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Spreading of the 100 biggest Lemmy communities

https://gehirneimer.de/media/cache/resolve/entry_thumb/3f/93/3f93a1af4263b9bf619fdb8678fd0ab2e3df765c83e302fcacc479fb5fe11907.png

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:

https://media.gehirneimer.de/21/cd/21cdd1045eb39e2ce9ab01a4b3f70d7dfed9f930a3a40016a62cfe43cad4a991.png

Community Users:

https://media.gehirneimer.de/3c/bb/3cbb159daffa604ec792892381cb0ad6bb41822b9f8fa3f5a113ea5bb96c36be.png

Dark_Dragon ,

Somebody did dirty for shitjustworks instance and that colour

Ategon ,
@Ategon@programming.dev avatar

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

BentiGorlich OP ,
@BentiGorlich@gehirneimer.de avatar

In this list it doesn't seem like it: https://lemmyverse.net/communities?order=active_month

Ategon ,
@Ategon@programming.dev avatar

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 programming.dev/communities that programmer humor has way more active users than most communities here

BentiGorlich OP ,
@BentiGorlich@gehirneimer.de avatar

Oh that is unfortunate

threelonmusketeers ,

Paging @tgxn

tgxn ,
@tgxn@lemmy.tgxn.net avatar

I’m here now, thanks for the ping :)

threelonmusketeers ,

Thanks for maintaining lemmyverse :)

tgxn ,
@tgxn@lemmy.tgxn.net avatar

Thank YOU for being the MVP that let me know it was broken! 🤣 🔥

threelonmusketeers ,

That was easy. I’m sure maintaining the site is much more difficult!

BentiGorlich OP ,
@BentiGorlich@gehirneimer.de avatar

Their deploy pipeline is broken as well. So I think that is the reason for the old crawl date

tgxn ,
@tgxn@lemmy.tgxn.net avatar

It sometimes does that when the crawler hasn’t had time to fetch a large proportion of the instances in the last 4 hours. the data should be pretty recent still. I’ll check on it now :)

BentiGorlich OP ,
@BentiGorlich@gehirneimer.de avatar

I think it is 12 old by now

tgxn ,
@tgxn@lemmy.tgxn.net avatar

Yeah it is, docker stopped loading the redis DB 🤣

github.com/tgxn/lemmy-explorer/pull/189
looks like it’s fixed it develop.lemmyverse.net

will be in prod shortly :)

Blaze ,

Thank you!

tgxn ,
@tgxn@lemmy.tgxn.net avatar

And I’ve fixed it now :D Sorry for the delay and thx for reporting <3

Ategon , (edited )
@Ategon@programming.dev avatar

https://programming.dev/pictrs/image/af8e8726-c182-443f-b019-9ee776ce4ac0.png

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

BentiGorlich OP ,
@BentiGorlich@gehirneimer.de avatar

What do you mean by "manually counted"?
And what did you use to generate the chart? Is that a Google API?

Ategon ,
@Ategon@programming.dev avatar

I looked at the community list in programming.dev (from programming.dev/communities) sorted by active users per month and noted down the instances for the top 100 communities

its using google sheets

going to recount with lemm.ees community list in a sec since theyre federated with hexbear

BentiGorlich OP ,
@BentiGorlich@gehirneimer.de avatar

I hate that their libraries are so good sometimes :D
Mine uses recharts with suboptimal configuration

acockworkorange ,

There’s always LibreOffice…

BentiGorlich OP ,
@BentiGorlich@gehirneimer.de avatar

I used that to filter the data, but it wouldn't generate a pie chart for it XD

acockworkorange ,

Weird, that’s one of its basic functions. Oh well.

Liz ,

Eyyyyy midwest.social!

meldrik ,

Surprised to see my small instance mentioned here 😅

Blaze ,

Your work is recognized!

Feathercrown ,

That contrast makes it impossible to read some labels

reagansrottencorpse ,

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

OprahsedCreature ,

Turns out Blue MAGA can’t suppress the left. Sad face.

Fitik ,
@Fitik@fedia.io avatar

"Truth social" has more monthly active users than all Lemmy instances combined, does it make it better?

Ambii ,

goo goo ga ga

FeelzGoodMan420 ,

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.
Blaze ,

Definitely

blackn1ght ,

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.

ngwoo ,

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.

Emperor ,
@Emperor@feddit.uk avatar

Great to have you with us. 👍

blackn1ght ,

♥️ glad to be part of our community!

BentiGorlich OP ,
@BentiGorlich@gehirneimer.de avatar

I mean the first problem went away when I sorted the communities by active users, though the second one got way worse with it XD

CentauriBeau ,

As someone out of the loop, why is hexbear bad? Alternatively, what is hexbear about?

CentauriBeau ,

Please disregard, after reading further in the comments I get the gist. I guess as I use LemmyWorld I don’t have to deal with them.

ericjmorey ,
@ericjmorey@discuss.online avatar

see: startrek.website/comment/11417825

Sootius ,

They’re an explicitly leftist comm, a lot of people take offense to being called out on right-wing assertions, and the .world’ers whip up myths without having ever seen or federated with Hexbear themselves.

