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, it should be another day or two.
We’re building something here!
I have little understanding of the technical details of Lemmy, but I’m having a hard time understanding how it can scale. How do you build something like /r/funny with 40 million subscribers when the biggest Lemmy instance seems to be suffering at 30k users?
As far as I can see while users can subscribe to communities on different instances, communities themselves are locked to a single instance. How could a multi million strong community grow here?
First of all, as a software engineer I’m — well, “impressed” is the wrong word because I remember how efficient software used to be in the '90s – I’m “satisfied” with how well Lemmy instances are scaling. Even the largest instances are running on single, fairly-small servers.
Keep in mind that this is all alpha software and not only likely very unoptimized but also pretty buggy, so the surprisingly few problems there have been are more likely due to that than to real issues of scale.