Hi folks!
Over the past few months, we have started seeing a significant amount of new user sign-ups. I would like to take this opportunity to welcome all of our new members, and to share some useful resources and info about lemm.ee.
First, some stats
Here is a bar chart of daily new users (this is only counting users which have been approved by our admins):
As you can see from the chart, for most of 2024, we were accepting roughly around 10-20 new users every day. Then, from the start of this year, the daily numbers have been constantly growing. Yesterday, we approved a massive 609 new users on lemm.ee.
The increase in sign-ups is significant enough that I have been taking several steps to improve our monitoring & anti-bot measures, but so far, it seems the vast majority of the new users are completely legitimate real humans! (Thank you all for not being bots 😅)
About lemm.ee
This Lemmy instance is turning 2 years old very soon. It was initially created around the time of the Reddit API changes, when existing Lemmy servers were getting overloaded with new users - lemm.ee was intended to help spread the load. We’re now the second largest Lemmy server when it comes to monthly active users.
Our core philosophy for this instance has always been to treat it as a generic gateway to the Lemmy network. I want to provide our users a stable and reliable home for their Lemmy account, so that they can have easy access to all of their communities, regardless of what instance the community is actually hosted on.
We run on some decently beefy hardware, and our setup is fairly customized in several ways in order to ensure a smooth experience for our users (most of the time, this has worked out quite well!). Our servers are currently hosted in Finland.
Our infrastructure has been funded by the community almost from the start through GitHub sponsorships and Ko-Fi donations. I am sure I speak on behalf all of our users when I say that I am extremely grateful to all supporters - you are really responsible for the continued existence of this instance!
Lemmy itself is open source software, and while it has improved massively during the time I have been using it, it definitely still has some rough edges. Please be patient when using Lemmy, and remember that it is being built collaboratively by humans (not corporations), without any intent of ever turning it into a business.
Useful resources
- If you’re confused about anything, feel free to check out our F.A.Q.
- We have an instance policy for administration, moderation, and federation - feel free to check it out if you want to understand how admins and mods are expected to act on lemm.ee
- For staying up to date with instance news, feel free to subscribe to [email protected]
- If you ever can’t reach lemm.ee, please check our status page at https://status.lemm.ee/ - I communicate updates on that page when dealing with any unplanned problems.
- You can always find these resources (and some more useful info) in the sidebar of our front page (https://lemm.ee/)!
Don’t forget to participate!
Communities on Lemmy only work if people actively use them. Even upvoting/downvoting based on quality of content is a great start, but I would really like to encourage you all to comment and even write posts, because that’s really the best way to build communities.
If you have any questions or thoughts about lemm.ee or Lemmy in general, feel free to post a comment below this post, and myself or one of our veteran users will definitely respond.
I hope you enjoy your time on lemm.ee, and I wish you all a great week!
I’m a sponsor and I’m not saying this to get thanked or something, I just want to say that I kick in $2 a month. It’s not a ton but if I can help keep this place running then I’m happy to toss a coin to my admin 🙂
I’m using the Voyager app. Do I donate through the website? I want to cover some costs too.
You can donate in the GitHub sponsorship link in the main post: https://github.com/sponsors/sunaurus
Monthly amount is the way to go! I chip in a whole fiver over at feddit.org each month, because that’s easily worth it. You get what you pay for, after all.
Thank you very much for the support!
Our infrastructure costs are currently quite stable at around 200€ per month, and considering that the instance is right now quite decently supporting nearly 6000 monthly active users, you could say that you are indeed relatively contributing a ton - you are effectively covering server costs for 60 people!
The fact that it’s a monthly amount is particularly great, because with recurring income, we will get advanced warning if there is danger of funds starting to run low.
Welcome new users!
For how long I have to wait until I can upload images for a community after my registration? Thx
That’s why I couldn’t upload images, the UI on mobile never gave me an error explaining this, it would be good to better make users aware of this.
