Spreading of the 100 biggest Lemmy communities
BentiGorlich@gehirneimer.de to 
The biggest surprise for me was the https://hexbear.net count, an instance I hardly interact with.
| Community Count | Community Subscriber Count | |
|---|---|---|
| beehaw.org | 6 | 133450 |
| hexbear.net | 33 | 663204 |
| lemdro.id | 1 | 17052 |
| lemmy.blahaj.zone | 1 | 15907 |
| lemmy.dbzer0.com | 1 | 53006 |
| lemmy.ml | 14 | 356460 |
| lemmy.one | 1 | 16257 |
| lemmy.world | 39 | 851950 |
| lemmynsfw.com | 2 | 33586 |
| sh.itjust.works | 1 | 16006 |
| sopuli.xyz | 1 | 14093 |
The data this is based on comes from https://lemmyverse.net where you can just download a full json of the data they have (I excluded all communities marked as "suspicious")
EDIT: The data if you sort by active users last month:
| Community Count | Community Active Month Count | |
|---|---|---|
| awful.systems | 1 | 2616 |
| feddit.org | 2 | 7363 |
| feddit.uk | 2 | 5289 |
| hexbear.net | 1 | 2952 |
| lemdro.id | 1 | 2898 |
| lemm.ee | 3 | 8898 |
| lemmy.blahaj.zone | 1 | 11422 |
| lemmy.ca | 3 | 14910 |
| lemmy.dbzer0.com | 3 | 13752 |
| lemmy.ml | 10 | 54949 |
| lemmy.world | 57 | 338384 |
| lemmy.wtf | 1 | 3602 |
| lemmy.zip | 3 | 12020 |
| mander.xyz | 1 | 11469 |
| sh.itjust.works | 5 | 37365 |
| slrpnk.net | 3 | 10897 |
| sopuli.xyz | 2 | 10070 |
| ttrpg.network | 1 | 4107 |
Community Count:
Community Users:
I knew hexbear was big but not that big
It’s big enough to feel their presence in every corner of the platform unfortunately
I cannot facepalm hard enough when I see lgbt ppl who praise Soviets or North Korea
Yeah I can’t say I was bothered when LW defederated. I’ve gotten in way fewer stupid arguments since they did the same with Lemmygrad. IIRC LW didn’t even let hexbear federate in the first place.
I don’t like defederations. I prefer to see everything, every post and comment and then block users/instances on my own if it becomes too much.
Literally a second ago I blocked another tankie, from LW this time. Before I even managed to type this comment fully. But then I don’t shy from making comments that attract them if I disagree with something. So inbox always busy
Sounds like you waste alot of time with people who don't deserve it
Yes but this may be a side effect of turning off the points experiment. Instead of getting dopamine from points I only get replies. So it could be that I subconsciously make my comments in a way that is more likely to attract some kind of response.
My main goal for Lemmy was to break Reddit addiction and I feel gaining likes plays a big part in staying glued to the screen
Seems like a good strategy would be to not have every post and comment shown to you if your goal is to break your habit of spending too much time on your phone or PC.
I would much rather signup to an instance that handles that for me.
As long as the instance is clear about what they defederate from and their reasons, then I’m happy with that. And if I wasn’t, I could choose a different instance.
Our instance is federated with hexbear, lemmygrad etc. I want to be resonsible for what I see and block, I'm really not a fan of defederation unless it's a last resort (i.e. CSAM or other illegal content).
I did end up blocking the lemmy.ml instance though, fuck that place. I haven't even blocked hexbear or lemmygrad.
Yes, that's pretty much our take on it: we'll defederate CSAM (and nonce-adjacent) instances asap, those with lax registration tend to become havens for spammers and trolls, so there is usually a wave of defederating, then someone reaches out to them, it gets sorted and we allow them back in. That tends to be the regular defederation and isn't controversial. Defederating, for example, Hexbear over, for example, trolling would be a bigger deal and we'd try and speak to the other Admins about it before any permanent banning.
Isn't your instance federated with hexbear? Seems like it hardly blocks any lemmy instances.
lol, forgot I was even on my feddit.uk account.
I’d already gone through blocking all of that stuff via my app before the defederation stuff happened, but if I were signing up to a new instance I’d appreciate it being blocked by default.
I think ideally a Lemmy client could connect to a number of instances, and you could add the more contentious ones yourself.
Some of these places are literally hosting child porn. You don't want that mirrored to a server that you're responsible for.
You're not really using the fediverse until you've been told that you'll get the bullet, too. Sometimes, it's exhausting commenting something pretty uncontroversial and then seeing like eight notifications and realizing it was on Hexbear.
