Spreading of the 100 biggest Lemmy communities
Spreading of the 100 biggest Lemmy communities
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
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
That's why I'm glad my instance blocked them.
Bro my instance just defederated them. Happy to say I've never seen their shit
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.
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...
Or because it's older than most of the other instances
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.
That's probably it
They’ve existed for a while. A lot of subscribers are inactive users. Kind of like reddit where a sub can have 5k people and still be inactive.
It's less that they're big, but old.
I haven't even heard of it xd
I only scroll all for now... Hexbear is the only thing I have blocked. I just got tired of trolly garbage.
Most instances block them so most communities on those instances won't see them either. Once you find certain communities on instances that don't block them you suddenly see half the comments being from hexbear, which likely quickly makes you block those communities fairly quickly.
What is hexbear? I never see it in my feed.
Your instance is defederated from them
I only know it because it is often mentioned when talking about trolling
It's an instance mostly based around authoritarian communism. They got banished from Reddit quite a bit before the black out.
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.
OFL, what is going on with this hexbear? And is there any reason behind the name?
And is there any reason behind the name? A bear, but hexagon shaped, is their mascot.
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)
Always nice to see lemmynsfw doing well. Those guys are going to bring a lot of people here
last i checked lemmynsfw just looks like r/gonemild though
Quality over quantity is what I would prefer. I think LemmyNSFW is a potential determent for other instances.
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
I added it to the main post :) And yeah should have done so in the initial post as well...
Thanks!
2 observations:
-
Wow I didn't think hexbear was that large. That's unfortunate...
-
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.
While spreading out is good, this isn't something like cryptocurrency where it's specifically bad if you have over 50% share. Each instance is the source of truth for their users and communities hosted there. It's not like a block chain where something with over half can suddenly define their own truth for everyone. So it's not necessarily a massive cause for alarm.
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.
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.
We just need a way to make it easy to seamlessly transfer both users and communities to another instance then it really won't matter if one gets disproportionately large because a shutdown won't affect anything. Ideally the inner workings should be as invisible to the end user as possible.
.ml and hexbear have been around much longer than the other instances so have built up more subscribers
I started on a small instance that fortunately gave a heads up when they decided to shut down. When I moved to a second, small instance where I ported all my community subscriptions, it shut down with no warning. It's a shame, because both instances were topically-focused and small enough to avoid defederation drama.
I love the idea of decentralized infrastructure, but now I'm on .world because I just don't have the time or willpower to move every few months, and I definitely don't have the wherewithal to run my own instance.
Try searching for a local community, especially if English is not your first language.
There's a bit of choice paralasys when joining Lemmy. Even if you know how the fediverse works you won't have knowledge of the culture and relationships of different instances.
I joined Lemmy.world because it advertises itself as the vanilla flavour of the fediverse, so it makes it an easy pick for someone like me who didn't quite understand how it all hangs together.
But I do agree with you, and I'm looking to migrate
after some concerning things have come up about the lemmy.world owner.Edit: confused the owner of lemmy.world and lemmy.ml.
The choice paralysis is real. I chose lemm.ee because it was easy to type into the address bar, and I've stuck around because the admin seems pretty level-headed.
But I do agree with you, and I’m looking to migrate after some concerning things have come up about the lemmy.world owner.
Lemm.ee should fit your bill
Definitely
that's the main reason I moved away from lemmy.world
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Surprised I dont see programming.dev in the data, we definitely have at least 3 communities in the top 100 (programmer_humor, programming, linux)
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
In this list it doesn't seem like it: https://lemmyverse.net/communities?order=active_month
Seems like lemmyverse doesnt have the instance listed at all for some reason, assuming a crawling issue. I reported it on their repository. Would be new since I remember it showing the instance before
You can check in https://programming.dev/communities that programmer humor has way more active users than most communities here
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.
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
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.
You can only export and import followed communities afaik
Mastodon doesn't allow to transfer posts either
https://docs.joinmastodon.org/user/moving/#move
Your posts will not be moved, due to technical limitations.
Idk if you can transfer likes comments and posts, but you can go to your old account from a new one and star everything with the new account pretty easily. So that at least can transfer.
Mastodon doesn't allow to transfer posts either
https://docs.joinmastodon.org/user/moving/#move
Your posts will not be moved, due to technical limitations.
Probably unintended side-effect of this post: A few people like me discovering new communities to follow. Thank you!
You didn't use a black color for us? Heresy!
Poor lemm.ee
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
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
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.
