For anyone who needs a reminder: user account ≠ human individual user. There are no bot/captcha protections nor IP restrictions on Lemmy. I'd say we have less than 1 million actual human individual users.
There are legit reasons, for example your main instance is buggy or does not federate with all services. Also, browsing Lemmy via Mastodon etc. is not convenient at all.
I remember checking out Lemmy in December 2022, it was barely even a proof of concept. Now it's a whole ecosystem.
it's incredible how far it has gotten in a short time. And while commercial platforms will only get worse with time, open source platforms will only get better. Growth might not always be a linear process, but I'm feeling optimistic. :)
There are indeed many Lemmy instances that have captcha protection, it's really up to the instance admins if they want to protect or not. Many of those "spam" instances do get quickly defederated by the serious ones.
Yes, but I don't think it matters. It's not hyper specialized yet, but the initial problem of "there are no users" is gone. I don't think anything can stop the fediverse now. The protocol is just too useful to not support.
Because you pretty much need a seperate Lemmy, Kbin and Mastodon account. I've heard that it's somehow possible to see Lemmy posts from Mastodon, but I haven't really been able to understand it. Apparently, it's janky as hell, but I wouldn't know, as I just have 3 accounts I use, one for each 'service'.
Since I moved during the Reddit fiasco when servers were overloaded and didn't know what I was doing I just hopped from instance to instance. So now I have at least 7 dead accounts that are still probably counted in the 'users' statistic.
I'd say one person counting for ~10 is significant, and I doubt I'm alone, even if I am an outlier with my instance-hopping
Lemmy and Kbin should be pretty interoperable, but Lemmy and Mastodon don't federate particularly well, or at least, the user experience of federation is not great. The formats are just very different since Mastodon doesn't have much of a concept of groups or communities and doesn't have post titles and so on.
But you can follow Lemmy communities from Mastodon and posts to the community will show up in your Mastodon feed, and you can boost, favorite (upvote), and comment on the post.