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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

JackbyDev ,

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

BentiGorlich OP ,
@BentiGorlich@gehirneimer.de avatar

But I like my tables 🥺

el_abuelo ,

In a world of mobiles being more ubiquitous than monitors, consider inverting your rows and columns next time. Scrolling down is more expected than scrolling sideways.

BentiGorlich OP ,
@BentiGorlich@gehirneimer.de avatar

will do 👍

BentiGorlich OP ,
@BentiGorlich@gehirneimer.de avatar

Updated the post :)

JackbyDev ,

Thank you. ❤️

Lemmy gold! A lemming on a gold medal.

bleistift2 ,

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.

JackbyDev ,

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.

ArmokGoB ,

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

Serinus ,

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.

ArmokGoB ,

The issue is that the kid that owns the ball sets the rules. LW could do something heinous, and the only choices would be to cope or lose half the Fediverse.

Serinus ,

You mean like if they went all tankie? Or like AOL email? This has already happened several times before and it’s fine. Google could kill gmail in six months and we’d all move on.

ArmokGoB ,

I’ve run into issues where information I want access to just doesn’t exist anymore because of the Reddit fiasco. The people that did that were a small minority of Reddit, and Reddit as a whole was basically unaffected by the protest after it was quashed.

Imagine the type of chaos it would cause if it came out that the LW admins were getting a corporate kickback to destabilize the Fediverse, or that they were involved in some other equally shady enterprise. It would probably be the end of the Fediverse, either through the created schisms or the lack of will to stop the corporate meddling. It would at least cause massive instability and make us look bad to users who would otherwise think of joining. A lot of information would probably be lost as people tried to push back. I’m sure a lot of people just wouldn’t have the willpower to move their communities elsewhere and there would be a significant number of people supporting the admins’ actions through apathetic inaction.

Blaze ,

Imagine the type of chaos it would cause if it came out that the LW admins were getting a corporate kickback to destabilize the Fediverse, or that they were involved in some other equally shady enterprise. It would probably be the end of the Fediverse, either through the created schisms or the lack of will to stop the corporate meddling

I agree that LW centralization isn’t good, but I’m not sure such event would be the end of the Fediverse, or Lemmy.

People would just massively move to other instances. LW communities usually have a non-LW non-lemm.ml alternative (such as !movies for !movies ), so that should be doable. A bit painful, but manageable.

Cataphract , (edited )

Imagine my surprise to see you in here talking about LW centralization isn’t good. You came onto a support question (link) for a community I had started with one of my concerns being the LW centralization and you quickly told me to abandon my community. Extremely weird considering you run a generic fantasy community which already exists in many places so felt a little kettle/pot.

Blaze ,

Hello,

I’m actually happy to talk about LW centralization at large. It’s a topic I like to discuss on !fedigrow, feel free to join us there.

To come back to your questions, there are different types of communities depending on how popular the topic is

  • very popular topics (tech, news, memes, politics) exist on Lemmy on a lot of different instances. !technology, !technology, !technology, etc. They are all active, no need to worry about those.
  • moderately popular topics: in this case, usually there is a large LW community, and then a smaller non-LW community. A mentioned “movies” above as an example, there is a whole list at the end of this post.
  • low activity topics: here, there is only one community, and it’s not that active. It is on LW, but the community is already so small that getting it active is a higher priority than bringing people to another instance. Examples: !football, !parenting, !television, !avatar

I feel like StarGate probably belongs in the third group, which is why I suggested you to consolidate with the existing LW communities.

Also, lemmy.ml have faced some powertripping complaints:

Extremely weird considering you run a generic fantasy community which already exists in many places so felt a little kettle/pot.

Interesting, I had actually forgotten about that community, which is why the last post there is 2 months ago. I’ll probably close it in the coming weeks and redirect elsewhere, after asking the community feedback.

On the other hand, I actively post to all of the following communities, to try to keep them off LW

Cataphract ,

https://lemmy.ml/pictrs/image/3c4e5246-6105-434a-a98e-4cc0a95a5e9d.gif

MrMakabar ,

The thing is that the value is in the communities and not in the old content. So most likely the mods would just post we move to a new instance and a lot of users would follow. We just saw that on the German speakin lemmy instance feddit.de, which was abandoned and now most of the users and communities moved to feddit.org, which is already one of the larger ones.