Can you truly say you've had the HB experience if you haven't recieved emoji/sticker/gif spam from people who weren't alive for 9/11, have never been outside their country, and refuse to listen to opposing views, but know with full certainty that all western countries are 100% full of genociders and colonial rapists who all deserve the glorious death the super benign, extremely peaceful and misunderstood countries of North Korea, China, and Russia who have never once been correctly accused of human rights violations....
And of course, if they point out that your country has dipped into those things in the past, well your entire worldview is shattered and their whataboutism has solved everything and proves you deserve the death they crave for you.
I am genuinely sad for HB. There are lgbt ppl there, generally dear to me. Seeing them enjoy such cesspit lured in by cultish atmosphere, supporting the very forces that can only destroy but not build anything. It is personal.
There's actually a lot of lgbt people there, based on their last poll:
https://hexbear.net/post/2687582
Hey, aren't you the one who dropped a diaper load because Hexbear removed your comments justifying supporting candidates who were pro genocide?
https://hexbear.net/modlog?page=1&actionType=All&userId=27562
Yep, that's me. You could probably find a few more good examples of me stepping in shit on Hexbear, that's hardly the first.
Join an instance that’s defederated from them. I haven’t seen their nonsense in months.
You can block instances yourself, I personally don't like when an instance makes that decision for me.
Blocking an instance is just equivalent to blocking all the communities on that instance. You'll still see the blocked instance's posts and comments in other instances and (maybe more importantly) the instance will still influence your feed via voting. So if hexbear collectively upvotes or downvotes some post, that will influence your feed. Defederation is the only way to prevent that kind of influence.
Downvotes are disabled on hexbear just fyi. One of the reason people leave a comment with stuff they disagree with. But upvoting yeah, very active userbase very actively upvoting means a lot of my feed on lemm.ee is from hexbear.
They have less than 500 MAU. It’s just a bunch of losers yelling at each other.Correction, updated data is actually closer to 2k MAU. They are the 4th most active instance, topped by lemm.ee, sh.itjust.works, and Lemmy.world.
Interesting, I expected them to be much larger
Yeah I was surprised too, but if you go by MAU hexbear and Lemmy.Ml combined are just under 3k last I checked.
Lemm.ee alone has about that many, and Lemmy.world has many times that
My guess is that they just needed to have their own community for a lot of stuff because so many instances are defederated from them. Though I am not sure...
Or because it's older than most of the other instances
I guess it's also natural that subcultures that tend to be banned elsewhere are early adaptors of alternative platforms.
We're lucky we didn't exist when the Trump extremists on Reddit went looking for a new home, or they would probably have been one of the biggest fields in this figure. Hopefully when the right wing extremists arrive instance admins will have the good sense to defederate.
If I remember correctly, Hexbear was there before the exodus. So that wouldn't make sense.
Hexbear is older than most of the fediverse, and didn't have federation enabled for years. It's a very self-sufficient community.
That's probably it
They’ve existed for a while. A lot of subscribers are inactive users. Kind of like reddit where a sub can have 5k people and still be inactive.
It's less that they're big, but old.
I haven't even heard of it xd
I only scroll all for now... Hexbear is the only thing I have blocked. I just got tired of trolly garbage.
Most instances block them so most communities on those instances won't see them either. Once you find certain communities on instances that don't block them you suddenly see half the comments being from hexbear, which likely quickly makes you block those communities fairly quickly.
. world is defederated with hexbear iirc
What is hexbear? I never see it in my feed.
Your instance is defederated from them
Think of it as the Tankie version of The Donald.
It's essentially where reddit's old Chapo Trap House community went after reddit banned them in 2020. It started federating with the rest of the fediverse some time last year, but there was a bit of a culture clash between it and some other larger instances and several of them defederated it
I only know it because it is often mentioned when talking about trolling
It's an instance mostly based around authoritarian communism. They got banished from Reddit quite a bit before the black out.
Gab also was big, but its role for the fediverse wasn't.
Who or what is/was Gab? 😅
Its like truth social
Not really surprising. 10 out of the 10 most commented posts in the past year are on hexbear (the top 2 being the weekly trans mega threads). Granted, a lot of that is just the hyper-active posting of a few users. Regardless, if you want a trans community, there's basically no active alternative to hexbear's traaa here.
What about blahaj?
I'm subscribed to pretty much all the trans coms I know of and traa is 90% of the trans content that shows up. Another 5% are other hexbear trans subs. Traa has as many comments in half a month as mtf@blajah has had in its entire existance and as many in a week as trans@blahaj has made in total (the two largest non-hexbear trans subs afaik).
