Hi folks!

Over the past few months, we have started seeing a significant amount of new user sign-ups. I would like to take this opportunity to welcome all of our new members, and to share some useful resources and info about lemm.ee.

First, some stats

Here is a bar chart of daily new users (this is only counting users which have been approved by our admins):

As you can see from the chart, for most of 2024, we were accepting roughly around 10-20 new users every day. Then, from the start of this year, the daily numbers have been constantly growing. Yesterday, we approved a massive 609 new users on lemm.ee.

The increase in sign-ups is significant enough that I have been taking several steps to improve our monitoring & anti-bot measures, but so far, it seems the vast majority of the new users are completely legitimate real humans! (Thank you all for not being bots 😅)

About lemm.ee

This Lemmy instance is turning 2 years old very soon. It was initially created around the time of the Reddit API changes, when existing Lemmy servers were getting overloaded with new users - lemm.ee was intended to help spread the load. We’re now the second largest Lemmy server when it comes to monthly active users.

Our core philosophy for this instance has always been to treat it as a generic gateway to the Lemmy network. I want to provide our users a stable and reliable home for their Lemmy account, so that they can have easy access to all of their communities, regardless of what instance the community is actually hosted on.

We run on some decently beefy hardware, and our setup is fairly customized in several ways in order to ensure a smooth experience for our users (most of the time, this has worked out quite well!). Our servers are currently hosted in Finland.

Our infrastructure has been funded by the community almost from the start through GitHub sponsorships and Ko-Fi donations. I am sure I speak on behalf all of our users when I say that I am extremely grateful to all supporters - you are really responsible for the continued existence of this instance!

Lemmy itself is open source software, and while it has improved massively during the time I have been using it, it definitely still has some rough edges. Please be patient when using Lemmy, and remember that it is being built collaboratively by humans (not corporations), without any intent of ever turning it into a business.

Useful resources

Don’t forget to participate!

Communities on Lemmy only work if people actively use them. Even upvoting/downvoting based on quality of content is a great start, but I would really like to encourage you all to comment and even write posts, because that’s really the best way to build communities.

If you have any questions or thoughts about lemm.ee or Lemmy in general, feel free to post a comment below this post, and myself or one of our veteran users will definitely respond.

I hope you enjoy your time on lemm.ee, and I wish you all a great week!

  • Kuwoka@lemm.eeEnglish
    2·
    13 minutes ago

    I’ve been wanting to get away from the primary social media platforms because reasons and I’m glad to have found lemm.ee just yesterday! I’m still looking for good alternatives for instagram and youtube but in fairness I haven’t done a lot of research yet. Happy to be apart of something new!

  • DioEgizio@lemm.ee
    10·
    1 hour ago

    I joined yesterday here too! I already hated reddit for the API thing (even though I use infinity) and for the enshittification that was happening, but censoring Luigi was way too much. Happy that I’m not the only one making the switch

  • Condiment2085@lemm.ee
    2·
    23 minutes ago

    Just joined a few days ago, actually loving it so far. Of course we lack a few of my fav subs here but I know it’ll grow.

  • Kichae@lemmy.caEnglish
    1·
    9 minutes ago

    Welcome, new neighbours!

    While checking out this wacky new space, I’d like to emcourage everyone to check out the Local tab, either at the top of your feed, or in your app menu. That’s where yoi’ll find posts from “communitues” (Lemmy’s “subreddits”) that are hosted on lemm.ee!

    A lot of communities are on different sites, and are ported (tarriff free!) for your enjoyment, but as with most things, it seems, the most sustainable way forward is to support Local!

    One thing that many people new to Lemmy and the wider “fediverse” (because it’s not just people on Lemmy-based websites that you’ll find posting in the communities here, surprisingly enough) struggle with is that each website on the network has its own “name space”, meaning that each community name can be used on each site. So, you can have, say, [email protected], [email protected], and [email protected]. People often fret over “having to follow all of them”, and wanting ways to collapse them into a single forum. And for a really niche topic, that might make sense (the thing to do, though, is just pick the one that best serves you and don’t worry about what’s going on on the other side of the fence). But for bigger topics, this “splintering” is often a godsend, since we can all have real discussions about the topic in smaller spaces. And, of course, !politics is going to just be meanibgfully different on .ca vs .ee vs .world.

    If you look to local first, it becomes much easier to stop worrying and love the bomb distributed network.

