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this post was submitted on 09 Dec 2023
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unfortunately other data is not encouraging , the number of servers is both down since the exodus and in the recent month.
I think the number of servers is a interesting metric to look on, it correlates with users who are tech savy and are early adopters, before the exodus the number of servers was growing consistently , despite the number of users mostly staying the same, That was IMO an indication of the relative quality of lemmy at the time and indeed it seemed to got the most benefits from the exodus out of all the reddit alternatives.
compare that with peertube which shows consistent growth in the number of servers (see this month, and long term), I think what makes them better then lemmy currently is that they currently seem better at prioritizing feature development by using a dedicated site.
Also the total donations have declined in the last month (from €3962 to €3,771 today), So i think we should try to not get overconfident and work to secure the future of lemmy or some other open source reddit alternative.
this is normal. we'll go through a lot of similar waves. people start servers, realize they're a lot of work, and then abandon them. servers that foster a healthy community will survive. hexbear's worst cycle involved losing the entire administrative team just weeks after a large percentage of the website left. don't sweat the growing pains - work together to learn, grow, and change.
Before the Reddit exodus, I don't remember many active servers besides Lemmy.ml and Lemmygrad (there was Lemm.ee and Lemmy.ca but they both had like 3 posts a week). Hexbear wasn't federated, and servers were mostly being desperately spun up in anticipation for a flood of users who would crash the network.
The donations being down is bad though. I would love for at least Lemmy.ml to sticky a post asking for funding; one has to look no further than Thunderbird to see how well that works.
There were about 80 before the exodus (may 2023), compared to to 40 (may 2022) and 15 (may 2021), about double the servers every year which is good considering this is "word to mouth" growth, even older data shows a clear growth trend, my guess is that i and others didn't really see them because they are some dude community, even today i think i will have a problem listing more then 5-10 lemmy servers.
beehaw and the science instance were also fairly active before the exodus, and midwest.social was like, a little active