Active users is the standard metric used to check how much a service is used (at least as far as i know. its what i see when i look at stuff published for investors).
hexbar is on the sixth place in term of number of active users with 1.8K , lemmy.world is 18K (enable the "active users" column and sort by it to see the full list)
Always nice to see lemmynsfw doing well. Those guys are going to bring a lot of people here
I couldn't imagine being a moderator there, the amount of shit they must see uploaded has to be enormous. This would apply to every media-oriented instance but due to their nature I am guessing it's worse
Oh definitely
It would be the hardest thing to moderate if lemmy blows up though.
Hehehe hardest hehehe
I think it is odd that they have no community in the top 100 anymore when sorted by active users
last i checked lemmynsfw just looks like r/gonemild though
Do they even have original posters? I thought it was just onlyfans farmers reposting their Reddit content.
There’s a few OC users there
It's a real mystery, where could these instances possibly be located?
(apologies for derailing, I don't know where else to post this)
"Private" in these fedi-surveys are just a complicated way of saying "behind Cloudflare" without saying behind Cloudflare for some reason.
I love me some Cloudflare MITM for my browsing data and authetication credentials. yum…
Pretty sure lemmy.ca is hosted in Canada
Yeah right, if lemmy.ca is in Canada then aussie.zone and lemmy.eco.br are in Australia and Brazil. Get a load of this guy.
I added it to the main post :) And yeah should have done so in the initial post as well...
Thanks!
2 observations:
Wow I didn't think hexbear was that large. That's unfortunate...
The fact that Lemmyworld is like 40% of the pie is NOT good. People are clearly not understanding or not caring thay the point of the fediverse is to prevent any one instance from having too much power. People need to leave lemmy world and join other smaller instances. If lemmy world were to shut down, imagine how many of the most popular communities would be gone.
Lemmy.world has no lock in on their "power". They have the most volunteer labor, money, and infrastructure. That's makes them stable, so people aren't worried about their data suddenly going offline (like kbin) and they don't worry about the service being flaky.
The same can be said about gmail and it is the same kind of problem here. Yes lemmy.world is not a profit orient it giant, but it is still a problem when one actor has this power over a federated network. (the scale of the problem is of course a lot larger with gmail)
Technical issues with Lemmy are, I think, still driving people to larger instances.
The big one is that if I make a community on a smaller instance, and gain ANY amount of volume and traction (which is not all that easy to do in the first place) and that server vanishes, shit's just... dead. It's gone and not coming back, because you can't move a community from a dead server to a live server.
Which means using one of the big, established, funded, stable, working instances is the only rational choice, but that also means I'll probably just make an account and post exclusively from there, and thus you end up in this cycle of everyone just going to one of the larger instances in preference to any of the smaller ones.
Everyone goes on and on and on about account portability being very important (which, I suppose it is: I don't think we need account portability but rather distributed identity independent of the specific platform you're using, but that's a whole different technical mess) but for something like Lemmy, being assured that the community you're working on will survive servers vanishing and a means to "take ownership" in a way that lets you port it to another home if and when your instance dies - because, for the most part, it's going to at some point - is far far more needed.
The size difference between Lemmy.world and lemm.ee could still be improved
It's that, plus the next largest instance being practically unusable due to hyper aggressive tankie censorship. Getting banned from .ml for not sucking Stalin's boot hard enough is practically a rite of passage at this point.
I agree in principle that .world containing most of the fediverse’s activity kinda isn’t great for the idea of the democratic nature of the fediverse. However, the point of the ‘verse is that anyone can spool up an instance if they dislike it, or start more communities on existing instances. If .world were to disappear it would suck, but that’s part of the problem with any instance in an informal community. Any of them can disappear.
That's just how federation works out in every federated service ever.
While spreading out is good, this isn't something like cryptocurrency where it's specifically bad if you have over 50% share. Each instance is the source of truth for their users and communities hosted there. It's not like a block chain where something with over half can suddenly define their own truth for everyone. So it's not necessarily a massive cause for alarm.
When you enter "how to join Lemmy" in search engines one of the first results is this Reddit thread, which explicitly suggests people join Lemmyworld.
In fact, when I point people to Lemmy via Reddit, I use that post also because that suggestion actually makes it way more approachable. I think most people, myself included, are intimidated by multiple servers and feel like they're "intruding" into private spaces. The size of Lemmyworld might help people feel like it's more anonymous and a little easier to join as a result, especially since they are being asked to wait for "approval", which is pretty unusual on the modern Net, let's be honest.
The problem is most likely people that are new to the fediverse/lemmy just not understanding it and choosing a "default", popular instance. I was going to pick it as a safe option when I first came here but it was under load and wasn't accepting new users, where I then had to find another instance and settled on feddit.uk.
It would be good if lemmy instances could have the option of "load balancing" new users, so if the current instance has way more active users than it's federated wtih then it disables registration but recommends other, smaller instances to the user.
