Spreading of the 100 biggest Lemmy communities

I knew hexbear was big but not that big

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)

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.

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

And here the diagram by community subscriber count:

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.

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.

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

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

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

Poor lemm.ee

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.

Programming.dev represent! o7

Jesus Christ, that's a lot of weirdos.

Surprised to see my small instance mentioned here 😅

Sorry mate, those figures with no meaningful captions are borderline incomprehensible. Like, what's the difference between first and second figure?

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

suprised mander.xyz is so small

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.

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

My instance doesn't even make the list. 🥲

Does anyone else just see pacman throwing up a rave?

hey, I see my instance in there 🤗

I'm just happy that Lemmy.ca made the list.

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/versions

Somebody did dirty for shitjustworks instance and that colour

*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 🥳🥳🥳

awww, my instance is not even on the chart. Big sad 😿

OP, you know you don't have you use a table, right? You can make a bulleted list.

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

That contrast makes it impossible to read some labels

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 3 2 excluding the reddit repost bot. Yappers.

Damn, my hexbear filter is getting a real workout!

Ayy, lemmy.zip

awful.systems is up there?

have to say i'm surprised. and a little disgusted.

Very interesting, although I'd like to see how different threadiverse software like mbin fits into this.

hi from thelemmy.club :D

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.

This highlights the problems with the Fediverse pretty well. Even decentralized systems tend towards centralization.

Is there a way to create a pie like this but on an individual basis?

💜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.

Is that table going under the sidebar and off the page for anyone else or just me? (on web)

Where is lemmygrad? I would have expected them to make it on the list

You're welcome.

I thought they were blocked everywhere. What's going on? Bunch of bots or something?

Anti Commercial-AI license