I agree, I think Lemmy should add an option to fetch all the historical posts from a remote community. Right now it just starts federating from when the first person subscribes to that community, but it would be better if it was retroactive.

Wow, TIL.

I based that off fedidb but it seems to be very inaccurate. Obviously it wasn’t tracking until a certain point in Lemmy development.

I’ll make a list of the major instances from before the APIcalpyse of June 2023 that are still active. For the Lemmy historians 🧐. I’m mostly basing this by the top admin account on each server, because the admins are listed in order of seniority in the sidebar.

• lemmy.ml - Apr 2019
• lemmygrad - Aug 2019
• hexbear/chapo - July 2020
• szmer.info - Aug 2020
• lemmy.ca - Dec 2020
• sopuli.xyz - Feb 2021
• midwest.social - Aug 2021
• mander.xyz - Dec 2021
• beehaw.org - Jan 2022
• slrpnk.net - April 2022
• feddit.it - May 2022
• lemmy.blahaj.zone - Jan 2023
• infosec.pub - May 2023

Honorable mention to feddit.de which was an early instance too IIRC and now lives on in feddit.org

This is largely just an interesting piece of trivia, but also somewhat notable because servers generally don’t federate content from before they were founded. So the older servers will have local copies of posts and comments from the early days of Lemmy.

For instance @QuentinCallaghan@sopuli.xyz actually has 2.37k posts and 1.73k comments. But sh.itjust.works only caches about 850/800 posts/comments from that account, because we only joined the network in June 2023.

Surely has to be https://sopuli.xyz/

The admin is a Finn, although the servers are technically in Germany.

Also it’s extra cool because it’s one of the true OG Lemmy servers, founded in June 2021.

All centralized services. The fediverse is theoretically resistant to that kind of process.

Also you forgot Limewire, the GOAT

Finally, I have been waiting for this.

Lemm.ee over 4,000 MAUs. Lemmy.ca and lemmy.dbzer0.com up to 1.5k after hovering around 1k for most of 2024. All of the major servers seeing solid growth. Good work lemmings, keep it up

Wow this guide is really good and easy to read on mobile, amazing work!

Once you’ve read the Silmarillion, there’s also The Children of Húrin. If you start from the Hobbit > LOTR > Silmarillion > CoH, it’s basically a steady progression of increasing epicness and tragedy.

I suppose the Silmarillion is the most epic, but Children of Húrin is the most intensely tragic.

Yes this is good to know, I wasn’t aware of the background with some of the fediverse projects.

I don’t understand the question. Pretty much all fediverse software was built with federation in mind from the start. They all started from scratch afaik, nothing was built on top of a centralized design.

They also happen to perform similar functions as earlier centralized websites, but that’s simply because those are the ways that people commonly prefer to use the internet. People use it to share photos, stream videos, connect with friends, microblog, blog, browse content aggregators, etc.

There could definitely be new paradigms of internet usage waiting to be discovered, but if the fediverse can’t even replace the existing functionality of the web first, it’d be very ambitious to start building brand new types of sites already.

That’s true, originally only users that posted or commented were counted as active. Then they changed it to count users who had voted as active, even if they didn’t post or comment.

But I believe that change occured almost one year ago, in March 2024. You can see a big spike of active users at that time. Starting this January we’ve seen some really nice organic growth, although it’s not nearly to the level of the API exodus. We still need more users, but it’s really encouraging to see some solid growth after over a year of stagnation/slow decline.

Wow. Absolute legend

https://discuit.net/

One of the more commonly recommended reddit alternatives aside from Lemmy. Goes to show how far ahead we are of any other alternative, they all have virtually no activity.

Also note that we bottomed out around 37k in October 2024, so we have seen pretty significant growth since then, and it seems to be accelerating.

Lol for real?

The main thing I heard about Bluesky is that it costs like $100 mill to run your own instance or something like that, so they only have one main instance for now. They technically have federation, but for all intents and purposes, it’s just another centralized corporate service waiting to be enshittified.

I think you did a really good job with this video. I kinda agree that it might be too long to hook complete newcomers. But it seems like a very useful resource for people who are just starting off on the fediverse or have heard about it a few times and want to understand more about how it actually works before really getting into it.

I think there will be a good number of people who bounce off the fediverse a few times before starting to actively use it, because it is relatively complex compared to mainstream social media. But then they will keep getting annoyed at corporate social media sucking and will eventually fully commit to the fediverse. This video could definitely help people take that step, and it really captures a lot of what makes the fediverse so great. Nicely done!

That’s fair, but also reddit will continue to make unpopular decisions, and we are already the default alternative. Just have to wait and see

I agree with you, but I feel that you’re glossing over the bigger point. In my view, you’re right about the way most social media users behave, but that behavior is also bound to slowly change as people get a better grip on how it is effecting them in a negative way. We as a society are learning the hard way about how toxic social media can be.

Most people are dumb and they don’t have time to consider whether something is better or worse, especially something as new as social media. But when they start to notice other people (like us!) doing something differently and having a better experience, they eventually catch on and change their behavior.

It’s like how it took a long time for people to stop smoking cigarettes, but once the tide turned it happened within a couple generations. Or wearing seat belts, or any other new, cool technology/product that people eventually started to understand better and adapt to after a few generations. Social media is like that, and we are simply the early adopters of a more humane and healthy form of social media. It takes a long time, but people will eventually start to understand how corporate social media is an unhealthy and exploitative habit, and this decentralized, community driven model is a much better experience.

We’ve kinda been hibernating since July 2023, with the userbase rapidly declining from that peak and then remaining nearly constant for the entirety of 2024. Honestly it’s quite impressive that we held such a steady monthly user count for the past year.

But now with all the publicity around the fediverse, we are beginning to pick up some organic momentum again. We’ve grown by about 2k active users in January (~5% growth). Keep that up for a few more months and it will start to become noticeable with more activity, which should hopefully start a positive feedback loop.

Regarding finding and subscribing to communities on other instances, I’m pretty sure this tool addresses that problem fairly effectively.

https://lemmy-federate.com/

You may want to add your instance to that.

Pixelfed’s monthly userbase has gone from 15k to almost 300k in the past month. Absolutely massive for the fediverse.

I’ll probably try it out eventually^TM

Sunk cost fallacy goes brrr

Yeah fuck algorithms, all my friends hate algorithms.

Not being sarcastic, I genuinely feel that way.

Btw you may be interested in !lain@sh.itjust.works despite the fact that it’s dead. Or maybe your username is completely unrelated. Worth a shot.