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:
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?
The problem with this is trust. If you could seamlessly migrate like this, there's nothing to stop someone faking a long post/comment on their own instance, making them look very legitimate and then migrating that account to a trusted/legitimate instance.
Then using that for spam/selling block chain etc.
People are the reason we can't have nice things.
Isn't that much easier nowadays with the one click settings export-import?
Mastodon still doesn't allow to move posts and comments
https://docs.joinmastodon.org/user/moving/
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.
I agree that LW centralization isn't good, but I'm not sure such event would be the end of the Fediverse, or Lemmy.
People would just massively move to other instances. LW communities usually have a non-LW non-lemm.ml alternative (such as !movies@lemm.ee for !movies@lemmy.world ), so that should be doable. A bit painful, but manageable.
Imagine my surprise to see you in here talking about LW centralization isn't good. You came onto a support question (link) for a community I had started with one of my concerns being the LW centralization and you quickly told me to abandon my community. Extremely weird considering you run a generic fantasy community which already exists in many places so felt a little kettle/pot.
Hello,
I'm actually happy to talk about LW centralization at large. It's a topic I like to discuss on !fedigrow@lemm.ee, feel free to join us there.
To come back to your questions, there are different types of communities depending on how popular the topic is
I feel like StarGate probably belongs in the third group, which is why I suggested you to consolidate with the existing LW communities.
Also, lemmy.ml have faced some powertripping complaints:
Interesting, I had actually forgotten about that community, which is why the last post there is 2 months ago. I'll probably close it in the coming weeks and redirect elsewhere, after asking the community feedback.
On the other hand, I actively post to all of the following communities, to try to keep them off LW