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
Lemmy.world has kept open signups open during every large Reddit exodus
I'm pretty sure they put up some hurdles during the Reddit APIcalypse. I think that's in part how I ended up on sh.itjust.works.
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.
They can be oriented to some type of content: For example, the many feddit.something are targetting people by countries or langages (.it, .uk, etc.). slrpnk.net is solarpunk oriented, mander.xyz science oriented. Litterature.cafe is books, reading and writing oriented.
And they can offer different moderation policies: People on lemmynsfw.com probably want to see NSFW content. lemmy.world has a policy against it. lemmy.dbzer0.com allow for open discussion about piracy that many instances forbid and so on.It you don't see the difference in instances, it is probably that you are about fine on your local instance. But if one day, you hear about a community you can't access, maybe that is because it is blocked by lemmy.word and you could access it from another instance
Yeah I actually tried beehaw initially but they never dealt with my application, so after a whole I just went with Lemmy.world.
an instance can be thought of like a reigonal server for a game, but for a community interest instead. dbzer0 is more on the fringes partaking more actively in piracy and AI shit, as well as other shit like anarchy and personal liberty/freedoms at a more broad scale.
Sometimes they're regionally specific, like the midwest instance, other times they're global like the .world instance.
you do have instance specific communities, and users obviously, but it's also open to the broader "fediverse" as well. The only technicality is that i'm tied to dbzer0 since that's where my acc sits, though i can still poke around outside of it.
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.
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.
yeah, personally i'm a user of dbzer0 because i prefer the more back alley stuff (it also bans porn so that shit doesnt show up in my feed)
It's up most of the time, there are a few instances where it's slow or doesn't want to load, but that's usually resolved quickly enough, just internet instability i think, reddit has the same issues for me.
I see all the .world shit anyway, so it makes little difference to me at the end of the day lol.
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.
I believe .ml was the first lemmy instance - the one made by the developers.
yeah that would explain ML
When I first got on Lemmy I signed up for a small instance my friend was on. Mostly ended up lurking. Before ditching that account, because I forgot the password, and was looking to go to a different instance anyway, I looked up what instances had the most federations. world had a lot, and no hexbear. It also has a old style interface, and blocks NSFW content, so I can more safely browse in public/at work. So I switched to it with my main and then separately logged into places with open NSFW content.
No gatekeeping. We did not have to answer any question, write any essay showing we were worthy etc.
Reddit refugees were welcome no question asked.
Once were in, we found the admin/founder to be cool, open and reasonable.
We stayed.
checks out i suppose, dbzer0 does have a pretty minor registration check, but it's not super overwhelming, and it aligns with my interests so meh.
During the Reddit API exodus I saw it in lots of comments. That's how I ended up here.
yeah that makes sense, i never went there because i didn't want to move to a community specific instance only to join a globally federated instance anyway lol.
I remember I picked Lemmy.world to create an account only because I had no idea what I was doing and it seemed like the only one which had merit at the time (I know how things work better now.) Now that I know how decentralization works I'll probably open a new account on another server when I get time.
In my case, I went to the biggest one after leaving beehaw.
I left beehaw because it was clear there was a double standard for one admin between minorities and the rest of us where an admin overlooked someone from a minority acting like a total ass and starting a fight.. and blamed me simply because my opinion half agreed with an article that was posted.
Which was such a pity because they other admin there is awesome (and I loved the idea of the instance), but I'm worried it will become a echo chamber eventually unfortunately where you simply can't discuss things, but only agree with people
yeah this is definitely a big concern with smaller instances, there are a couple of tricks to this general problem from what i've thought/seen of over time.
The obvious one is a democratic vote, literally just ask people in the instance, the second obvious one is to vet people in that instance specifically and personally. And if they cause problems just yeet em. You're the dictator after all. The most common option is to have a decentralized moderation team made up from the general community, which is extremely common and generally works, though suffers from the opposite problem, ironically.
I think if i had to moderate a lemmy instance i'd probably do a mix of heavier vetting (although most of it would likely be after they initially joined, a vibe check i suppose. As well as just being a literal direct dictator, depending on the size i might have "chaos control" mods, just to keep goofy shit from happening while i'm away, or to provide some support, who knows. And naturally, i'd focus on community votes, i'd be curious what the community instance itself had to say.
I was a reddit Sync user and was super bummed when (large scale) API access was shut off, so I jumped on the chance to use Sync for Lemmy. It defaulted to world for signups, presumably for ease of use for migrating reddit users. Knowing that Sync already had a loyal audience that was willing to put in a little effort to migrate, it seems the dev opted to make everything as similar to the reddit UX as possible, including registration.