We just need a way to make it easy to seamlessly transfer both users and communities to another instance then it really won't matter if one gets disproportionately large because a shutdown won't affect anything. Ideally the inner workings should be as invisible to the end user as possible.
Great to have you with us. 👍
♥️ glad to be part of our community!
.ml and hexbear have been around much longer than the other instances so have built up more subscribers
I started on a small instance that fortunately gave a heads up when they decided to shut down. When I moved to a second, small instance where I ported all my community subscriptions, it shut down with no warning. It's a shame, because both instances were topically-focused and small enough to avoid defederation drama.
I love the idea of decentralized infrastructure, but now I'm on .world because I just don't have the time or willpower to move every few months, and I definitely don't have the wherewithal to run my own instance.
There's a bit of choice paralasys when joining Lemmy. Even if you know how the fediverse works you won't have knowledge of the culture and relationships of different instances.
I joined Lemmy.world because it advertises itself as the vanilla flavour of the fediverse, so it makes it an easy pick for someone like me who didn't quite understand how it all hangs together.
But I do agree with you, and I'm looking to migrate
after some concerning things have come up about the lemmy.world owner.Edit: confused the owner of lemmy.world and lemmy.ml.
The choice paralysis is real. I chose lemm.ee because it was easy to type into the address bar, and I've stuck around because the admin seems pretty level-headed.
Haven't heard anything so far, what are they?
Thanks for asking, made me go look again. I had mixed up Lemmy.world owner Ruud and the creator of Lemmy itself and admin of lemmy.ml. Ruud seems chill, lemmy.ml less so.
Lemm.ee should fit your bill
Definitely
I mean the first problem went away when I sorted the communities by active users, though the second one got way worse with it XD
As someone out of the loop, why is hexbear bad? Alternatively, what is hexbear about?
see: https://startrek.website/comment/11417825
Please disregard, after reading further in the comments I get the gist. I guess as I use LemmyWorld I don’t have to deal with them.
Surprised I dont see programming.dev in the data, we definitely have at least 3 communities in the top 100 (programmer_humor, programming, linux)
Manually counted communities in the top 100 per instance and threw it into another pie chart (for active users / month)
This also seems to be different than the results gotten from lemmyverse as the lemmyverse data hasnt been updated in 11 days according to that site
A bunch of instances gained or lost some coms in the top 100 from variance of things happening in the last week
(the eight instances that it decided to not give labels to that have 1 community are feddit.uk, lemmy.zip, beehaw.org, lemdro.id, ttrpg.network, lemmy.wtf, lemmy.blahaj.zone, mander.xyz)
edit: updated graph to be more accurate users/month counts
Eyyyyy midwest.social!
What do you mean by "manually counted"? And what did you use to generate the chart? Is that a Google API?
I looked at the community list in programming.dev (from https://programming.dev/communities) sorted by active users per month and noted down the instances for the top 100 communities
its using google sheets
going to recount with lemm.ees community list in a sec since theyre federated with hexbear
I hate that their libraries are so good sometimes :D Mine uses recharts with suboptimal configuration
In this list it doesn't seem like it: https://lemmyverse.net/communities?order=active_month
Seems like lemmyverse doesnt have the instance listed at all for some reason, assuming a crawling issue. I reported it on their repository. Would be new since I remember it showing the instance before
You can check in https://programming.dev/communities that programmer humor has way more active users than most communities here
And I've fixed it now :D Sorry for the delay and thx for reporting <3
Oh that is unfortunate
Their deploy pipeline is broken as well. So I think that is the reason for the old crawl date
It sometimes does that when the crawler hasn't had time to fetch a large proportion of the instances in the last 4 hours. the data should be pretty recent still. I'll check on it now :)
I think it is 12 old by now
Yeah it is, docker stopped loading the redis DB 🤣
https://github.com/tgxn/lemmy-explorer/pull/189
looks like it's fixed it https://develop.lemmyverse.net/
will be in prod shortly :)
Thank you!
And here the diagram by community subscriber count:
Nearly but not exactly :D
Could you please do it based on monthly active users?
Oh that would be interesting as well. I will do that. Checking back in 2h :D
Thanks!
I will add both pictures to the main post as well. Here is the Pie chart for community count:
And here is the pie chart for community users:
Great !
Lemmy.world gets A LOT bigger this way XD
I think subscriber count is probably not ideal. I've seen communities where the number subscribers is 10x the number of active monthly users.
For other communities, subscribers is about equal to active users.
Based on Monthly active users, the picture is different: https://lemmyverse.net/communities?order=active_month
You already see a 4 sh.itjust.works community, a lemmy.ca community, a lemmy.zip community just from the top 30
I might as well leave lemmy.world
I'm only concerned about how to transfer all my stuff to the new account. Mastodon makes it super easy.
