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!

  • Kichae@lemmy.caEnglish
    0·
    1 hour 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·
      1 hour 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·
      1 hour 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·
    1 hour 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!

  • Condiment2085@lemm.ee
    0·
    2 hours 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.

  • NovaOG@lemm.eeEnglish
    0·
    2 hours 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

    • scsi@lemm.ee
      0·
      44 minutes ago

      …sick of reddit kowtowing to billionaires interests

      Welcome. If you’re not aware, BlueSky is seeded by venture capital money and is generally under the ownership of billionaires; their “federation” is you optionally running a server that hosts your own (meta)data but the access to use that data (your content feed) still goes through one and only one website owned, operated and moderated by billionaires. They’ve already made it well known they intend on adding ads to their platform and have not yet worked out actual server federation. $0.02

  • DioEgizio@lemm.ee
    0·
    2 hours 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

  • Bederckous@lemmy.world
    0·
    3 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.

  • javi@lemm.ee
    0·
    4 hours ago

    For how long I have to wait until I can upload images for a community after my registration? Thx

  • pixelpure@lemm.eeEnglish
    0·
    4 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.

  • Flemmy@lemm.eeNederlands
    0·
    5 hours ago

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

    • gon [he]@lemm.ee
      0·
      4 hours ago

      Hey, welcome!

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