Day one

Lemmy.zip was first created on June 10th 2023.

Fun fact, it two attempts to get Lemmy.zip up and running as I locked myself out of the Admin account the first time :)

Week one

Week one was a week of madness as people moved from Reddit to check out Lemmy, a time of discovery and exploration.

Our first Server Update goes over much of what happened in that first week!

On the 8th day, we had our first spam wave!

I pretty quickly had to turn on registration verification (which I detailed in the second server breakdown) and also appointed Sami as our second admin.

Our application process has also been expanded a couple of times, from a more detailed application question to trying to make the process clearer with (hopefully) helpful emails and welcome messages.

At the same time, we also did some pretty cool things...

Like moving our image storage to Backblaze S3 and setting up the mobile site (which at the time was Voyager but I don't have a screenshot of that!)

On the 25th June, the community made our logo!

Yes, the yellow zipped Lemmy logo was created in this thread.

On the third week, we made our Matrix chat

Not joined it yet? You can click below. Its pretty chill!

ZippyBot was also born this week.

At the time I only knew how to write “Hello World” in Python.

Now ZippyBot is almost a couple of thousand lines of code running 24/7.
(Zippy is fully open source - you can see its code by clicking here!)

Lemmy.zip turned 1 month old.

I feel like we did loads in that first month. The 4th server overview sheds some more light on what we did to top off that first month, but tl;dr we upgraded the server, defederated Threads based on a user vote, and broke the 1000 signed up users mark.

Since then...

In our first year we have had over two and a half thousand signed up users, are in the top 20 most active lemmy servers, we have loads of awesome communities…

... And, out of the top 20 Lemmy instances, we're also the most active Lemmy instance as a percentage of signed up users vs active users ;)

Our Server...

Our server now has 20 threads (12 cores), 64gb RAM, and 1gbps connection to beam Lemmy right into your eyes.

Fun fact: We've had to restore backups to the server 6 times.. Whoops! đź‘€

Communities

Our most active community has consistently been Interesting News from Around the World.

Runners up include Technology and Gaming.

Our most subscribed community is Starfield (for now...)

Posts

Our highest voted post of all time (so far) is this spicy meme.

In fact, CluelessDude scored all 3 of our top posts this year with memes in the Gaming community!

Changes

We've upgraded Lemmy 11 times, from 17.4 up to 19.4 bringing all sorts of new features and improvements, from 2FA to pretty solid persistent federation!

We've also built our own tools locally to help mods promote their communities, improve moderation across the instance, and make the new user experience the best we can.

Browse your way...

Over time, we've added lots of different ways to browse Lemmy.zip. Our current front ends are:
- m.lemmy.zip (Our standard mobile site, which also words really well on desktop!)
- old.lemmy.zip (To help people transitioning from the other place!)
- t.lemmy.zip (Tesseract, a fork of Photon with loads of extra features)
- a.lemmy.zip (Alexandrite, a desktop-first alternative Lemmy UI)

See one you've not tried before? Give it a shot!

April Fools!

💎🙌🚀
Lemmy.zip was going to the moon!

You can read our IPO annoucement here.