It’s written in sidebar of Instance.
Fair but when you’re using mobile apps like Voyager or Sync you just get a error and don’t understand why
Also there’s a limit of 500kb. So, I just used my own Image Hoster.
4 weeks. In mean time you can use catbox.moe or Imgur. Or any other Image Hoster.
How can I use a link to set the community logo/banner?
It’s possible but Lemmy UI don’t have any option for that. For this you need [email protected] with turned on Imgur Upload in setting. Upload Image and Banner as normal also work PFP.
Catbox doesn’t work for some users
I’m excited to be part of this growing community! The increased censorship of Reddit and breaking away from U.S. services were the biggest reasons for me trying Lemmy out.
Welcome to Lemmy, here are a few pointers to help you settle in
breaking away from U.S. services
See also:
First time I’m seeing baraza.africa. Neat!
Hey! Any idea on why this wave is happening? Also, how does it compare to the initial Reddit “refugee” wave?
We had a few really huge days in 2023, but other than those, it seems like the growth so far in March is definitely outpacing our initial wave of new users in 2023.
a big driving force is r/BuyFromEU with 150k active subs and r/BuyCanadian with 300k
They’re trying to move away from US products, including tech.
Also the Luigi censorship as mentioned.
Now is a good time to comment something like this on those subs to help guide people.
Try out the European-Hosted Reddit alternative, Lemmy
It also has a Mobile-AppI use it alongside Reddit, and I’m enjoying it more and more, slowly switching over
Yeah, same. The whole moving away from US tech products got me on Lemmy amongst other services. Today I learned you can block users, which is an interesting concept to filter out the haters 😉.
Reddit heard we have a fediverse chick.
I have her. What’s all this we stuff. Getting sick of everyone hitting on her.
!! lol
I saw a r/YSK (You Should Know) post about Lemmy today and was curious and had some time . I’m intrigued.
My congrats! Hope you enjoy your stay here in the fediverse, and don’t forget to donate to the admin that keeps the server running!
It’s crazy. I loved Digg until I had to go to Reddit to get the experience I loved once Digg began it’s enshitification. Now that Reddit is experiencing enshitification, I’m coming here. I hope this is the next iteration of the pure experience that I’m looking for.
As for why, it’s probably due to the censorship screws getting tighter at Reddit. Luigi is a bad word. Eating the rich is verboten. Just 2 examples. Interacting/upvoting such content is now also an offense even if you didn’t write it yourself.
For many, it’s their stop to get off the train. Mine was the API boogaloo.
Yep, I’ve been flirting with Lemmy for a year and a half and come here every time Reddit really pisses me off or bans me for something I would have never been banned for 10 years ago.
I’m not flirting with it anymore. This recent batch of censorship is too much. It’s the last straw. Left my Reddit account for good. I can still use it as a resource to get answers to questions without needing an account.
If you’re accustomed to using Reddit via Android, you might like the app Stealth (download from F-Droid, source code at GitLab). It’s a privacy-focussed Reddit scraper/client with no account support. I don’t interact with Reddit any more, but on the rare occasion that I want to check on a community there, it does the job. You can bookmark communities you want to follow and get a feed, all the standard stuff you’d expect to do, besides logging in.
I love that idea, thanks. There are smaller communities on there that are going to be hard to replace for information and news on some of my more obscure interests.
That is a wonderful chart.
Congratulations. Great to see growth :)
Great post !
Hello everyone. Just joined and getting used to the layout, coming from Reddit not much else.
Hey, welcome!
Check out some alternative UIs like phtn.app and alexandrite.app, they’re really cool!
can i see upvote and downvote count on it?
You can, yes.
On Alexandrite, you can check it by hovering over the combined total. See image.
On Photon, the numbers are written on the buttons directly. See image.
Oh, I just realized its bugged on LibreWolf. Thanks anyway!
Huuuuh… I’m actually using LibreWolf… So, I’m not sure that’s the issue.