You can only export and import followed communities afaik
Mastodon doesn't allow to transfer posts either
https://docs.joinmastodon.org/user/moving/#move
Got it.
Idk if you can transfer likes comments and posts, but you can go to your old account from a new one and star everything with the new account pretty easily. So that at least can transfer.
Mastodon doesn't allow to transfer posts either
https://docs.joinmastodon.org/user/moving/#move
Probably unintended side-effect of this post: A few people like me discovering new communities to follow. Thank you!
You didn't use a black color for us? Heresy!
My deepest apologies milord 🙏 I promise to do better next time * leaves the throne room backwarss while bowing *
You must be confused, we don't have a king, just pirates and anarchists 😁
Sorry milord captain 🙏
We're anarchists, we don't have a king, we strongly oppose centralized power in the hands of one powerful leader
anyone have any guesses as to why lemmy.world is so big? Scale/size advantage? Reliability advantage? Name recognition? What do we think is the culprit here.
And whilst i'm here, anybody want to explain the source of lemmy.ml to me? I only know it as the instance where mad people yell at me from lol.
perhaps a more "ambiguous" federation system would be better. having community instances is nice and all, but having one literally just be lemmy.world seems a little bit antithetical to me.
Lemmy.world has kept open signups open during every large Reddit exodus while many others didn't. It's also decently reliable, has decent moderation and is well known. The reason why people didn't move after is probably because instance migration on Lemmy isn't possible* so they just stick with what they use.
*Yes I don't consider exporting/importing followed communities a migration
Open signups is the biggest reason. Pretty much every other instance wanted you to jump through hoops to sign up with them.
I don't think I needed to for https://programming.dev.
I heard what lemmy is. I googled Lemmy. I downloaded an app. I pressed sign up. I ended up on Lemmy.world.
I'll be honest I don't even really understand what different instances do.
They can be oriented to some type of content: For example, the many feddit.something are targetting people by countries or langages (.it, .uk, etc.). slrpnk.net is solarpunk oriented, mander.xyz science oriented. Litterature.cafe is books, reading and writing oriented.
And they can offer different moderation policies: People on lemmynsfw.com probably want to see NSFW content. lemmy.world has a policy against it. lemmy.dbzer0.com allow for open discussion about piracy that many instances forbid and so on.
It you don't see the difference in instances, it is probably that you are about fine on your local instance. But if one day, you hear about a community you can't access, maybe that is because it is blocked by lemmy.word and you could access it from another instance
If the dbzer0 instance allows piracy talk but I'm signed up to an instance that doesn't allow it, can I talk in their community or do I risk being banned from mine?
In other words, are my comments stored on their instance or on mine?
Lemmy stores your posts and replies on both your host server and on the server of the community.
One interesting behavior to note here that is different from reddit is that while comments on reddit belong to the profile of the person commenting and is then imported to view in the subreddit (this is why you can edit comments after being banned, and why there visible in your profile even if removed from a subreddit), on lemmy the target community is instead authoritative and your host server will by default respect a deletion by community mods on different servers by also removing that comment from your profile.
You can talk on their instance. If the moderator of your instance dis not wanted you to interact with this other instance they would have block it.
That I'm not sure. But I think there is a copy of the content you accessed on your instance. Maybe someone administrating an instance could answer you better than I did.
Your comments are stored on both. The "canonical" version would be on your home instance but every instance that is federated with your instance would get a copy of your comments. I think it's even possible to have your content removed from one instance but not another. One of my posts shows as removed in the mod log but isn't actually removed.
I signed up at feddit.nl and I am not even from Netherlands.
If you find yourself well were you are, then you are in the right place (^_^)
So which instance an account is from matters regarding which communities you can join? Huh.
Only insofar as some instances block communication from some other instances. Not mine though, that's actually one of the reasons I picked it. That and it being by an org that's older than the web and runs a public unix server and a bunch of retrocomputing type services as well as fediverse stuff. They started out as a dialup anime BBS.
Yes but not so much. The fediverse is a big place and everyone can open a community in the same topic in a instance that is not block. Look how many zero waste there is !zerowaste@lemmy.ml !zerowaste@slrpnk.net !zerowaste@lemm.ee !zerowaste@lemmy.world !zero_dechet@jlai.lu. And they may be more on instances I don't know.
For what I have witness instances blocked each other over divergence on political activism. If you don't plan to go discuss with people who really want to convince you to become communiste, you should be fine.
Go on [your.instance]/instances for the list of block instances.
Yeah I actually tried beehaw initially but they never dealt with my application, so after a whole I just went with Lemmy.world.
an instance can be thought of like a reigonal server for a game, but for a community interest instead. dbzer0 is more on the fringes partaking more actively in piracy and AI shit, as well as other shit like anarchy and personal liberty/freedoms at a more broad scale.
