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:
awww, my instance is not even on the chart. Big sad 😿
Programming.dev represent! o7
Lemmy.zip mentioned 🥳🥳🥳
It’s very funny that despite most of you hating hexbear so much, they are still one of the biggest.
Turns out Blue MAGA can’t suppress the left. Sad face.
“Truth social” has more monthly active users than all Lemmy instances combined, does it make it better?
goo goo ga ga
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.
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.
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.
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?
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)
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.
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.
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)
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.
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
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?
That’s just how federation works out in every federated service ever.
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.
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.
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.
.ml and hexbear have been around much longer than the other instances so have built up more subscribers
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.
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 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?
Thank you for editing your original comment to reflect that 😎
Sure, but getting people on a fediverse platform is still good.
-
suprised mander.xyz is so small
!science_memes@mander.xyz is the 9th most monthly active community
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)
It’s a real mystery, where could these instances possibly be located?
(apologies for derailing, I don’t know where else to post this)
Pretty 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.
“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…
Always nice to see lemmynsfw doing well. Those guys are going to bring a lot of people here
I think it is odd that they have no community in the top 100 anymore when sorted by active users
I think it’s good.
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
Quality over quantity is what I would prefer. I think LemmyNSFW is a potential determent for other instances.
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
I added it to the main post :) And yeah should have done so in the initial post as well…
Thanks!
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.
Defederating from Hexbear probably didn’t hurt. I remember when the users were literally flooding .world circlejerking about being the biggest and best instance and that any instance that defederated from them was full of transphobic Nazis.
.world pre-emptively defederated from hexbear before hexbear ever entered federation. you are making things up wholecloth.
https://lemmy.world/post/2498330
We made the decision to preemptively defederate from Hexbear
I remember when the users were literally flooding .world
ok
Are you from another dimension as everyone else where this happened? Because they never federated in the dimension I live in. Very interesting you’re able to cross this gap, does the name Nelson Mandella mean anything to you?
Yeah, it must have been on a different instance. I have a terrible memory for places, which probably bleeds over. I distinctly remember the circlejerking and getting lots of messages about how people who don’t like Hexbear are transphobic, though.
dbzer0 had a few issues with hexbear and i believe we defederated from hexbear? I honestly cant remember, i blocked that instance a while ago.
It was probably every instance, ML included.
It may have been after someone proposed defederating from them, but I’m pretty sure it didn’t happen because I’ve seen users around recently. I have the instance filtered, but I still need to block the users, same with ML.
at the very least there was discussion around it, like i said i ended up blocking that instance at some point.
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.
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.
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.
I was a reddit Sync user and was super bummed when (large scale) API access was shut off, so I jumped on the chance to use Sync for Lemmy. It defaulted to world for signups, presumably for ease of use for migrating reddit users. Knowing that Sync already had a loyal audience that was willing to put in a little effort to migrate, it seems the dev opted to make everything as similar to the reddit UX as possible, including registration.
Now that I’m more familiar with the fediverse, I’ve been considering migrating to a more specialized instance that matches my interests. Truthfully, though, it seems unlikely that much of anything would change if I did since I’m going to keep using the same app, so I’ve been slow to move.
To compare this with my experience with Mastodon, I was absolutely overwhelmed by the idea of instances and really had no idea which to join, nor did I have a familiar app to work with. I figured it out eventually, but a lot of the artists I follow didn’t or didn’t have time to, so overall I haven’t spent much time on it. I’ve spent way too much time on Lemmy so far.
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
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.
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.
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.
Lemmy.world has kept open signups open during every large Reddit exodus
I’m pretty sure they put up some hurdles during the Reddit APIcalypse. I think that’s in part how I ended up on sh.itjust.works.
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
During the Reddit API exodus I saw it in lots of comments. That’s how I ended up here.
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.
Wouldn’t comment or user count be a slightly better metric? Oh oh, do all 3 sode by side please!
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/versionsIf 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.
Is that table going under the sidebar and off the page for anyone else or just me? (on web)
On mobile I was able to scroll it horizontally.
On Thunder, everything (just) fits horizontally:
I might have preferred to scroll horizontally a bit.
Yeah, I love Thunder but, uh, it’s a work in progress.
I’m just happy that Lemmy.ca made the list.
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.