Baku

@rglullis@communick.news apologies for the tag, wasn't sure if this would pop up in your feed otherwise

I love the idea, and I also believe that getting more people onto the fediverse is a good thing. However, I do have a couple of questions/concerns.

Firstly, I'm not really sure why this would require access to Lemmy instances themselves? is it to improve coverage by automatically crawling all the communities on a given instance to match with Reddit alternatives? Or is it to automatically sign new people up to an instance and then subscribe them to the Lemmy communities automatically? I believe that pushing for admins to provide root level access to their Lemmy servers is going to limit your growth. I don't run an instance, but if I did, I'm not sure that I would allow anything except the bare minimum access to the server.

I also noticed that the Subreddits section doesn't display anything. I ended up creating a second account which I OAuth'd to my Reddit account, and it was still empty. I was trying to figure out how to add an 'alternative to' section on a few communities (which took me a while to figure out how to do)

Also, about the above: Are there any plans to add a way to link a Reddit account to a pre-existing account? What about account deletion, data anonymisation, and GDPR compliance? I do realise most of those aren't relevant at the moment, and probably won't be for some time, but I think you may encounter some issues, considering the more privacy-conscious nature of a lot of Fediverse users.

I do really hope to see this expand and grow, though. Despite the potential to bring some unsavoury Reddit types, it'll be an overall win for the Fediverse.

I wonder if that means we can claim adverse possession

It always makes me chuckle a bit how internet censorship (at least in western countries and on a personal level (school and work networks excluded)) is almost always just done through DNS. I mean I'm sure not going to be the one to tell them how laughably ineffective that is, but it's just funny.

Thank you for your thought provoking question, "AI has use". I'm sure this is a legitimate question coming from a real human.

Thanks!

Heya, sorry for the necropost, but would you mind sharing how you're doing on storage these days? I'm looking at spinning up a Lemmy instance of my own and I'm curious about the storage aspect on small instances

I guess the mods didn't find this very funny, since they nuked it. Disappointing, because I was able to read it through the magic of caching and it made me crack up laughing

They do in certain cases. If you sign up through a VPN or Tor, they require you to provide a recovery email. They don't accept temporary email addresses, and even if you don't sign up work a VPN, they'll still collect and be obligated to hand over your IP

Seriously. In Australia, you have to "activate" your Sim card with your full name, email, bank details (depending on the carrier), and a copy of your driver's license. Hell, I bought my last phone directly from a carrier, completely outright, with cash, prepaid with no plan, and they took a photocopy of my drivers license. Buying phones elsewhere they've never done that to me, as long as it's prepaid and bought outright, but for some reason the major telcos do it for all purchases

As far as I know, no

Is Lemmy growing or shrinking?

It looks like Lemmy has shrunk overall since our peak of 68k active users in July last year to our low point (since rexxit anyways) of 32k, but we seem to be attracting more MAUs now and have climbed back up to 51k.

I'm not entirely sure what you mean by diversity, or at least what measure of it you're seeking, but if you mean instances, there's currently ~770 instances online, a bit over half of our peak in July. I'm not aware of any major instances that have closed down yet though, so I assume it's mainly small, single user instances that have shit down, as well as a few hyper niche ones with very few members.

Average users per instance has also been increasing and is getting close to the levels we were at in june when everybody was joining the same few instances. That peak was 690 users per instance, that dropped to a low of 321 in July, presumably because there was more of an emphasis on getting people spread out after initial influx of people who just needed to go somewhere.

There was something interesting I noticed in the stats, in Feb there was a major drop in total posts of almost 5 million. I don't know what exactly happened, but our total posts halved, so perhaps that's why nobody's been posting updates.

It's even more obvious on the 120 day graph

Overall, it appears we have shrunk compared to our peak during rexxit, but we have been steadily increasing in both active users and posts (excluding the major drop in Feb) since our low point a couple of months after rexxit. That's about what I'd expect, and quite good compared to most popular corpo sites which lose a lot more percentage of their MAUs after they've peaked. Threads lost something like 80% of their userbase a week after it launched. Also I don't think that peak during rexxit will be our biggest peak. We'll probably continue steadily gaining users until Reddit fuck up again and we get another influx, like what happened with mastodon.

FYI all these stats are fairly easy to find. I like FediDB because it's got a more friendly UI, but Fediverse Observer has a more plain UI, so is better for posting graphs and such. But that's the beauty of the fediverse, we can all access the same things through all sorts of UIs