Sometimes they're regionally specific, like the midwest instance, other times they're global like the .world instance.
you do have instance specific communities, and users obviously, but it's also open to the broader "fediverse" as well. The only technicality is that i'm tied to dbzer0 since that's where my acc sits, though i can still poke around outside of it.
About lemmy.world - when running from reddit, it was literally first on the list of advised ones everywhere. Also, biggest, so it had most communities. I am actually pretty much only aware of .world, .dbzer0 and sh.itjust.works. From the normal ones anyway.
lemmy.ml is basically an instance made by creators of lemmy from what I know.
I bounced between a few instances and .world seemed to always be up and available. Not to mention all the communities on .world.
I don't have an allegiance. Open more communities in other instances or migrate the .world ones there.
I just want to post.
yeah, personally i'm a user of dbzer0 because i prefer the more back alley stuff (it also bans porn so that shit doesnt show up in my feed)
It's up most of the time, there are a few instances where it's slow or doesn't want to load, but that's usually resolved quickly enough, just internet instability i think, reddit has the same issues for me.
I see all the .world shit anyway, so it makes little difference to me at the end of the day lol.
If I am not mistaken, ML was made by a couple of Fediverse Developers, but their moderation policies are comparable to Elon Musk so nobody goes there.
World has good branding, will moderate, and has some of the best uptime stats.
yeah that would explain ML
When I first got on Lemmy I signed up for a small instance my friend was on. Mostly ended up lurking. Before ditching that account, because I forgot the password, and was looking to go to a different instance anyway, I looked up what instances had the most federations. world had a lot, and no hexbear. It also has a old style interface, and blocks NSFW content, so I can more safely browse in public/at work. So I switched to it with my main and then separately logged into places with open NSFW content.
No gatekeeping. We did not have to answer any question, write any essay showing we were worthy etc.
Reddit refugees were welcome no question asked.
Once were in, we found the admin/founder to be cool, open and reasonable.
We stayed.
During the Reddit API exodus I saw it in lots of comments. That's how I ended up here.
yeah that makes sense, i never went there because i didn't want to move to a community specific instance only to join a globally federated instance anyway lol.
In my case, I went to the biggest one after leaving beehaw.
I left beehaw because it was clear there was a double standard for one admin between minorities and the rest of us where an admin overlooked someone from a minority acting like a total ass and starting a fight.. and blamed me simply because my opinion half agreed with an article that was posted.
Which was such a pity because they other admin there is awesome (and I loved the idea of the instance), but I'm worried it will become a echo chamber eventually unfortunately where you simply can't discuss things, but only agree with people
I remember I picked Lemmy.world to create an account only because I had no idea what I was doing and it seemed like the only one which had merit at the time (I know how things work better now.) Now that I know how decentralization works I'll probably open a new account on another server when I get time.
Poor lemm.ee
Nah I’d say this is right on par with the philosophy of the instance. Lemm.ee is moreso infrastructure for interacting with the fediverse than a specific community
Yes, the most active communities (https://lemm.ee/communities) are
All started by different people than the admin, who is indeed quite hands back regarding communities
We are small af. I think we are mostly just overflow .world users.
We’re currently the 2nd most active instance measured by MAU, only lead by Lemmy.world
Programming.dev represent! o7
Jesus Christ, that's a lot of weirdos.
suprised mander.xyz is so small
!science_memes@mander.xyz is the 9th most monthly active community
https://lemmyverse.net/communities?order=active_month
Surprised to see my small instance mentioned here 😅
Your work is recognized!
A barchart might be better as the comparison of instances with the most subscribed accounts doesn't mean much I feel
we have some users that register but are inactive and/or are infrequently active which could be a sign of lurkers or bots but empty accounts don't mean much when it comes to the health of an instance.
However; if we look at each community's active monthly and daily users it can tell another story and that data compared against Reddit's could be useful for anyone seeking alternatives
I'm rambling with little sleep but hopefully what I've said make a little bit of sense
Sorry mate, those figures with no meaningful captions are borderline incomprehensible. Like, what's the difference between first and second figure?
I used 2 different metrics to rank the communities:
For each of the 2 ranking metrics there are 2 different chars:
Duplicate instances are a problem imho. You can see the network effect synergy working by how many communities flock to the biggest instance lemmy.world.
There also need to be tools to merge two communities on separate instances, or move them.
Two of my niche instances tried to leave reddit, but then there were two versions, one on .ml and one on .world. Confusing. Maybe there need to be reviews for communities or instances.
I wouldn't mind so much if there were a way to see duplicate posts across instances. I guess it'd be hard to implement but as it stands unless it's specifically a crosspost you can't find other discussions of the same media
Oh yeah absolutely, lemmy definitely needs better cross posting. Currently crossposts are kinda yanky with quote blocks. I'd also love to see reposts that are detected automatically.
