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:
I knew hexbear was big but not that big
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.
Interesting, I expected them to be much larger
What is hexbear? I never see it in my feed.
Think of it as the Tankie version of The Donald.
It’s a leftist server. LW defederated from them months ago because they have some, well, interesting takes on things like the war in Ukraine. I can’t recall the exact cited reasons for defederation but I’m sure you could find the defederation post on lemmy world’s announcements page.
.world never federated with Hexbear from what I remember. I’m pretty sure they were on the block list before Hexbear got federation completed. There was no single incident as far as I know.
Wrong. They federated with them then had a big discussion on if they should defederate (you can probably still find it in meta). It’s why I left - I prefer to make my own defederation decisions (and I like Hexbear, and Piracy too).
Source: I was there.
Not really surprising. 10 out of the 10 most commented posts in the past year are on hexbear (the top 2 being the weekly trans mega threads). Granted, a lot of that is just the hyper-active posting of a few users. Regardless, if you want a trans community, there’s basically no active alternative to hexbear’s traaa here.
What about blahaj?
I’m subscribed to pretty much all the trans coms I know of and traa is 90% of the trans content that shows up. Another 5% are other hexbear trans subs. Traa has as many comments in half a month as mtf@blajah has had in its entire existance and as many in a week as trans@blahaj has made in total (the two largest non-hexbear trans subs afaik).
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 sure 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.
2 observations:
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Wow I didn’t think hexbear was that large. That’s unfortunate…
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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.
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.
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
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