Now that I'm more familiar with the fediverse, I've been considering migrating to a more specialized instance that matches my interests. Truthfully, though, it seems unlikely that much of anything would change if I did since I'm going to keep using the same app, so I've been slow to move.
To compare this with my experience with Mastodon, I was absolutely overwhelmed by the idea of instances and really had no idea which to join, nor did I have a familiar app to work with. I figured it out eventually, but a lot of the artists I follow didn't or didn't have time to, so overall I haven't spent much time on it. I've spent way too much time on Lemmy so far.
yeah that makes sense, i think the problem with migrating normie users is that there isn't quote the comprehensive explanation of things needed. A more thorough and complete overview would be required i think.
Defederating from Hexbear probably didn't hurt. I remember when the users were literally flooding
.worldmy inbox circlejerking about being the biggest and best instance and that any instance that defederated from them was full of transphobic Nazis.Edit: I have a shit memory. I don't remember what instance it was, but the circlejerking and the defederation slander definitely happened.
https://lemmy.world/post/2498330
We made the decision to preemptively defederate from Hexbear
I remember when the users were literally flooding .world
ok
.world pre-emptively defederated from hexbear before hexbear ever entered federation. you are making things up wholecloth.
Programming.dev represent! o7
Jesus Christ, that's a lot of weirdos.
Surprised to see my small instance mentioned here 😅
Your work is recognized!
suprised mander.xyz is so small
[email protected] is the 9th most monthly active community
A barchart might be better as the comparison of instances with the most subscribed accounts doesn't mean much I feel
we have some users that register but are inactive and/or are infrequently active which could be a sign of lurkers or bots but empty accounts don't mean much when it comes to the health of an instance.
However; if we look at each community's active monthly and daily users it can tell another story and that data compared against Reddit's could be useful for anyone seeking alternatives
I'm rambling with little sleep but hopefully what I've said make a little bit of sense
I added charts that use the monthy active users
Sorry mate, those figures with no meaningful captions are borderline incomprehensible. Like, what's the difference between first and second figure?
I used 2 different metrics to rank the communities:
- at first I sorted the communities by their total subscriber counts. The two diagrams coming from this sort are easily recognizable because hexbear has a big chunk of the communities in them.
- the second one ranks them by active users per month. These are the ones where lemmy.world has >50%
For each of the 2 ranking metrics there are 2 different chars:
- Labeled "By Community Count": just count the amount of communities out of the 100 biggest that are on a given server
- Labeled "By Community Users": sum up the amount of users (active/month or total suscribers) in all of the 100 biggest that are on a given server
Duplicate instances are a problem imho. You can see the network effect synergy working by how many communities flock to the biggest instance lemmy.world.
There also need to be tools to merge two communities on separate instances, or move them.
Two of my niche instances tried to leave reddit, but then there were two versions, one on .ml and one on .world. Confusing. Maybe there need to be reviews for communities or instances.
I wouldn't mind so much if there were a way to see duplicate posts across instances. I guess it'd be hard to implement but as it stands unless it's specifically a crosspost you can't find other discussions of the same media
[email protected] is a community dedicated to this.
There also need to be tools to merge two communities on separate instances, or move them.
The issue is not the tools, more the people. I contacted mods of [email protected] and [email protected] a while ago to see if they wanted to merge, both sides wanted to stay on their own communities.
There are plenty of other examples, usually a large LW community, but with a more active non-LW alternative. LW wants to keep their community open, and the non-LW doesn't have much power besides showing they are more active.
Piefed has topics, so different fediverse communities can be viewed through the Fediverse-topic for example
It's very funny that despite most of you hating hexbear so much, they are still one of the biggest.
"Truth social" has more monthly active users than all Lemmy instances combined, does it make it better?
goo goo ga ga
Turns out Blue MAGA can't suppress the left. Sad face.
Does anyone else just see pacman throwing up a rave?
My instance doesn't even make the list. 🥲
But we probably all make it onto some list ^^
hey, I see my instance in there 🤗
you can find some more data for your instance here too https://lemmyverse.net/instance/feddit.org
:)
Ich bin nicht so glücklich :(
Did you graph these with a JS library? I'd love to improve the community stats page with some more cool graphs like these.
