The user count at the moment of this post stands at 33279 and continues to grow!
To take the #1 spot from lemmy.ml (36185 users and no longer growing), lemmy.world just needs about 3000 new users. Given the current growth rate, that should only be another day or two.
We’re building something here! Kudos to lemmy.world admin @ruud@lemmy.world for all of his hard work keeping this site running smoothly.
To track lemmy’s growth: https://lemmy.fediverse.observer/list
I guess my question is that you can’t really control if a community grows to be huge or not. You can control who can create an account your instance, but unless you defederate, what happens if 20 million accounts subscribe to a single community? How is that load handled? Does it just collapse the entire instance under it’s weight? Or is the fediverse just inherently built to stifle community growth past a certain scale?
I would hope that an instance/magazine that can’t handle 20m users will have some sort of manual approval or other filter like Beehaw does. Beehaw defederated because they needed to breathe. Same with any other instance that begins to near its limit.
I was more referring about impacts of non-local users browsing communities on other instances. Which instance handles that load? If I browse lemmy.ml communities on my lemmy.world account am I impacting lemmy.world or lemmy.ml? What happens when all 35k lemmy.world users browse a lemmy.ml community because it’s the most popular one? Does lemmy.ml need to support all their own users + any non-local visitors?
That’s why I mentioned Beehaw. Beehaw defederated for this reason.