The user count at the moment of this post stands at 33279 and continues to grow!
To take the #1 spot from lemmy.ml (36185 users and no longer growing), lemmy.world just needs about 3000 new users. Given the current growth rate, it should be another day or two.
We’re building something here!
I think the biggest issue to user growth will be getting the word out that this place exists. Like a lot of people, I’m trying to find a more ethical alternative to Reddit and had no idea kbin was a thing.
It seems that Kbin is also the better entry point for most former reddit users because even if it has different instances too, it’s not that spread out like Lemmy is so new users have less to worry about and can discover the Fediverse more as they go
I never heard of lemmy and kbin either before 2-3 weeks ago, yet here I am. Info about alternatives has been plastered everywhere on reddit since then, really hard to not see them.
I have little understanding of the technical details of Lemmy, but I’m having a hard time understanding how it can scale. How do you build something like /r/funny with 40 million subscribers when the biggest Lemmy instance seems to be suffering at 30k users?
As far as I can see while users can subscribe to communities on different instances, communities themselves are locked to a single instance. How could a multi million strong community grow here?
First of all, as a software engineer I’m — well, “impressed” is the wrong word because I remember how efficient software used to be in the '90s — I’m “satisfied” with how well Lemmy instances are scaling. Even the largest instances are running on single, fairly-small servers.
Keep in mind that this is all alpha software and not only likely very unoptimized but also pretty buggy, so the surprisingly few problems there have been are more likely due to that than to real issues of scale.
Second, and more importantly, remember that having really big instances is “doing it wrong” to begin with. The intended design of Lemmy (and Fediverse services in general) is to have a whole lot of small instances, not a few big ones.