I had a crack at it on these pages, but didn't dive into specific community info
https://lemmyverse.net/inspect
https://lemmyverse.net/inspect/versionsI used recharts Though one rendered it with google charts and that did look a lot nicer, but if one fine tunes it, then it will probably look equally good
If you're willing to post your code somewhere or send it to me somehow, I might have to find some time to integrate it on lemmyverse - also welcome to submit a PR if you have the inclination https://github.com/tgxn/lemmy-explorer
Ohh, you're the author?? I remember stumbling into these a while back. Those are neat! Great job.
Yes it is me, the author 🤗
I have not had much time lately to work on it, one day I'd love to integrate some more cool graphics and visualizations for the network.
Somebody did dirty for shitjustworks instance and that colour
I'm just happy that Lemmy.ca made the list.
*instances
Wouldn't comment or user count be a slightly better metric? Oh oh, do all 3 side by side please!
EDIT: Woah this page looks totally different on desktop than mobile.
Lemmy.zip mentioned 🥳🥳🥳
we exist!!
awww, my instance is not even on the chart. Big sad 😿
you're doing your part in keeping the federation healthy and decentralized o7
Me too.
everyone goes to the most popular one because they think that's the one with all the things on it that's how the internet works that's what everyone's doing
Everyone goes to Lemmy.world because unlike most instances it has (effectively) open registration and some popular Lemmy apps use it in their signup flow so new users don't have to understand the intricacies of the fediverse they can just hop straight in.
Everyone goes to Lemmy.world because unlike most instances it has (effectively) open registration
The registration page does not look different really to the lemmy.nz one, same for lemm.ee, sopuli.xyz, sh.itjust.works has even one less tiny hurdle to jump to register. Didn't bother to check others. Or i am missing something here?
As a user, I really rally don't want to start "instanse hoping" for lemmy. I just want to sign in and that's it. Fediverse decentralized nature is also it's drawback
I went with it because I figured it had same peering defaults.
It does, which is really nice.
OP, you know you don't have you use a table, right? You can make a bulleted list.
Please avoid any and all situations in which you might have the chance of handling any kind of categorized data, for the sake of all of us.
It's worth mentioning that when I first made this comment the tables were wider than they were tall. Essentially the axes were flipped. The columns were literally one character wide to fit everything on the screen lol. If the post looked like it did not when I made the comment then I wouldn't have said it.
That contrast makes it impossible to read some labels
Damn, my hexbear filter is getting a real workout!
One amusing bit re: hexbear, it's been around almost as long as lemmy.ml and lemmygrad.ml, but it seems was only added to the tracker last year, as it shows up as 12 months old, I have to imagine it's including posts/comments from before that timeframe because bozhe moi:
Even if you divide the hexbear comments by 4 they'd still be in the top
32 excluding the reddit repost bot. Yappers.It's hard to beat an operation with state funding.
Ayy, lemmy.zip
Ayyyyy
Very interesting, although I'd like to see how different threadiverse software like mbin fits into this.
It uses the lemmy API, so it is plattform specific. AP has no metric for active users in the magazine yet, only instance wide. So for mbin only total subscriber count would be a metric
awful.systems is up there?
have to say i'm surprised. and a little disgusted.
How are they awful? I've had one bad and cringy interaction with them but nothing too out of the ordinary
i was more referring to the fact that as a snark community they don't necessarily represent the best of us
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.
If i'm understanding the last graph right, it's showing the total number of active monthly users per instance's top communities, filtered by the overall top 100 communities?
So if an instance has activity spread out over many niche communities, that activity isn't represented on this graph?
I would think having a diversity of smaller communities is more in-line with the spirit of the fediverse, I'm not sure of the value in slicing the data in this way.
hi from thelemmy.club :D
Hello!
Is there a way to create a pie like this but on an individual basis?
You mean the spread of the communities you are subscribed to? If so: probably yes, but not an easy one as you have to have access to the data (or more easily: the database)
💜Purple slices rise up!💜
Your data quality is questionable. You list only 2 communities for feddit.org. Lemmy Explorer has 148. I doubt that they’re all ‘suspicious’. And if they are, then that flag is itself suspicious.The title says "the 100 biggest Lemmy communities"
I guess the 2 communities are [email protected] and [email protected]
Where is lemmygrad? I would have expected them to make it on the list
same tbh
Their communities aren't that active https://lemmygrad.ml/communities
You're welcome.
I thought they were blocked everywhere. What's going on? Bunch of bots or something?
No, it’s just a big community by itself already. So while some big instances have it blocked, they have enough users to just have activity from their own instance.
