Similar to Mastodon's spikes last year, it seems. Anyways, there is data to think about. Source
this post was submitted on 06 Aug 2023
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I've been wondering what Lemmy was like until Jun 2023. Quite cozy I guess.
Very boring. You got 3 replies on your posts if you were lucky.
Things are good. Why are people obsessing over usage numbers? It's a fantastic place to be, away from big tech!
All/New was the only way you could get an entirely new feed a couple times a day.
There was still some lore and beefs between servers (like with wolfballz, a right wing community taken down for hatespeech, or hexbear that became incompatible and headed their own way). Feddit.de has a still a bunch of old federated servers cached that came into and went out of existence.
Between Lemmy.ca (I joined there in March) and Beehaw, there were 10 people posting regularly as in a handful of posts a day. Lemmy.ml had a mix of general news and user "Yogthos" posting pro-China news/propaganda.
It was a quiet but nice little place. The admins running the instance would often be quick to reply and give you detailed answers whenever you needed them. Now many have their plate full with moderation actions and keeping their site up.
!Programmerhumor@lemmy.ml was one of the first communities to me that seemed based off a Reddit subreddit theme.
We knew the change winds were coming, slowly at first in May, then suddenly exploded after May 30th. Beehaw grew from 700 users to 14000 in less than two weeks (during the time the Reddit protest was being organized). That was a crazy change for Fediverse people, new people everywhere, minor trolls popping here and there, Lemmy.world and sh.itjust.works being born, admins working overtime to accept new members. All very exciting.
Second half of June there was some trouble. Beehaw defederated because they couldn't keep up with moderating users from instances with open signup processes (and I suspect it was triggered by a troll making a hateful post about his dick on the LGBTQ sub).
Then there was a torrent of accounts made on some instances that originally had one or two users. They had no comments or posts and had a username with a random word and a bunch of numbers. All of a sudden the instances with the "most users" were these completely inactive instances.
CAPTCHA was better implemented, and dbzero helped create a filter to monitor and defederate instances with hugely disproportionate number of accounts compared to activity.
There's your mini-history lesson for Lemmy.