  • NovaOG@lemm.eeEnglish
    2·
    37 minutes ago

    I was finally looking to take the plunge away from corporate social medias. I was already using BlueSky as my Twitter/X replacement, and one thing stuck with me that they were doing: Federation. That seemed cool, and look! There is a Reddit replacement that does this “federation” thing. Lemm.ee seemed to line up with my general principles (Im a leftist so i don’t want any lefty communities or instances defeded) and i like talking with the community at large, so here i am :D

    I’ve also recommended it to all my friends who enjoy BlueSky and are sick of reddit kowtowing to billionaires interests. Sorry/you’re welcome for some of the user rush the last couple of days haha

  • Bederckous@lemmy.world
    9·
    2 hours ago

    Signed up last night. With the oversight dumpsterfire that reddit has become, I really hope Lemmy continues to grow at a good clip.

  • imaqtpie@sh.itjust.works
    38·
    3 hours ago

    Remarkable growth in the past week, and indeed past 3 months. Thank you for providing the stats.

    Lemm.ee and sh.itjust.works had been similar in size for most of 2024 (2500-3500 MAUs), but you’re now nearly twice our size!

    It’s really nice to see this kind of growth because it’s decreasing the overall share of the Lemmy userbase on lemmy.world and therefore increasing the stability of the network. There had been worries that lemmy.world would steadily increase its share of the userbase and become a single point of failure, but that seems increasingly unlikely.

    Lemm.ee has always been a well-run server with great performance and an excellent admin and it’s great to see that new users are choosing an option that will give them the best possible version of what Lemmy can offer.

  • pixelpure@lemm.eeEnglish
    24·
    3 hours ago

    I’m excited to be part of this growing community! The increased censorship of Reddit and breaking away from U.S. services were the biggest reasons for me trying Lemmy out.

  • Kidplayer_666@lemm.ee
    20·
    4 hours ago

    Hey! Any idea on why this wave is happening? Also, how does it compare to the initial Reddit “refugee” wave?

    • AnonomousWolf@lemm.ee
      10·
      2 hours ago

      a big driving force is r/BuyFromEU with 150k active subs and r/BuyCanadian with 300k

      They’re trying to move away from US products, including tech.

      Also the Luigi censorship as mentioned.

      Now is a good time to comment something like this on those subs to help guide people.

      Try out the European-Hosted Reddit alternative, Lemmy
      It also has a Mobile-App

      I use it alongside Reddit, and I’m enjoying it more and more, slowly switching over

    • SwizzleStick@lemmy.zipEnglish
      26·
      3 hours ago

      As for why, it’s probably due to the censorship screws getting tighter at Reddit. Luigi is a bad word. Eating the rich is verboten. Just 2 examples. Interacting/upvoting such content is now also an offense even if you didn’t write it yourself.

      For many, it’s their stop to get off the train. Mine was the API boogaloo.

      • CallateCoyote@lemmy.world
        12·
        3 hours ago

        Yep, I’ve been flirting with Lemmy for a year and a half and come here every time Reddit really pisses me off or bans me for something I would have never been banned for 10 years ago.

        I’m not flirting with it anymore. This recent batch of censorship is too much. It’s the last straw. Deleted my Reddit account for good. I can still use it as a resource to get answers to questions without needing an account.

        • vaguerant@fedia.io
          4·
          2 hours ago

          If you’re accustomed to using Reddit via Android, you might like the app Stealth (download from F-Droid, source code at GitLab). It’s a privacy-focussed Reddit scraper/client with no account support. I don’t interact with Reddit any more, but on the rare occasion that I want to check on a community there, it does the job. You can bookmark communities you want to follow and get a feed, all the standard stuff you’d expect to do, besides logging in.

          • CallateCoyote@lemmy.world
            3·
            2 hours ago

            I love that idea, thanks. There are smaller communities on there that are going to be hard to replace for information and news on some of my more obscure interests.

    • sunaurus@lemm.eeOP
      17·
      4 hours ago

      We had a few really huge days in 2023, but other than those, it seems like the growth so far in March is definitely outpacing our initial wave of new users in 2023.

  • Flemmy@lemm.eeNederlands
    10·
    3 hours ago

    Hello everyone. Just joined and getting used to the layout, coming from Reddit not much else.

    • gon [he]@lemm.ee
      5·
      3 hours ago

      Hey, welcome!

      Check out some alternative UIs like phtn.app and alexandrite.app, they’re really cool!