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:
Damn, my hexbear filter is getting a real workout!
Surprised to see my small instance mentioned here 😅
Your work is recognized!
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
Your posts will not be moved, due to technical limitations.
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
Your posts will not be moved, due to technical limitations.
Probably unintended side-effect of this post: A few people like me discovering new communities to follow. Thank you!
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
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.
Lemmy.zip mentioned 🥳🥳🥳
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
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
I added charts that use the monthy active users
Somebody did dirty for shitjustworks instance and that colour
I’m just happy that Lemmy.ca made the list.
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
Major changes:
- programming.dev is there tied with a bunch of other instances for fourth most communities at 3 (its a 5 way tie)
- hexbear is no longer listed since the 1 community is no longer in the top 100
A bunch of instances gained or lost some coms in the top 100 from variance of things happening in the last week
(the six instances that it decided to not give labels to that have 1 community are lemmy.zip, beehaw.org, ttrpg.network, lemmy.wtf, lemmy.blahaj.zone, mander.xyz)
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 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
There’s always LibreOffice…
I used that to filter the data, but it wouldn’t generate a pie chart for it XD
Eyyyyy midwest.social!
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
Oh that is unfortunate
Paging @tgxn@lemmy.tgxn.net
I’m here now, thanks for the ping :)
Thanks for maintaining lemmyverse :)
Thank YOU for being the MVP that let me know it was broken! 🤣 🔥
And I’ve fixed it now :D Sorry for the delay and thx for reporting <3
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!
That contrast makes it impossible to read some labels
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?
goo goo ga ga
Turns out Blue MAGA can’t suppress the left. Sad face.
2 observations:
-
Wow I didn’t think hexbear was that large. That’s unfortunate…
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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.
Definitely
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.
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.
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.
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.
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)
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.
How many instances federate by default? It may be difficult to get your new solo instance into the others.
That’s just how federation works out in every federated service ever.
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.
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.
Is it good or bad that I had to think if you meant hexbear or lemmy.ml, and even after doing so I’m still not sure?
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.
The size difference between Lemmy.world and lemm.ee could still be improved
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?
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.
They’re an explicitly leftist comm, a lot of people take offense to being called out on right-wing assertions, and the .world’ers whip up myths without having ever seen or federated with Hexbear themselves.
That’s all really - Take a glance at the site if you want to know what it’s about, rather than take people at their word on it.
They openly state that their primarily goals in federation is to be obnoxious trolls, and boy howdy do they put a lot of energy into it. They are first and foremost, just obnoxious. It’s like 20% teenagers going through their edgy anti establishment phase, and then the rest are right wing, Russian, and Chinese trolls playing soggy waffle with each other. They pretend to be super serious about LGBT issues but then simp for Hamas, Iran and Russia. And one of their tankie leaders just got caught calling trans issues “western pink washing.”
It’s just a mess. It’s probably a bit overblown, but the community is legitimately annoying if nothing else.
one of their tankie leaders just got caught calling trans issues “western pink washing.”
Your whole post is made up, but this is at least a specific claim that also didn’t happen. Pics or you’re talking shit.
Thats a .ml admin
https://lemmy.ml/post/18761554
see the link to “kristinas post” for The hexbear take on the situation (nutomic is banned from hexbear afaik)
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.
Haven’t heard anything so far, what are they?
Thank you for editing your original comment to reflect that 😎
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.
But I do agree with you, and I’m looking to migrate after some concerning things have come up about the lemmy.world owner.
Lemm.ee should fit your bill
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.
Great to have you with us. 👍
♥️ glad to be part of our community!
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.
.ml and hexbear have been around much longer than the other instances so have built up more subscribers
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