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!

  • CringeWaffle@lemm.ee
    0·
    45 minutes ago

    Hello lemm.ee!

    I’m one of the 609 new users who joined yesterday 🎉

    At first, I didn’t know much about Lemmy, I just found lemm.ee through join-lemmy.org (filtered by “All topics - english - most active”) and joined because it was the most popular instance…

    Initially, I thought I needed to create an account on every instances I wanted to join to access more content, but after reading a lot of posts (in particular in this community!), I finally understood how federation works.

    Now that I know more about Lemmy and lemm.ee itself, I’m actually really happy with my (uneducated) choice!

    As for the “why now?”, I think like many Reddit users, I’m getting tired of the ongoing ensh*ttification, especially with the recent issues around upvotes… And yesterday was a rainy day, so I took the time to finally understand how Lemmy works, and here I am.

    Thanks everyone for the warm welcome!

  • EABOD25@lemm.eeEnglish
    0·
    1 hour ago

    It’s all trash redditor implants who think they’re opinions are absolute and make the fediverse politically, individualized, and nonsensical garbage. First time I logged in and contributing to the fediverse in about a month, and of course, I see this that makes me immediately pissy.

    Yes. More people that get offended at the words “rape” and “kill” are exactly what the fediverse need. This is total pandering for the sake of members and publicity. And no one needs to worry. I’m gradually working away from this platform because unfortuantely most people here just want to virtue signal or trauma dump to either make themselves feel better or feign ignorance that they’re talking to another person just so they can can feel better about their sorry lives by tearing down this person or group on the internet.

  • Foni@lemm.ee
    0·
    2 hours ago

    I carry here as a year and a half (before I was in another instance that closed) and I can say that the increase in traffic, participation, comments, vows etc. For a couple of months it is remarkable.

    I don’t know if it’s for Trump pushing Europeans and Candadia outside their products, for Reddit turning its platform into shit full of bots and unpopular standards or a combination of both, but I think that the network and community is doing really good (we even have a community of conservatives, half a year ago something like that would be unthinkable)

  • Nicker44@lemmy.todayEnglish
    0·
    3 hours ago

    Boost for reddit stopped working for reddit. Then I saw they made a boost for Lemmy. Was curious and now I regularly check this platform out.

  • simple@lemm.eeEnglish
    0·
    3 hours ago

    That’s awesome! I don’t know what sparked more people to come over though. Would be great if someone can fill me in since I’m so out of the loop.

    Also, PSA to all new users on Desktop: Try Alexandrite - a gorgeous front-end for Lemmy https://alexandrite.app/lemm.ee/

    • CrimsonDawn@lemm.eeEnglish
      0·
      1 hour ago

      boycott of American products and support for a European increased independence movement

      • sunzu2@thebrainbin.org
        0·
        3 hours ago

        You are safe to express ur self in this here social media dear…

        They hate the idea that internet loves Luigi haha

    • LinPing1976@lemm.ee
      0·
      3 hours ago

      Some people are currently looking for European and more private alternatives to traditional social medias. Hopefully more will follow.

  • lakemalcom10@lemm.ee
    0·
    4 hours ago

    I’m a sponsor and I’m not saying this to get thanked or something, I just want to say that I kick in $2 a month. It’s not a ton but if I can help keep this place running then I’m happy to toss a coin to my admin 🙂

    • sunaurus@lemm.eeOP
      0·
      3 hours ago

      Thank you very much for the support!

      Our infrastructure costs are currently quite stable at around 200€ per month, and considering that the instance is right now quite decently supporting nearly 6000 monthly active users, you could say that you are indeed relatively contributing a ton - you are effectively covering server costs for 60 people!

      The fact that it’s a monthly amount is particularly great, because with recurring income, we will get advanced warning if there is danger of funds starting to run low.

  • thickertoofan@lemm.eeEnglish
    0·
    4 hours ago

    hi! is there any “default” community or a place where every new user is automatically registered in? or a place where we can see some kind of graph for lemmy users signing up on a daily basis? would be nice for [email protected] datahoarding too haha.

  • Kichae@lemmy.caEnglish
    0·
    6 hours 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.

    • Blaze (he/him) @lemmy.dbzer0.com
      0·
      6 hours ago

      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

      Not sure we have enough of a userbase and content posted to recommend that

    • yawn@lemm.eeEnglish
      0·
      6 hours ago

      Respectfully I would disagree with part of your message. It sounds a bit like you’re encouraging some degree of instance tribalism, but the whole beauty of Lemmy is that I can be a regular and full member of !something@lemmy.ca with my @lemm.ee account.

      For new members, I would have the opposite advice: don’t pay too much attention to what instance a specific community is on. Just treat each community as its own entity and each person as an individual.

      The reason I bring this up is that I think useless instance tribalism can be a real issue on Lemmy sometimes. I have seen statements too often along the lines of “oh you have an account on <instance>, so I will just ignore you”.

  • Kuwoka@lemm.eeEnglish
    0·
    6 hours 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!