Almost! At the time of this post, lemmy.world has a whopping 25733 users and is growing fast.
Since my last post yesterday, it has added 4000 new users, making it the clear second-largest lemmy instance out there. Also quickly catching up to lemmy.ml's 36000 (not taking new signups).
beehaw.org (3rd largest) sits at 12500 users, partly because of more restrictive registration requirements.
Source: https://lemmy.fediverse.observer/list
Exciting to see all this growth!
Except BeeHaw as defederated lemmy.world - which is a shame. Step in the wrong direction IMO. That's going to be a huge problem because now if you're a BeeHaw member you no longer see anything lemmy.world related - you're suddenly, overnight, cut off from thousands of people and posts.
Having these larger instances owned by 1 person like they all are now is a shame, but unavoidable at the beginning I suppose. One of them gets bitter and you have thousands defederated. I guess over time as things splinter up more it may get better.
I'll likely just spin up my own instance so I can federate with everyone and never be dropped (at least from my side).
For what it's worth, beehaw.org is run by 4 admins and a number of mods. They also hope the defederation is temporary until better moderation tools are available: https://beehaw.org/post/567170.
We'll see if they really mean that, but others have said that lemmy moderation tools are still limited compared to mastodon's, for example.
Probably the integration of modding tools like AutoMod would be heaps handy here, it could automatically flag potentially troublesome posts and help cut back on spam / bad actors.
From memory Reddit uses automod and so does twitch / discord. Though I'm not sure if they actively let you integrate with it directly on third party sites
I think I would be helpful for instances to have more control over federation than turning on or of for there instances. Ideally I think giving lemmy.world and sh.itjust.works read only access to Beehaw would have been the best option while we wait for better moderation tools. Until those options exist though they didn't really have much other choice.