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).

If you wanted to get help with moderating your own community then head over to !moderators@lemmy.world!

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Spreading of the 100 biggest Lemmy communities (media.gehirneimer.de)
submitted 8 months ago by BentiGorlich@gehirneimer.de to c/fediverse@lemmy.world
397 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 132 points 8 months ago (44 children)

I knew hexbear was big but not that big

[–] TexMexBazooka@lemm.ee 37 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 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 28 points 8 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 8 months ago

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

[–] aasatru@kbin.earth 26 points 8 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 101 points 8 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 72 points 8 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 8 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 92 points 8 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 54 points 8 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 24 points 8 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 8 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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[–] Ategon@programming.dev 51 points 8 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 29 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 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 38 points 8 months ago (2 children)

And here the diagram by community subscriber count:

[–] Blaze@sopuli.xyz 22 points 8 months ago (2 children)

Could you please do it based on monthly active users?

[–] BentiGorlich@gehirneimer.de 20 points 8 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@feddit.org 32 points 8 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 8 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 8 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

[–] Moghul@lemmy.world 30 points 8 months ago

Jesus Christ, that's a lot of weirdos.

[–] db0@lemmy.dbzer0.com 29 points 8 months ago (5 children)

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

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[–] jay@mbin.zerojay.com 28 points 8 months ago

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

[–] reagansrottencorpse@lemmy.ml 24 points 8 months ago (3 children)

It's very funny that despite most of you hating hexbear so much, they are still one of the biggest.

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[–] NostraDavid@programming.dev 23 points 7 months ago

Programming.dev represent! o7

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