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.
yeah. we're trying to really curb who we're adding at this point to "people who actually want to be here that align with our goals" so it's not completely overwhelming (our backlog of admissions is about 100)
Good luck with that, it's no easy feat, and I expect it to get especially crazy when many sub-reddits shut down on the 12th. Be as ready as you can, I'll try to help guide new users best I can as well.
as we've noted a couple times, an extreme option we can leverage is just not approving anyone and if it gets too crazy i'm pretty confident that's what we'll do (or we'll limit our approvals to a general number per day, and what happens happens. i think we might also be able to make the instance private, dunno.
What would going private mean in this context (sorry, I'm new to this fediverse thing)? Does it mean invite only, or does it mean only members can view the discussions?
It means we wouldn't be allowing new accounts to be created on our instance. All of the communities here would still be federated with every instance we federate with. You'd still be able post and comment exactly as you can now.
That's fair. There's only so much you and the admin team can handle, you have my trust to do whatever must be done. There will be plenty of other instances for new users to go to.
In any case I hope it works out, as it sounds like you have a game plan if things get overwhelming. Cheers!
I worry about how this is going to get handled. There are going to be a lot of people looking to check out Lemmy, and this could be a true pivotal moment for the platform. Like it or not, Beehaw is one of the instances that lots of people have been hearing about, and so you're going to play a part in that pivotal moment. Not allowing people to participate could drive them away. It's a tough situation. I don't envy you.
They will always be welcome to participate in our communities via federation, but we may not have the bandwidth to accommodate everyone in a way which does not compromise our ethos. If you haven't had a second to check out the philosophy posts in the sidebar, it will give you an idea of where we intend to take this place. This is an explicitly nice and safe space, and we are perfectly fine with driving traffic that isn't explicitly nice elsewhere.
Sorry if this was answered elsewhere, but does that mean Beehaw automatically federates with new instances and only the explicit Blocklist can't? I was toying with the idea of maintaining my own single user instance for stability but don't want to run the risk of being excluded if it goes private in the future.
Sorry if this was answered elsewhere, but does that mean Beehaw automatically federates with new instances and only the explicit Blocklist can’t?
i believe we automatically federate, yeah. federation here seems to explicitly work in a way where if you just leave the "Allowed Instances" section blank (as we do), you federate with all instances except the ones you have explicitly blacklisted.
Oh, that's an idea I hadn't thought of. I have a private server at home. I could set up an instance for myself as long as I can continue to interact with others.
Like it or not, Beehaw is one of the instances that lots of people have been hearing about, and so you’re going to play a part in that pivotal moment. Not allowing people to participate could drive them away.
popping in to say: while we're sympathetic, this crudely speaking isn't really an obligation we signed up for, nor one which really should be incumbent on us to solve (not least because of the OP statistic). for what it's worth though in between keeping this place functional, we are trying to shoot things to the Lemmy devs and community as a whole to make the platform as good as it can, and to ensure instances can accommodate the many, many users we can't and won't take in.
i'll reiterate again that we have specific goals and we make it very clear—as clear as it can be, within the context of Lemmy's limitations—what we're looking for, why we're looking for that, and that this simply isn't a community for everyone. (we didn't even ask to be passed around by the Lemmy devs as an instance you should try to sign up for in the absence of being able to use lemmy.ml, lol). that's for federation reasons but also practical ones, and as much as i understand many people want a new place to go for a lot of people that place isn't necessarily going to be here.
I don’t know if your rejections currently do, but perhaps they could point to other instances. As gently as possible explaining beehaw is at max moderation capacity and suggesting the other instances.
Unfortunately rejections do not notify the end user of any reason. There's supposed to be a toast message when they try to log in, but that's not working. We've logged a bug on GitHub for Lemmy devs but we don't have an ETA for a fix
Fair enough, but beehaws the only instance I know of that defeds with lemmygrad. If I wanted to recommend a lemmy instance to a friend and didn't want them put off by the awfulness of that community I wouldn't know where else to point them to.
