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
- If you’re confused about anything, feel free to check out our F.A.Q.
- We have an instance policy for administration, moderation, and federation - feel free to check it out if you want to understand how admins and mods are expected to act on lemm.ee
- For staying up to date with instance news, feel free to subscribe to !meta@lemm.ee
- If you ever can’t reach lemm.ee, please check our status page at https://status.lemm.ee/ - I communicate updates on that page when dealing with any unplanned problems.
- You can always find these resources (and some more useful info) in the sidebar of our front page (https://lemm.ee/)!
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!
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.
One of the reasons I use this snippet below to promote Lemmy is that it defaults to lemm.ee and users don’t run into descision fatigue when picking an instance
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
It would be nice if it could also default to eg. sh.itjust.works and other generalist instances
Hello! I joined today
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 🙂
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.
Monthly amount is the way to go! I chip in a whole fiver over at feddit.org each month, because that’s easily worth it. You get what you pay for, after all.
I’m using the Voyager app. Do I donate through the website? I want to cover some costs too.
You can donate in the GitHub sponsorship link in the main post: https://github.com/sponsors/sunaurus
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!
Welcome to Lemmy, here are a few pointers to help you settle in
Lemmy.world is bigger but they also have a bit of a reputation. Nothing wrong with that instance, but they’re often disliked by other instances for the same reasons why people from other websites don’t like redditors. Lemm.ee doesn’t have that same stigma from what I’ve seen.
!yepowertrippinbastards@lemmy.dbzer0.com has quite a few reports for LW mods
I use to dislike lemmy.world, because I kept seeing divisive posts from them trying to stir up hate against other instances. I find that kind of unprovoked unnecessary shit-stirring to be ugly.
But then I realised that these negative posts were always coming from the same couple of users, every time. So it wasn’t because lemmy.world had that attitude, but rather there were a couple of zealots who happen to be on that instance.
And I think of that whenever someone says bad stuff about other instances; because it’s probably a similar situation - just a couple of people giving the instance a bad rep.
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.
Welcome to Lemmy, here are a few pointers to help you settle in
breaking away from U.S. services
See also:
First time I’m seeing baraza.africa. Neat!