this post was submitted on 13 Aug 2024
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Fediverse

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A community to talk about the Fediverse and all it's related services using ActivityPub (Mastodon, Lemmy, KBin, etc).

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694
Spreading of the 100 biggest Lemmy communities (media.gehirneimer.de)
submitted 3 months ago by BentiGorlich@gehirneimer.de to c/fediverse@lemmy.world
435 comments fedilink hide all child comments
 

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:

top 50 comments
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[–] NOT_RICK@lemmy.world 133 points 3 months ago (48 children)

I knew hexbear was big but not that big

[–] Emmie@lemm.ee 109 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago) (20 children)

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

[–] NOT_RICK@lemmy.world 71 points 3 months ago (1 children)

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.

[–] Emmie@lemm.ee 23 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago) (4 children)

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

[–] knatschus@discuss.tchncs.de 49 points 3 months ago (1 children)

Sounds like you waste alot of time with people who don't deserve it

[–] Emmie@lemm.ee 20 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago) (1 children)

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

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[–] li10@feddit.uk 22 points 3 months ago (4 children)

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.

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[–] conditional_soup@lemm.ee 25 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago) (9 children)

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.

[–] Transporter_Room_3@startrek.website 31 points 3 months ago (14 children)

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.

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[–] TexMexBazooka@lemm.ee 28 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago) (2 children)

~~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.

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[–] BentiGorlich@gehirneimer.de 23 points 3 months ago (10 children)

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...

[–] goferking0@lemmy.sdf.org 34 points 3 months ago

Or because it's older than most of the other instances

[–] aasatru@kbin.earth 24 points 3 months ago

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.

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[–] wiki_me@lemmy.ml 100 points 3 months ago (8 children)

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)

[–] Blaze@sopuli.xyz 73 points 3 months ago (9 children)

Always nice to see lemmynsfw doing well. Those guys are going to bring a lot of people here

[–] independantiste@sh.itjust.works 52 points 3 months ago (1 children)

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

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[–] FeelzGoodMan420@eviltoast.org 83 points 3 months ago (26 children)

2 observations:

  1. Wow I didn't think hexbear was that large. That's unfortunate...

  2. 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.

[–] ericjmorey@discuss.online 50 points 3 months ago (2 children)

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.

[–] BentiGorlich@gehirneimer.de 21 points 3 months ago (4 children)

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)

[–] schizo@forum.uncomfortable.business 34 points 3 months ago (3 children)

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.

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[–] blackn1ght@feddit.uk 19 points 3 months ago (3 children)

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.

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[–] Monstrosity@lemm.ee 19 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago)

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.

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[–] Ategon@programming.dev 52 points 3 months ago (15 children)

Surprised I dont see programming.dev in the data, we definitely have at least 3 communities in the top 100 (programmer_humor, programming, linux)

[–] Ategon@programming.dev 30 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago) (7 children)

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

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[–] BentiGorlich@gehirneimer.de 39 points 3 months ago (2 children)

And here the diagram by community subscriber count:

[–] Blaze@sopuli.xyz 22 points 3 months ago (2 children)

Could you please do it based on monthly active users?

[–] BentiGorlich@gehirneimer.de 20 points 3 months ago (4 children)

Oh that would be interesting as well. I will do that. Checking back in 2h :D

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[–] cron 32 points 3 months ago

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.

[–] Resol@lemmy.world 30 points 3 months ago (5 children)

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.

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[–] Blaze@sopuli.xyz 30 points 3 months ago

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

[–] db0@lemmy.dbzer0.com 28 points 3 months ago (5 children)

You didn't use a black color for us? Heresy!

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[–] jay@mbin.zerojay.com 28 points 3 months ago

Probably unintended side-effect of this post: A few people like me discovering new communities to follow. Thank you!

[–] KillingTimeItself@lemmy.dbzer0.com 25 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago) (23 children)

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.

[–] qaz@lemmy.world 37 points 3 months ago (2 children)

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

[–] samus12345@lemmy.world 23 points 3 months ago (1 children)

Open signups is the biggest reason. Pretty much every other instance wanted you to jump through hoops to sign up with them.

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[–] Eiri@lemmy.world 34 points 3 months ago (22 children)

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.

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[–] Demdaru@lemmy.world 23 points 3 months ago

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.

[–] ByteOnBikes@slrpnk.net 21 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago) (1 children)

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.

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[–] FiniteBanjo@lemmy.today 20 points 3 months ago (2 children)

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.

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[–] tacosanonymous@lemm.ee 25 points 3 months ago (1 children)

Poor lemm.ee

[–] TexMexBazooka@lemm.ee 27 points 3 months ago (3 children)

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

[–] Blaze@sopuli.xyz 26 points 3 months ago

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

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[–] NostraDavid@programming.dev 23 points 3 months ago

Programming.dev represent! o7

[–] Moghul@lemmy.world 21 points 3 months ago

Jesus Christ, that's a lot of weirdos.

[–] FundMECFSResearch@lemmy.blahaj.zone 19 points 3 months ago (1 children)

suprised mander.xyz is so small

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