Hopefully you don't have to make the community private, but shutting down approvals is a great option. They can always sign up for another instance and participate here
They can but it's a bit wonky. You can "subscribe" to lemmy communities by following the community as if it were a username, so for example you'd follow @chat to follow !chat. However, the result is that every single post and comment made in chat gets boosted ("retweeted") into your feed, which is... not ideal.
You can also respond to any lemmy post by pulling it up in mastadon and replying to it with your mastadon account. You can just search the link to a lemmy thread or post in the mastadon search bar to bring it up and reply from there.
I've got an idea. Since during the sign up phase we answer questions, so why not add a question that poses a hypothetical scenario where the prospective member can answer in their own words what they would do in that scenario.
The scenario can be crafted to gauge someone's kindness, even if there are no right or wrong answers. For example, we can have the question be:
"Can you share an example of a recent action you took to make someone's day better?"
Or:
"Tell me about a time when you offered assistance or support to someone in need."
Or:
"Could you describe a situation where you went out of your way to show empathy or understanding to someone?"
Trolls and ne'er-do-wells are not as likely to give detailed, thoughtful answers to these sorts of questions.
This way it provides an additional way to screen applications so nice people migrate here.
While it will tend to exclude them, it's also highly likely to exclude others as well. As an example, I have ADHD, so often it is difficult to amass enough spoons to provide detailed answers to things like this.
I think this community has hit the sweet spot where there's enough of a userbase that posts get traction and there's a regular stream of posts, but not too manuy users that posts are easily buried under a sea of noise.
I came here myself yesterday. I'm worried it isn't going to be able to grow much however. Everyone seems to go to the same instance when wanting to join. Really should have some sort of home page for the service where users are presented with a randomly selected, general purpose instance to join. That way one can spread the load and new users won't have to deal with the confusing process of signing up.
That said, I'm new to the whole fediverse concept. This might not be a good idea for obvious reasons that I'm not aware of.
The common sentiment and the one I've been feeling is that lemmy overall feels pretty cool. There is an incredibly steep learning curve, but that cool feeling kind of keeps you motivated to try and figure things out.
Beyond simply finding an instance, the signing up process can seem a little confusing as well. Waiting for manual approvals on some instances can really kill the hype and lead to that initial pull being lost.
I completely understand why some instances would want to keep that signup process. But if the "top instances" all have that "wait period" people may, also understandably, not stick around. A seemingly opaque bureaucratic process in order to even be able to see if they like lemmy.
I don't know whether random is the right answer... We've already seen a little drama on the lemmy.ml instances based on one of the server operators preferences. I think people will naturally go to other instances. The server operators effectively determine what belongs and what doesn't in the instance, and that can change based on their whims. I am against a default but a random server selected automatically seems like a weird roulette.
The power structure of Lemmy instances is like a fiefdom, the admins hold the effective power to select what users and what discussions is allowed within their server they rule. Some rulers are generous and benevolent, some are strict, some are hostile, some are laissez-faire except for certain peculiarities. If you don't like any of them, then be the ruler of your own kingdom that you create and communicate with the other lords from your throne.
I know it is a smaller community, but it feels nice to be able to comment and actually be(e) seen instead of instantly buried. No more are the times of having a fully typed out comment, only to delete it thinking no one is going to see it. Just based on that fact alone I am loving it, and have recommended it to a few of my friends.
Loving Lemmy (and the beehaw community specifically) Even if all of reddit's issues are addressed magically overnight I'd still stay here. I feel like I can say what I want here without triggering some alt right douchebag
I agree 100%. Reddit has honestly gotten a bit too big imo? so much promotion and noise. Lemmy on the other hand is smaller and it kinda reminds me of the reddit early days when there were articles and thoughtful posts
That is such an amazing and sudden increase!! Huge thanks and congratulations to the admin team for handling such a dramatic increase, maintaining uptime, integrity, and moderation. I'm so happy to see Lemmy exploding in popularity, it's an amazing platform that could honestly change the future of the internet
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