This is my first try at creating a map of lemmy. I based it on the overlap of commentors that visited certain communities.
I only used communities that were on the top 35 active instances for the past month and limited the comments to go back to a maximum of August 1 2024 (sometimes shorter if I got an invalid response.)
I scaled it so it was based on percentage of comments made by a commentor in that community.
Here is the code for the crawler and data that was used to make the map:
The original data had 21,000+ features. I used an algorithm to reduce the dimensions to 2 but keep a similar structure (so similar communities are close dissimilar communities are far away).
So the axes don't really mean anything in particular.