Before the Reddit exodus, I don't remember many active servers besides Lemmy.ml and Lemmygrad (there was Lemm.ee and Lemmy.ca but they both had like 3 posts a week). Hexbear wasn't federated, and servers were mostly being desperately spun up in anticipation for a flood of users who would crash the network.

The donations being down is bad though. I would love for at least Lemmy.ml to sticky a post asking for funding; one has to look no further than Thunderbird to see how well that works.

[–] wiki_me@lemmy.ml 5 points 11 months ago

Before the Reddit exodus, I don’t remember many active servers besides Lemmy.ml and Lemmygrad (there was Lemm.ee and Lemmy.ca but they both had like 3 posts a week). Hexbear wasn’t federated, and servers were mostly being desperately spun up in anticipation for a flood of users who would crash the network.

There were about 80 before the exodus (may 2023), compared to to 40 (may 2022) and 15 (may 2021), about double the servers every year which is good considering this is "word to mouth" growth, even older data shows a clear growth trend, my guess is that i and others didn't really see them because they are some dude community, even today i think i will have a problem listing more then 5-10 lemmy servers.

[–] morrowind@lemmy.ml 2 points 11 months ago

beehaw and the science instance were also fairly active before the exodus, and midwest.social was like, a little active