info/node/details/25274. Made in GIMP.
Thank you Chris, alyaza, Gaywallet again for making such a nice place and managing this explosion in popularity, to the mods and other people keeping it operating, and lastly to everyone joining, contributing, posting and commenting and be(e)ing friendly!
This is the moment for lemmy. The big issue this system had was it's viability. It was tiny. Like you'd look around at dead instances proudly reporting their double digit monthly user count with several day old threads and no comments.
I know I've taken a look at lemmy for a few times and decided not to take the plunge because while I wanted a smaller alternative to reddit, it was too small. We're at a point now where things are active enough to draw in a stream of content and the snowball rolling downhill will eventually grow into an avalanche.
I dont think a federated open source reddit alternative is going to reach the hundreds of millions of users reddit got, but that doesnt matter. What matters is there's enough people around to sustain a decent community.
Exactly. Over at lemmy.ca there were just a handful of users posting regularly making up the entire feed until recently, now it looks like it's starting to pick up as well. That is probably the story of all growing Fediverse communities lately.
Lemmy is not a publicly traded company so growth is not the paramount priority of its existence, but it is certainly great to have a sizeable place where there are enough people around who care about each other.
Lemmy doesn't need infinite growth and ever more value extraction from its users as a traditional company would, but a sizable userbase is definitely a good thing. There's a certain critical mass that any social site needs.
I'd love to hear more about your thoughts on critical mass. The way I see it, there's many levels of critical mass but each come with various levels of trade-off.
The community feel is tangible and the methodology is distributed in nature... win/win for socializing online, IMO.