Reposts are based on the URL linked in the post. If it's the same URL, both posts will display as crossposts.
Piefed has topics, so different fediverse communities can be viewed through the Fediverse-topic for example
!fedigrow@lemm.ee is a community dedicated to this.
The issue is not the tools, more the people. I contacted mods of !android@lemmy.world and !askandroid@lemdro.id a while ago to see if they wanted to merge, both sides wanted to stay on their own communities.
There are plenty of other examples, usually a large LW community, but with a more active non-LW alternative. LW wants to keep their community open, and the non-LW doesn't have much power besides showing they are more active.
It's very funny that despite most of you hating hexbear so much, they are still one of the biggest.
"Truth social" has more monthly active users than all Lemmy instances combined, does it make it better?
Turns out Blue MAGA can't suppress the left. Sad face.
Does anyone else just see pacman throwing up a rave?
My instance doesn't even make the list. 🥲
But we probably all make it onto some list ^^
hey, I see my instance in there 🤗
you can find some more data for your instance here too https://lemmyverse.net/instance/feddit.org
:)
Ich bin nicht so glücklich :(
Did you graph these with a JS library? I'd love to improve the community stats page with some more cool graphs like these.
I had a crack at it on these pages, but didn't dive into specific community info
https://lemmyverse.net/inspect
https://lemmyverse.net/inspect/versions
I used recharts Though one rendered it with google charts and that did look a lot nicer, but if one fine tunes it, then it will probably look equally good
If you're willing to post your code somewhere or send it to me somehow, I might have to find some time to integrate it on lemmyverse - also welcome to submit a PR if you have the inclination https://github.com/tgxn/lemmy-explorer
Ohh, you're the author?? I remember stumbling into these a while back. Those are neat! Great job.
Yes it is me, the author 🤗
I have not had much time lately to work on it, one day I'd love to integrate some more cool graphics and visualizations for the network.
Somebody did dirty for shitjustworks instance and that colour
I'm just happy that Lemmy.ca made the list.
*instances
Wouldn't comment or user count be a slightly better metric? Oh oh, do all 3 side by side please!
EDIT: Woah this page looks totally different on desktop than mobile.
Lemmy.zip mentioned 🥳🥳🥳
we exist!!
awww, my instance is not even on the chart. Big sad 😿
you're doing your part in keeping the federation healthy and decentralized o7
everyone goes to the most popular one because they think that's the one with all the things on it that's how the internet works that's what everyone's doing
Everyone goes to Lemmy.world because unlike most instances it has (effectively) open registration and some popular Lemmy apps use it in their signup flow so new users don't have to understand the intricacies of the fediverse they can just hop straight in.
And this is making a lemmy.world monopoly, which is bad for the fediverse (still better, than reddit).
I think it would definitely be nice to spread users (and communities) across more instances. Doubly so since I'm on an instance that is struggling with the volume of content from Lemmy.world because of what is effectively a limit of how much you can get from one instance at a time.
But if we want people on Lemmy who don't know what Linux is, then we need to avoid that massive barrier of asking users to pick an instance. And the second massive barrier of registration applications.
A good compromise I think would be to have multiple trusted servers with open registrations that the app randomly defaults them to when they go to sign up for an account.
Are you okay lately? I had a look the other day, seems almost fixed:
https://grafana.lem.rocks/d/bdid38k9p0t1cf/federation-health-single-instance-overview?orgId=1&var-instance=lemmy.world&var-remote_instance=lemmy.nz
Aussie.zone on the other is almost a week behind: https://grafana.lem.rocks/d/bdid38k9p0t1cf/federation-health-single-instance-overview?orgId=1&var-instance=lemmy.world&var-remote_instance=aussie.zone
We are fine, but it's not fixed. I have a second VPS running in Finland, using this queue batcher. The Lemmy.world team kindly set up their server to point to this VPS instead of the actual Lemmy.nz server, then the VPS collects all the events and sends them to the Lemmy.nz server in batches of 100.
It keeps us up to date, but it's cheating 😆
Last I heard Aussie.zone doesn't have this setup, but they do have a prefetcher (or rather, Nothing4You, who made the queue batcher, is running a prefetcher for them). This basically takes the new comments and posts from Lemmy.world, and sends a request to Aussie.zone to fetch that post. Because this happens outside the normal federation queue it can be done in parallel. It means when Aussie.zone receives the federated activity from Lemmy.world, it already has it, so it can reply quicker and process more events per second. Lemmy clears out activities older than a week in a weekly scheduled job, which is why you will see Aussie.zone's backlog drop a bit once a week. They won't get that content from Lemmy.world, it's just lost. Because of the prefetcher, it's likely just up/down votes (which can't be prefetched).