That’s all really - Take a glance at the site if you want to know what it’s about, rather than take people at their word on it.

Socsa ,

They openly state that their primarily goals in federation is to be obnoxious trolls, and boy howdy do they put a lot of energy into it. They are first and foremost, just obnoxious. It’s like 20% teenagers going through their edgy anti establishment phase, and then the rest are right wing, Russian, and Chinese trolls playing soggy waffle with each other. They pretend to be super serious about LGBT issues but then simp for Hamas, Iran and Russia. And one of their tankie leaders just got caught calling trans issues “western pink washing.”

It’s just a mess. It’s probably a bit overblown, but the community is legitimately annoying if nothing else.

Sootius ,

one of their tankie leaders just got caught calling trans issues “western pink washing.”

Your whole post is made up, but this is at least a specific claim that also didn’t happen. Pics or you’re talking shit.

Socsa ,

sh.itjust.works/post/23147589

mathemachristian ,

Thats a .ml admin

lemmy.ml/post/18761554

see the link to “kristinas post” for The hexbear take on the situation (nutomic is banned from hexbear afaik)

Blaze ,

(nutomic is banned from hexbear afaik)

Indeed, interesting: hexbear.net/u/[email protected]

https://sopuli.xyz/pictrs/image/5389867f-e4dc-49b3-9f17-3cb25389c142.webp

mathemachristian ,

They take transphobia very seriously there. There was a whole thing about lemm.ee defederation, they defedded from blahaj because of that etc.

ericjmorey ,
@ericjmorey@discuss.online avatar

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 OP ,
@BentiGorlich@gehirneimer.de avatar

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)

ericjmorey ,
@ericjmorey@discuss.online avatar

That’s just how federation works out in every federated service ever.

RememberTheApollo_ ,

I agree in principle that .world containing most of the fediverse’s activity kinda isn’t great for the idea of the democratic nature of the fediverse. However, the point of the ‘verse is that anyone can spool up an instance if they dislike it, or start more communities on existing instances. If .world were to disappear it would suck, but that’s part of the problem with any instance in an informal community. Any of them can disappear.

JackbyDev ,

How many instances federate by default? It may be difficult to get your new solo instance into the others.

JackbyDev , (edited )

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.

Ategon ,
@Ategon@programming.dev avatar

.ml and hexbear have been around much longer than the other instances so have built up more subscribers

Monstrosity , (edited )
@Monstrosity@lemm.ee avatar

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.

HereIAm , (edited )

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.

Preflight_Tomato ,

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.

Scrollone ,

I agree on the choice paralysis. I ended up with Feddit.it because my native language is Italian and that’s the biggest instance in my language.

Blaze ,

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

voracread ,

Haven’t heard anything so far, what are they?

HereIAm ,

Thanks for asking, made me go look again. I had mixed up Lemmy.world owner Ruud and the creator of Lemmy itself and admin of lemmy.ml. Ruud seems chill, lemmy.ml less so.

voracread ,

Thank you for editing your original comment to reflect that 😎

goosehorse ,

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.

Scrollone ,

Try searching for a local community, especially if English is not your first language.

secret300 ,

that’s the main reason I moved away from lemmy.world

FundMECFSResearch ,

suprised mander.xyz is so small

Blaze ,

!science_memes is the 9th most monthly active community

lemmyverse.net/communities?order=active_month

wiki_me ,

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 ,

Always nice to see lemmynsfw doing well. Those guys are going to bring a lot of people here

independantiste ,
@independantiste@sh.itjust.works avatar

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

Blaze ,

Oh definitely

BentiGorlich OP ,
@BentiGorlich@gehirneimer.de avatar

I think it is odd that they have no community in the top 100 anymore when sorted by active users

ericjmorey ,
@ericjmorey@discuss.online avatar

I think it’s good.

ericjmorey ,
@ericjmorey@discuss.online avatar

Quality over quantity is what I would prefer. I think LemmyNSFW is a potential determent for other instances.

tacosanonymous ,

It would be the hardest thing to moderate if lemmy blows up though.

TheBat ,
@TheBat@lemmy.world avatar

Hehehe hardest hehehe

umbrella ,
@umbrella@lemmy.ml avatar

last i checked lemmynsfw just looks like r/gonemild though

Linkerbaan ,
@Linkerbaan@lemmy.world avatar

Do they even have original posters? I thought it was just onlyfans farmers reposting their Reddit content.

TexMexBazooka ,

There’s a few OC users there

BentiGorlich OP ,
@BentiGorlich@gehirneimer.de avatar

I added it to the main post :)
And yeah should have done so in the initial post as well...

Blaze ,

Thanks!

moosetwin ,
@moosetwin@lemmy.dbzer0.com avatar

https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/pictrs/image/fa49bcfb-02a4-446e-9f5b-9f8dabacb29a.webphttps://lemmy.dbzer0.com/pictrs/image/89be2030-0127-4f0b-b350-7b8b5113967e.webphttps://lemmy.dbzer0.com/pictrs/image/0e33653a-0d0f-46e9-b4f9-d7ada7da766c.webp

It’s a real mystery, where could these instances possibly be located?

