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:
Games is the largest games com by far in terms of posts and comments (150k comments and 15k post vs 71k comments and 3k posts on lemmy world..
News has most posts than any other news and about as many comments as lemmyworld.
Politics has the most posts of any politics coms, but far less comments than lemmyworld's.
History basically has no competitors (150k comments vs 7k for the next largest)
Movies also has no competitors (75k comments vs 9k for the next largest).
Videos has 56k comments vs lemmyworld's 13k
Music has 45k comments vs lemmyworld's 6k
Urbanism has 44k comments vs fuckcar's 19k
Granted, given Hexbear has been around for 4 years, the number of comments/posts is largely a side effect of age. But it also means calling them duplicates is probably misleading. OTOH, the main trans community there has been very active recently, dwarfing all other trans communities combined.
They are more "community" than the ex-redditor secluded island that is most of the others instances, that's definitely the side effect of age.