Very interesting, thanks!
You mean like the mastodon app does? https://blog.joinmastodon.org/2023/05/a-new-onboarding-experience-on-mastodon/
Isn't this a bit ironic coming from someone on a LW account? Genuinely asking 😄
I made the account here, when it wasn't as popular and I'm way too lazy to migrate.
Yay centralization!
As a user, I really rally don't want to start "instanse hoping" for lemmy. I just want to sign in and that's it. Fediverse decentralized nature is also it's drawback
OP, you know you don't have you use a table, right? You can make a bulleted list.
But I like my tables 🥺
In a world of mobiles being more ubiquitous than monitors, consider inverting your rows and columns next time. Scrolling down is more expected than scrolling sideways.
Updated the post :)
will do 👍
Please avoid any and all situations in which you might have the chance of handling any kind of categorized data, for the sake of all of us.
Damn, my hexbear filter is getting a real workout!
One amusing bit re: hexbear, it's been around almost as long as lemmy.ml and lemmygrad.ml, but it seems was only added to the tracker last year, as it shows up as 12 months old, I have to imagine it's including posts/comments from before that timeframe because bozhe moi:
Even if you divide the hexbear comments by 4 they'd still be in the top
32 excluding the reddit repost bot. Yappers.It's hard to beat an operation with state funding.
I was briefly a Hexbear member pre-federation, and while I don't have any proof, I left because that was exactly the vibe I got from the place.
The what now?
That contrast makes it impossible to read some labels
Ayy, lemmy.zip
Very interesting, although I'd like to see how different threadiverse software like mbin fits into this.
It uses the lemmy API, so it is plattform specific. AP has no metric for active users in the magazine yet, only instance wide. So for mbin only total subscriber count would be a metric
awful.systems is up there?
have to say i'm surprised. and a little disgusted.
hi from thelemmy.club :D
Hello!
If i'm understanding the last graph right, it's showing the total number of active monthly users per instance's top communities, filtered by the overall top 100 communities?
So if an instance has activity spread out over many niche communities, that activity isn't represented on this graph?
I would think having a diversity of smaller communities is more in-line with the spirit of the fediverse, I'm not sure of the value in slicing the data in this way.
This highlights the problems with the Fediverse pretty well. Even decentralized systems tend towards centralization.
There's absolutely nothing wrong with a little centralization in your federation. It works well enough for email. The point is that you have the option, not that you have to use it.
You don't have to trade one extreme for the other. In fact, I think this is the perfect example of that. Lemmy.ml is the developers' instance, and by default would likely be the largest. Except... you know. Many, many people started there before going to other instances, especially the largest competitor.
The issue is that the kid that owns the ball sets the rules. LW could do something heinous, and the only choices would be to cope or lose half the Fediverse.
The thing is that the value is in the communities and not in the old content. So most likely the mods would just post we move to a new instance and a lot of users would follow. We just saw that on the German speakin lemmy instance feddit.de, which was abandoned and now most of the users and communities moved to feddit.org, which is already one of the larger ones.
What lemmy really needs is the ability to easily move accounts and communities. Mastodon has that for users already.
The lack of migration is what kept me on ml for several days after I found out what they consider ml stands for.
One click migration to a different instance would be a huge benefit to the decentralisation effort.
It's Mali, right? Right? Not some reference to communism?
You mean like if they went all tankie? Or like AOL email? This has already happened several times before and it's fine. Google could kill gmail in six months and we'd all move on.
I've run into issues where information I want access to just doesn't exist anymore because of the Reddit fiasco. The people that did that were a small minority of Reddit, and Reddit as a whole was basically unaffected by the protest after it was quashed.
Imagine the type of chaos it would cause if it came out that the LW admins were getting a corporate kickback to destabilize the Fediverse, or that they were involved in some other equally shady enterprise. It would probably be the end of the Fediverse, either through the created schisms or the lack of will to stop the corporate meddling. It would at least cause massive instability and make us look bad to users who would otherwise think of joining. A lot of information would probably be lost as people tried to push back. I'm sure a lot of people just wouldn't have the willpower to move their communities elsewhere and there would be a significant number of people supporting the admins' actions through apathetic inaction.
Is there a way to create a pie like this but on an individual basis?
You mean the spread of the communities you are subscribed to? If so: probably yes, but not an easy one as you have to have access to the data (or more easily: the database)
Your data quality is questionable. You list only 2 communities for feddit.org. Lemmy Explorer has 148. I doubt that they’re all ‘suspicious’. And if they are, then that flag is itself suspicious.The title says "the 100 biggest Lemmy communities"
I guess the 2 communities are !ich_iel@feddit.org and !europe@feddit.org