Technology

For some reason, same. I'm just, like, feel enthusiastic about Fediverse as a whole and Lemmy in particular.

Same here, I am just afraid this will stop after the first wave of enthusiasm.

I’ve got a ton of things to post that are either from my pulled down Reddit posts or stuff I had but never posted. Here, if anything I’m trying to pace my posts so that I don’t drown a community in just my threads.

I looked at the participation (active user) rate, it shows above 20% in Beehaw and 7% overall in Lemmy. Normally subreddits of 3,000-6,000 are kind of slow and people post once in a while, most probably lurk.

Here, at least for now it's really buzzing, people get a sense that they can be heard and real conversations are happening.

Yeah, I'm usually just a lurker but Lemmy makes me want to take part of the experience. I really hope that it will take off in the long run.

Makes sense. A friend of me unfortunately turns Lemmy down because the largest instance has "only" 1.6k users

I’ve known about Lemmy for a few months and just registered with Beehaw because it looked active and had a funny name.

What has been the biggest driver in activity? I’m curious how a community like Beehaw bootstraps itself into existence

I think that it was also influenced by it being the developer's instance (thus kinda had some official-ness to it, combined with the domain name reflecting the name of the service) and people wanting to just give newcomers an easy onboard by directing them straight to a link rather than to join-lemmy where some people get confused about choosing an instance. I had seen it in a few subs on reddit where it was just people putting lemmy.ml rather than join lemmy to give someone alternatives to reddit.

If you imagine you're targeting reddit users looking for an alternative and you already know that some people get confused by choosing instances, you're potentially more influenced to just give them a link to one of the instances. Doesn't really matter where they sign up to an extent since it's all federated, just need to skip them past the part that might confuse them. Then if you're doing that, you're also making it more familiar to things they understand by using a domain that looks official. If you say, "Use Lemmy" and then put "beehaw.org", some might question why it's called Lemmy but the website is beehaw. You don't go to reddit.com but call it Linkit, so it may have seemed better to just use lemmy.ml to tell people to use Lemmy. Of course if you onboard people through join-lemmy then it better contextualizes names of instances that don't have lemmy in them, but I think people were just trying to find ways to spread the word without potentially confusing people with the federation aspect.

I to thought it wise to pick one with high numbers. It had nothing to do with being afraid of not having people to talk to though, as I understood that we'd all be connected. It was more a fear that an instance with 20 users might get shut down because the owner got bored. In my mind it seems less likely that a popular instance gets shut down.

So what happens to an account if an I stance goes away?

Most people don’t really get how federation works

This is 100% me, but my understanding is that you can see all community content and interact with everyone regardless of what server you're on, is that more or less correct? I went with beehaw because it seemed moderately popular (I'd read that servers can disappear, and figure more users=less likely?) and is focused on keeping out assholes, which I am 100% cool with.

There's definitely a forum vibe here. You can already see that the different instancess (lemmy.ml, beehaw.org, lemmy.world, lemmy.one) have their own specificities. Very refreshing.