EDIT: Just crossed 26000!
Almost! At the time of this post, lemmy.world has a whopping 25733 users and is growing fast.
Since my last post yesterday, it has added 4000 new users, making it the clear second-largest lemmy instance out there. Also quickly catching up to lemmy.ml's 36000 (not taking new signups).
beehaw.org (3rd largest) sits at 12500 users, partly because of more restrictive registration requirements.
Source: https://lemmy.fediverse.observer/list
Exciting to see all this growth!
Yeah I'm also interested in seeing how all of these sites work and looking at ways I can help improve it. The whole positing process / propagation process seems pretty complex though so I'll probably let the more familiar devs work on it for now.
From what I understand though, each admin (for example kbin.social) is maintaining a fork of their project so they could implement automod on their own local content, but that wouldn't stop propagated content (e.g from Lemmy) coming in that's spam.
Seems like the issue might need to be fixed on a site by site basis.