As a result, our instance https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/ got 625 new user registrations (of which 536 where accepted) in the past 24 hours! And the registrations are not abating even now. We still get like 10 new ones per hour!
I suspect this is probably the largest advertisement, for lemmy specifically, since the main reddit blackouts 1.5 years ago.
Have your own instances also seen an influx of new users?
For anyone new: consider investing 10 minutes to learn how lemmy works and why decentralized and open source is better than proprietary and centralized platforms like reddit.
https://join-lemmy.org/docs/index.html
https://docs.joinmastodon.org/
https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.en.html
That’ll teach em! You can’t just sign up, first you gotta read some 20 minute long post from gnu.org
It’s a bit of a mixed experience. Overall, federation has its benefits, but it also tends to encourage cliquish behavior among groups. Sometimes, entire servers get blacklisted for various reasons. Reddit has a lot of corners that don’t violate its current ToS, but in federation, ToS isn’t usually about pleasing the most people and pulling them into your platform, it’s more about the ideals of your server admin team. That’s a good thing, I suppose. It’ll be interesting to see how things play out with Lemmy federations when Reddit bans porn.
Especially important to understand decentralization when it comes to topics like piracy. Unlike Reddit, a non-commercial Lemmy instance isn’t going to be shut down by a CEO who is worried about how it might affect their ability to sell ads. But, admins can get threatened, they can get overwhelmed, they can get hit by a bus. It’s good to know how how to find other communities on other servers, etc.