Beehaw is the next-largest Lemmy instance after lemmy.ml. They've already defederated themselves from lemmygrad.ml for ~10 months

https://beehaw.org/post/443376

  • temptest [any]
    ·
    1 year ago

    Worth pointing out that Lemmygrad was the largest instance until a week ago. Beehaw and lemmy.ml exploded with incoming redditors.

    • sovietknuckles [they/them]
      hexagon
      ·
      1 year ago

      The next explosion will be June 12 when a lot of reddit subs protest the reddit API change by shutting down for 48+ hours. I hope Hexbear is listed on https://join-lemmy.org/instances by then

      • temptest [any]
        ·
        edit-2
        1 year ago

        Yeah... although I'm not sure that the admins here will be ready to launch federation in a week, or the Lemmy devs put a pretty insular and experimental place (from a software perspective, relative to Lemmy mainline) near the top of the list for newcomers.

        • sovietknuckles [they/them]
          hexagon
          ·
          1 year ago

          Lemmy, Lemmygrad, and Beehaw all switched from a user registration page to a registration request form, where new users submit the registration form but they have to answer questions and their account only gets created if a mod determines they provided satisfactory answers.

          Lemmygrad's questions, for example:

          • Why you would like to join?
          • What left tendency would you call yourself? ( Marxist / Marxist-Leninist, etc)
          • What is your understanding of gender? Should Marxists support the LGBT community?
          • What communities you would most like to participate in, and
          • How or why you chose the username you did.

          That would be a way to avoid Hexbear having more users than we can handle

          • temptest [any]
            ·
            edit-2
            1 year ago

            One reason why most instances have increased barrier-to-entry was some rightoid spammer who would register accounts on any open-registration & federated instance and spam scat porn on lemmy.ml, basically every day, until all the open ones were defederated form lemmy.ml.

            This was about a year ago btw.

      • daisy
        ·
        1 year ago

        I hope Hexbear is listed on https://join-lemmy.org/instances by then

        I hope we're not. I think the current situation of open registrations but staying relatively low-key is the long-term healthiest one. It prevents admins having massive capacity headaches overnight and prevents mods from being instantly overworked, but it also keeps the entrance bar low enough where baby-leftist ex-redditors don't say "eh, never mind" on seeing a registration questionnaire.

    • glimmer_twin [he/him]
      ·
      1 year ago

      Lemmygrad was the biggest? Whenever I’ve checked it out it looked even slower than here

      • temptest [any]
        ·
        edit-2
        1 year ago

        Yes*, and also, yes.

        Hexbear, if we group it in with Lemmy as a non-federating fork, was by far the biggest, and possibly still is (I haven't run numbers). But if we only considered federated instances, Lemmygrad was the biggest. Here is a rundown from about a year ago.

          • temptest [any]
            ·
            1 year ago

            That is noteworthy, but it would be nice if we can find a metric which shows activity. For example, the same front-page which lists lemmy.ml as having 31K users also says only 2K active in the last 6 months, I think it's fair to say most are dormant.

            Hexbear says "529 Users Online", while lemmy.ml currently says "2K users online", so I'm assuming their measuring the same thing. If that's the case, this rush has boosted them above Hexbear, although there's no knowing if how much they will retain after this month is over.

            • sovietknuckles [they/them]
              hexagon
              ·
              edit-2
              1 year ago

              If that’s the case, this rush has boosted them above Hexbear, although there’s no knowing if how much they will retain after this month is over.

              lemmy.ml will probably pass 4k users when reddit enables the new API pricing on July 1, essentially booting all Apollo users.