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I don't have any fancy graphs to show the community's growth, but I thought it was worth noting this milestone. The largest individual community on lemmy.ca and the largest national community on lemmy as a whole that I can see. Discuss.
[Edit] A Graph
Credit to our gracious host, @smorks@lemmy.ca
When the reddit blackout was at it's height lemmy got a huge influx of users but I think a lot of people had some misapprehensions about how lemmy would grow as a result of that. A lot of people seemed to think there was going to be some huge exodus where half of reddit said, "fuck you, I'm out!" but the reality was the vast majority of people were participating in a temporary protest and the desire of their heart was simply for reddit to go back to the way that it was. But that doesn't mean it's for nothing.
I conceive of what happened as the sowing of seeds. Some people's attention was brought to this platform and we have to water those seeds with content, and give people the opportunity to give and receive interaction. Let people comment, and have their comments commented to in turn. And when enough of that is happening we can harvest that thing that we're all really looking for in all this: Community. And if we can do that, when the next set of bad moves from reddit drives the next wave of people to look for something else (third party apps ending at the end of the month, surely old reddit soon after that), we'll have created something organic for people to glom onto and really get the ball rolling. Something I think was missing in the first round of reddit refugees.
I'm one of the reddit refugees. To be honest I didn't think the protest would make it very far, although I was hoping it would. It looks like reddit got a black eye out of it but that's about it... nothing substantial.
That is fine by me. I was considering killing my two 10yr old+ accounts there anyway, and in the process I found this place, which I quite like to be honest. It's a little janky and rough around the edges to be sure, but any of you that remember how reddit was back in the day know it was the same thing at one point. Lemmy has serious potential to become great, lots of work needs to be done but it looks like a lot of talent is already here to fullfill that potential. Growth is great, but if things grow too fast problems do too.
I look forward to seeing the true potential of what Lemmy can become, and I hope I can be useful in some way to help that happen and be part of it.
The communities that exist on Reddit just need a place to congregate, and Lemmy seems to fit the bill. There are still a lot of scuff features but the plumbing is in place to be entirely decentralized and look to be working. I am very interested to see what content / biases get promoted in /c/Canada now that there is minimal corporate interference.
I don't think anything was really missing ... I think it will just take time. I never expected a quick switch from one platform to another for anyone ... I even had a hard time making the break from reddit to here. I love the mountains of content at reddit but the more I explore this side of the fence, the more I feel like I am starting over and I really don't mind that. This was the feeling I had when I started reddit ten years ago and I really don't mind going over it all again.
However, this time, I am a veteran poster and contributor ... I know more how to interact with people and be positive, stern, contribute positively and avoid getting entangled with others on messy topics. I didn't have that experience the first time around.
Lemmy and the fediverse has the benefit of gaining a userbase of veteran posters, lurkers and contributors who will be more capable of generating more useful content this time around. We all just want to talk, debate, discuss and share with one another ... we all like our cat videos and memes but I think a good portion of people just want to be able to talk about ideas and perspectives to stay informed with the rest of the world. And I think it will be those kinds of people that will slowly move onto platforms like this and slowly grow a new community of content on the internet.
People and their ideas and thoughts are the like the dandelions of the internet ... they'll grow anywhere they can and once they catch, they'll blossom into fields of flowers in no time. Corporate controls are like weed killers that try to manicure the landscape into pretty flowers, grasses and crops to be harvested into picture perfect, highly organized and controlled environments that maximize profits but in the end give no useful, healthy product ... I don't mind living on the gravel sideroad of progress with not enough soil, in the hot sun and not enough water ... give us time and we'll grow our roots deep into the soil and cover the land with our bountiful growth!
I've been waiting for over a year now for people to find and populate Lemmy. To give it a big enough influx of users to make it viable as a space.
That's honestly all I about out of this now. That enough people are interested in a new social experiment that is about community ownership and operation.
Reddit LARPed at that as they tricked people who cared about topics to work for them for free, but this is the real deal. And it doesn't need 50 million people to succeed.
It probably only needs 5 thousand. Everything can grow from there. With 50,000 or 100,000, it can flourish. That number of people will secure strong long term growth for the whole endeavour.
I don't need Reddit to disappear. As far as I'm concerned, it will be dead the moment it goes public. It'll stop having the potential to be what it was for people, and it will be reborn as something new. But in ita death, it will have breathed more life into the Fediverse, and for that I am glad.
When I consider what my motive is for caring about this like I do, I see that it is the confluence of a few tendencies in my personality.
Open source and the open source spirit. Ever since I found a red hat disk as a child back in the 90s the communal nature of the open source software movement was appealing to me.
The community based nature of it. For many years I've been watching the profit motive turn rotten all the things I enjoy about browsing the internet. There is no corporate entity here. There's just us.
Probably most of all, and is perhaps a bit nationalistic of me, but I was always bothered that the main hubs of talking about Canadian issues exist on American websites. Our data, subject to their data privacy laws, the profit going to American corporations. Here I see an opportunity to build a hub for Canadians to discuss Canadian issues on a platform that is run by and for the benefit of Canadians. Of course, people want to consume content from other parts of the world, and I think the federation model allows us to eat our cake and have it too, we have this little slice of Lemmy to serve Canadians primarily, while still having access to the world.
Personally this is me and Pixelfed right now. Iโm slowly figuring out Lemmy/Kbin, Iโve been on mastodon for a few years now.
I like your way of putting this. I'm a refugee but I'm already liking it so much better over here than over there. I feel like everyone here really wants to be here and participate. We're all actively trying to grow these communities so let's do it!
Preach.
Iโm honestly still using Reddit but mostly just lurking now, and really prefer Lemmy / kbin due to how completely awful the official app is (using Apollo now just makes me sad).
So I love participating here and plan to do so more and more! Whereas with Reddit, I can see myself opening that up less and less.
Weโll likely always be smaller, but we can be big enough while being better - and that would be fine by me.
Well, as they say, Rome wasn't built in a day. If we can develop this in just a little over a week, who's to say what we can build in a year? Or two? Or five? Reddit had been around for seven years before the digg migration supercharged it into the main web forum. I think we're doing pretty good so far.
I donโt have any fancy graphs to show the communityโs growth
Hang on....
/c/Canada
Number of subscribers
Before: 0 == 200 >
After: 0 ====================================================================== 2000 >
Glad I could help with my elite graphing skills!
Well they certainly overshadow mine, haha.
Sorry.
As a Canadian I am also obligated to say, oh donโt be sorry, Iโm sorry!
Oh, sorry, you're right. Sorry.
A great day for Canada, and therefore the world
I might be able to get a graph. no promises! and it likely won't be very fancy.
this took me way too long to do, for what it is.
Very Canadianโฆ itโs a hockey stick graph!
Clearly Lemmy and a lack of pirates cause global warming.
Well I think it looks pretty good.
Looks like the angle of the slope is flattening out, now that the initial surge is past. What're the odds you can easily reframe this as "new accounts per day" rather than total users. That would show the Reddit related spike more clearly. (First derivative, if you're a math person.)
that shouldn't be too difficult I don't think. I'll see what I can do.
Also, the graph somehow reminds me of the first wave covid cases, when we were all obsessed with watching the thing go exponential. Weird, haha.
That would be great to see.
Pretty cool ๐๐๐ป