(apologies for derailing, I don’t know where else to post this)

Blaze , (edited )

Pretty sure lemmy.ca is hosted in Canada

moosetwin ,
@moosetwin@lemmy.dbzer0.com avatar

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.

recursive_recursion ,
@recursive_recursion@programming.dev avatar

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

BentiGorlich OP ,
@BentiGorlich@gehirneimer.de avatar

I added charts that use the monthy active users

tacosanonymous ,

Poor lemm.ee

TexMexBazooka ,

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

Blaze ,

Yes, the most active communities (lemm.ee/communities) are

All started by different people than the admin, who is indeed quite hands back regarding communities

tacosanonymous ,

We are small af. I think we are mostly just overflow .world users.

TexMexBazooka ,

We’re currently the 2nd most active instance measured by MAU, only lead by Lemmy.world

cron ,

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.

Blaze ,

Based on Monthly active users, the picture is different: 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 ,

Jesus Christ, that’s a lot of weirdos.

morrowind ,
@morrowind@lemmy.ml avatar

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

nokturne213 ,

On mobile I was able to scroll it horizontally.

threelonmusketeers ,

On Thunder, everything (just) fits horizontally:

https://sh.itjust.works/pictrs/image/67c218d0-1d00-4601-a507-28d268e1e155.jpeg

I might have preferred to scroll horizontally a bit.

mke ,

Yeah, I love Thunder but, uh, it’s a work in progress.

onlinepersona ,

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

Anti Commercial-AI license

WaterSword ,
@WaterSword@discuss.tchncs.de avatar

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.

TexMexBazooka ,

It isn’t big though. They just get kicked out of everywhere else they go for being disruptive assholes, so for every community there’s a hexbear duplicate

ZeroHora ,
@ZeroHora@lemmy.ml avatar

Duplicate with half the posts and a third of comments.

TexMexBazooka ,

All of which are super politically charged

ZeroHora ,
@ZeroHora@lemmy.ml avatar

Depends, the /c/[email protected] is politically charged as expect at any game community, what I found more interesting is the hatred for gamers(this one is deserved).

WaterSword ,
@WaterSword@discuss.tchncs.de avatar

Hexbear (if you disagree with their politics) is basically like a white american from the deep south. They’re perfectly reasonable to talk to as long as it isn’t politics

WalrusDragonOnABike ,

Games is the largest games com by far in terms of posts and comments (150k comments and 15k post vs 71k comments and 3k posts on lemmy world…

News has most posts than any other news and about as many comments as lemmyworld.

Politics has the most posts of any politics coms, but far less comments than lemmyworld’s.

History basically has no competitors (150k comments vs 7k for the next largest)

Movies also has no competitors (75k comments vs 9k for the next largest).

Videos has 56k comments vs lemmyworld’s 13k

Music has 45k comments vs lemmyworld’s 6k

Urbanism has 44k comments vs fuckcar’s 19k

Granted, given Hexbear has been around for 4 years, the number of comments/posts is largely a side effect of age. But it also means calling them duplicates is probably misleading. OTOH, the main trans community there has been very active recently, dwarfing all other trans communities combined.

ZeroHora ,
@ZeroHora@lemmy.ml avatar

They are more “community” than the ex-redditor secluded island that is most of the others instances, that’s definitely the side effect of age.

Binette ,

Hexbear was there before the reddit exodus, so this make no sense.

Please verify your claims before saying nonsense.

TexMexBazooka ,

Because they - specifically Chapo trap house-got all of their communities banned from Reddit years before.

You are not making the argument you think you are

Binette ,

When you say “It isn’t big”, you’re comparing it to reddit? That would basically dwarf all Lemmy instances combined lmao.

This post was comparing Lemmy instances with other Lemmy instances. Hexbear was its own website for a while, and only decided to start trying federation like a few months after the whole reddit thing. They’re fine on their own even, so I don’t know why people keep acting as if they necessarily want to be federated.

TexMexBazooka ,

When did I say anything about Reddit?

Binette ,

Bro please…

https://lemmy.ml/pictrs/image/f54d77ef-7f51-4c5f-9798-5dbbe116a346.jpeg

TexMexBazooka ,

If you read the rest of that sentence, you’ll (maybe) figure out that there isn’t any comparative statements there- just pointing out that hexbear mostly originated from users banned from Reddit, for being toxic and disruptive.

Binette , (edited )

If it wasn’t a comparative argument, then what’s wrong with my original statement?

Edit: I think I understand what you’re coming from, but it still doesn’t make sense? They were self contained, and they didn’t just make those communities because they were defederated? It’s because there was demand. If some random instance with one user makes like 100s of communities, will it count in the graph?

TexMexBazooka ,

If some random instance with one user makes like 100s of communities, will it count in the graph?

Yeah it will, that’s the problem with using community count as a measure for the activity of a given instance.

Hexbear is interesting because like you said, they’re very self contained.

Sootius ,

lol, what disruption did they do when LW “pre-emptively defederated” them “as a last resort”? Or did they just get banned for being leftists?

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