I don't need Lemmy to compete with or kill Reddit. All I wanted was any one platform to get enough of an influx of users to be self-sustaining even after the outrage started to die down, which appears to have been successful.

Personally I don’t care if I’m talking to millions of people vs hundreds of thousands as long as there are enough people to make it feel alive and like a community.

It’s a hard habit to break, because we’ve been trained to think this way for years, but try to remember: we don’t need to attract millions of users to be valuable. This isn’t a commercial enterprise. We don’t sell advertising. We don’t measure success by the number of eyeballs we can promise paying customers.

What matters now is the quality of conversation. In fact, that’s the ONLY measure of any consequence. It’s strange, because in the past, someone’s often tried to use services like this as a way to make money, or as a way to make something else they were selling more attractive. We expected it. It was always in the back of our heads. It even got to the point that if a company did something that wasn’t an effort to increase profitability, we criticized them. Generosity, real generosity, was alien to us.

It’s hard to wrap your head around the idea that people volunteer their time and money to build and maintain the fediverse, simply because they want us to be able to communicate. That’s it. There’s no hidden agenda. There’s no quest for profit at our expense.

I’m perfectly fine with the fediverse growing slowly. I don’t want it to be strained beyond what the mods can handle. Bigger isn’t necessarily better.

for me i'm over comparing to Reddit, I'm just looking for somewhere in a similar format but without a bunch of the issues that I can enjoy

I’m truly not being a negative nancy but the last time I checked reddit had 400M user accounts. We should be comparing active user numbers, but either way, this is a drop in the bucket and reddit rightly does not consider Lemmy a threat to its supremacy at this point.

Even when considering accounts across all lemmy instances, it still only combines for a total of 2 million. But overall I'm optimistic about lemmy's trajectory too.

Ummm. I have a friend that has a 2nd NSFW account too.

Kbin adds another 63k.

With this same logic in mind, I'd assume almost the entire population of lemmynsfw should be disregarded from this count, which is almost certainly majority comprised of people's porn alts that they want to keep separate from their main accounts.

( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)

There is some stuff like auto expanding content and not blurring NSFW content. Simple stuff. Hoping those features will make it back up into Lemmy soon.

We're just behind cloudflare, the server itself and all us admins are Canadian.

It is surprising. A month ago they were Canadian servers, @smorks@lemmy.ca moved it to lunanode (Canadian). ~~Perhaps CDN was moved or the whole machine was moved to a cheaper hosting platform since it got very big from then and is under new admin management as of a week ago-ish.~~

Edit: found the answer from @Shadow@lemmy.ca, TL:DR is CloudFlare

Correct! The server running this and all data is stored in Canada.

Here's a blurb from a doc I'm working on:

Lemmy.ca is hosted in Canada at OVH in Beauharnois, QC with all data on a dedicated server. Backups are PGP encrypted and pushed to the OVH backup service, however these will be moved off-site in the near future.

We use Cloudflare as a security and performance layer in front of the server. They accept the traffic for Lemmy.ca through a worldwide network of ingestion points, scrub it of abusive traffic, cache the images, and pass it through an encrypted tunnel to our server. This means they can see in plain text the data sent between us including your credentials, posts, comments and images. You can read more about their policies at https://www.cloudflare.com/trust-hub/.

Everybody needs at least two. One for regular interaction, and another for porn. I mean for science.

I’m old enough to remember a simpler time before lemm.ee was in the top 10 largest instances (it was 2 days ago when I signed up)