Refer to title.
One that hasn’t been created yet
Either kbin.social or Lemmy.world. Then again, this hyper growth period is ripe for disruption. Facebook is talking about an ActivityPub instance. Imagine if they poured resources into UX improvements and directed their 2.5 billion users to it. It would be the largest instance by far overnight.
It would also be defederates instantly by hundreds of communities - people don’t want corporations here because of what corpos have done to their own social media platforms.
The last thing I want to see is a meta community get big, because meta will probably start injecting ad posts directly into the community. I’m ok if it’s just the users, I’m not ok if it’s all the other baggage.
Not to mention meta will probably start with microblogging platforms first. Which is a bit harder to fuck with in the way meta can with Lemmy/kbin. I’d be more ok with it if they stayed there, I would however delete or park my Instagram accounts, especially if insta users can follow me directly on mastodon.
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Well spreading the userbase is the ideal situation… when 1 becomes too big it gets an extreme server load and too much control over content created there… The whole idea of lemmy is to spread out… I can imagine if instance owners get this idea they would temporarily suspend account registration on their own trying to push alternative instances to maintain a good decentralized user base.
Isn’t server load kind of irrelevant with the instances on CDNs?
I believe it is going to be Lemmy.World. Besides my home instance of Kbin, which I love dearly, it is the one I see and hear about the most.
It does make sense because it is open to sign-ups, is federated with pretty much everything (apart from closed off instances like Beehaw and the tankies at Grad), and has the advantage of being a Lemmy instance (which gives it name recognition).
In the long-term, I hope federation keeps this space open, even if there is one or some “main” instance(s) people use.
The good thing about having open sign-up is that you get a big userbase pretty quickly.
The bad thing about having open sign-up is that you have people squatting on usernames and impersonating other people.
I mean, can you imagine?
Take my username from my cold dead hands!
Biggest user base, or biggest in terms of posting? If it’s the latter, definitely lemmynsfw
Someone build lemmy.xxx please.
there is lemmynsfw.com for you already
Kbin and probably kbin.social
The biggest growth will come from Reddit/Twitter. A huge chunk of users from both are young and become easily outraged over social issues.
Websites tend to grow in stages and at each stage they build momentum. If you kill momentum at a key point everyone can end up fleeing the website.
The developers of lemmy are tankies, idiologues can’t help themselves. As a result they’ll drop a comment supporting some abhorrent action from China/Russia or repost China/Russia state media propaganda and cause outrage at a key moment and lemmy will become a dirty word.
Aside from not having controversial admins it also has a much more Reddit like interface, which makes the transition much easier.
It probably would have been beehaw if they didnt defederate so early. Given the viewpoints of the people in charge there expressed in their comments on defederating and refederating, I suspect that Beehaw is going to have a consistent problem with constantly defederating and refederating.
Lemmy.world is most likely to grow the largest now because the barrier to entry is low compared to the other two. Additionally, the instance name gives the impression of a general or catchall instance moreso than lemmy.ml or beehaw.
Beehaw wants a safe space. They don’t want diversity; just the very rigid thoughts and opinions of which the owner approves. For this reason they don’t want most people to subscribe. And that’s fine. Every community can make their own rules.
Of course, every instance has the right to preserve their own echo chamber. That is not a problem, but it could be later when users keep seeing communities from one instance go away and come back, or users get effectively “banned” from interacting with those communities because they signed up on the wrong instance. Even if they refederate, they’ll be seen as unreliable by everyone else.
Its like banning all people who drive a Toyota from parking in your parking lot because some people you don’t like drive a Toyota. Sure, you have the right to do that, but you will be losing out on the parking fare of those big communities of Toyota drivers, and even people who dont drive Toyotas but see you banning them. Then you get less traffic, less users, people leave, and it becomes a parking lot that is 98% empty.
This leads to hyper segmented communities, which have benefits, but normies don’t really like when a place only has 3 active users.