I just installed LibreWolf like a week ago, it seems to work fine in 99% of cases. I just get this “WebGL not supported” in some pages (i’m reading now that it can be enabled, though) and also now this upvote/downvote thing in alexandrite. Anyway, yesterday I updated it, but the upvotes and downvotes are still missing for some reason. Also, I had 2 windows open and librewolf remembered only one of them after the update, oh well. Still need to figure out the kinks…
I’m still using firefox on another device, and it looks like comments show no upvotes at all, regardless of the browser?
I’m still using firefox on another device, and it looks like comments show no upvotes at all, regardless of the browser?
Well, IDK what to tell you… Both comments and posts show the upvotes for me when I hover the cursor over the number; this works on all browsers, for me.
Are you on mobile? That’s the only thing I can think of, as IDK how it works with touch vs mouse.
If you’re browsing on mobile, I can recommend the app Voyager for Lemmy or Thunder for Lemmy. I liked their layout the best from the few I tried.
Remarkable growth in the past week, and indeed past 3 months. Thank you for providing the stats.
Lemm.ee and sh.itjust.works had been similar in size for most of 2024 (2500-3500 MAUs), but you’re now nearly twice our size!
It’s really nice to see this kind of growth because it’s decreasing the overall share of the Lemmy userbase on lemmy.world and therefore increasing the stability of the network. There had been worries that lemmy.world would steadily increase its share of the userbase and become a single point of failure, but that seems increasingly unlikely.
Lemm.ee has always been a well-run server with great performance and an excellent admin and it’s great to see that new users are choosing an option that will give them the best possible version of what Lemmy can offer.
One of the reasons I use this snippet below to promote Lemmy is that it defaults to lemm.ee and users don’t run into descision fatigue when picking an instance
Try out the European-Hosted Reddit alternative, Lemmy It also has a Mobile-App
I use it alongside Reddit, and I’m enjoying it more and more, slowly switching over
It would be nice if it could also default to eg. sh.itjust.works and other generalist instances
sh.itjust.works
I’ve seen people deterred by the name containing"shit"
For me it was one of the main motivations to join sh.itjust.works
Name checks out
Yeah, it literally reads “shit just works”. Who doesn’t want their shit to just work? I know I do.
I want my shit to go down the toilet, actually…
Yes, it usually works both ways, people like it or hate it
Like Marmite.
Yea unfortunately a clean easy url matters
A good URL is extremely important for growth. But I wouldn’t say unfortunately, as I don’t think sh.itjust.works users have any desire to become a very large server. We seem to thrive as a smaller, more tight-knit community.
That’s the beauty of the fediverse, whether you’re on the largest or the smallest server, you are basically accessing the same content. The rapid growth of lemm.ee benefits all of us.
Happy to be here, happier to see it grow!
Lemm-ee is a cool brand too. Good job, Estonia!
Signed up last night. With the oversight dumpsterfire that reddit has become, I really hope Lemmy continues to grow at a good clip.
Welcome to Lemmy, here are a few pointers to help you settle in
Thanks!
same, checked that post, came here. Also planning to selfhost a lemmy instance for my country (none from here till now)
I joined yesterday here too! I already hated reddit for the API thing (even though I use infinity) and for the enshittification that was happening, but censoring Luigi was way too much. Happy that I’m not the only one making the switch
Welcome to Lemmy, here are a few pointers to help you settle in
Lemmy loves Luigi!
💚💚💚💚
Eternity for lemmy is a fork of infinity for reddit
I’m using voyager rn and I love it but thanks for the suggestion anyways
hi! glad to be a part here!
Welcome!
Just joined a few days ago, actually loving it so far. Of course we lack a few of my fav subs here but I know it’ll grow.
Welcome!
It will come with time, if possible be the change you want to see. I’m trying to grow the South African sub.
It might take years but 🤷♂️
If you see any demand for new communities then start them. [email protected] can help.
Thanks!
