Lemmy reached 50k monthly active users!

I have been browsing all and noticing many new communities popping up. Lemmy is bustling with activity, and it's actually possible to sort by hot now.
The next great migration is truly underway. New users are staying and posting, and I believe its in no small part because of the work you and other activ users put in.
So, thank you and keep it up.
- Happy to help!

So we’re seeing the MAU increase and seeing a fairly steady decline of the number of servers online. That’s concerning.
I would love to know why we’re seeing such a decline. My guess is the costs of running a service and the time it takes to manage the instance. As instance operators see increased costs for bandwidth, image storage, etc… but without any real form of revenue to offset those costs, I think we’re going to see only the truly dedicated operators continue to run the system the way it’s needed.
I’ve seen quite a few discussions already where users are saying as soon as they see an ad, they immediately delete their account and move.. which is their own prerogative. However, outside of donations and potential begging for people to contribute, there really isn’t a business model to be had here.
I’ll continue to research methods to keep server and hosting costs down, but it’s something that we all (public instance operators) need to think about.
- It's probably people starting instances as a small side project without making them public and shutting them dowb after a while
  For costs, you can have a look at this post; https://feddit.org/post/2600584
  
  Yep that's me!
  I love lemmy.world but just that instance slammed my small server to the point it looked closer to a ddos. I eventually just went to rss instead.
  
  Yeah that makes sense. I'm hoping it's just that people have started personal, single-user instances and shut them down and not a larger set of instances going down. I would hope that we would hear more about instances shutting down if that was the case.
  After reading through your post for costs, it seems that overall, costs are relatively low, unless the admin/team determine they want to increase the resources or implement additional setups for any reason.

Rminds me of the old days. I was a major Digg contributor and when everyone decided to jump ship to Reddit I had my reservations. It as tiny. The forums now known as subreddits were no better than old usenet. But it worked and it had welcome arms for free speech to occur. Lemmy seems like the next Reddit to me but with the chance to do better.
- Welcome to Lemmy, here are a few pointers to help you settle in
  !newtolemmy@lemmy.ca
  !communitypromo@lemmy.ca
  
  Thank you but absolutely not necessary.

The visualization framework used by Fediverse Observer clearly does not have real mobile web support. 😄
Good news, I hope by the end of 2025 we can hit a stable 75K MAUs. This will be a massive help for more niche communities.
- During the last migration with Reddits API changes we grew from 1k MAU to 70k. So its possible that we reach 700k or even more. Though I hope the growth is more gradual this time because it was extremely stressful back then.
- That would be nice indeed ! Then !tycoon@lemmy.world will blossom!
- As long as there isnt a "fake good guy" company like bluesky that lures people away from looking for a real longterm solution, lemmy might get a real growth spurt from the continued reddit exodus.
  
  Digg will be having a go at it, let's see what happens.