What lemmy really needs is the ability to easily move accounts and communities. Mastodon has that for users already.

el_abuelo ,

The lack of migration is what kept me on ml for several days after I found out what they consider ml stands for.

One click migration to a different instance would be a huge benefit to the decentralisation effort.

threelonmusketeers ,

what they consider ml stands for

It’s Mali, right? Right? Not some reference to communism?

Nath ,
@Nath@aussie.zone avatar

The problem with this is trust. If you could seamlessly migrate like this, there’s nothing to stop someone faking a long post/comment on their own instance, making them look very legitimate and then migrating that account to a trusted/legitimate instance.

Then using that for spam/selling block chain etc.

People are the reason we can’t have nice things.

Blaze ,

Isn’t that much easier nowadays with the one click settings export-import?

Blaze ,

What lemmy really needs is the ability to easily move accounts and communities. Mastodon has that for users already.

Mastodon still doesn’t allow to move posts and comments

Mastodon currently does not support importing posts or media due to technical limitations

docs.joinmastodon.org/user/moving/

Lost_My_Mind ,

Does anyone else just see pacman throwing up a rave?

return2ozma ,
@return2ozma@lemmy.world avatar

You’re welcome.

nutsack ,

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

OutsizedWalrus ,

I went with it because I figured it had same peering defaults.

It does, which is really nice.

MystikIncarnate ,

Yay centralization!

Dave ,
@Dave@lemmy.nz avatar

I’m curious what this looks like for Mastodon. Of the top X accounts listed by followers, what proportion are on instances run by the Mastodon organisation?

BentiGorlich OP ,
@BentiGorlich@gehirneimer.de avatar

I did that a while ago: https://wehavecookies.social/@BentiGorlich/111839058984677014

https://files.wehavecookies.social/media_attachments/files/111/839/034/803/518/348/original/6392faf9f1b43a96.png

Dave ,
@Dave@lemmy.nz avatar

Oh nice! I also saw the other one showing almost half of the followers of those accounts are on mastodon.social.

I guess Lemmy finds it a little harder to get communities set up away from the big instances because to get a community off the ground you need eyeballs, and the biggest instances have the most eyeballs in the All feed.

Dave ,
@Dave@lemmy.nz avatar

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.

Persen ,

And this is making a lemmy.world monopoly, which is bad for the fediverse (still better, than reddit).

Dave ,
@Dave@lemmy.nz avatar

I think it would definitely be nice to spread users (and communities) across more instances. Doubly so since I’m on an instance that is struggling with the volume of content from Lemmy.world because of what is effectively a limit of how much you can get from one instance at a time.

But if we want people on Lemmy who don’t know what Linux is, then we need to avoid that massive barrier of asking users to pick an instance. And the second massive barrier of registration applications.

A good compromise I think would be to have multiple trusted servers with open registrations that the app randomly defaults them to when they go to sign up for an account.

BentiGorlich OP ,
@BentiGorlich@gehirneimer.de avatar

You mean like the mastodon app does? https://blog.joinmastodon.org/2023/05/a-new-onboarding-experience-on-mastodon/

Dave ,
@Dave@lemmy.nz avatar

Doesn’t that say they default new users to a server owned by them? That’s the same kind of thing as defaulting to Lemmy.world for Lemmy apps.

What I mean is a larger list of trusted instances. Including ones outside the control of one organisation, though I get that this is risky for Mastodon because they don’t want to default people to somewhere that’s going to shut down or have some drama and ruin a hard earned brand.

We probably have more leeway to do it in Lemmy apps since (with the exception of Jerboa) they aren’t developed by “Lemmy”, and Lemmy.world is also not run by “Lemmy”. But for this same reason, " Lemmy" has no control over what these apps default to.

BentiGorlich OP ,
@BentiGorlich@gehirneimer.de avatar

You have the "easy" buttons for users that just want to sign in and don't think about it and then you have the "choose your own" button underneath it. I still am not a fan of this design, but I really care for decentralization and they want to attract "normal" people as well

ricdeh ,
@ricdeh@lemmy.world avatar

But if we want people on Lemmy who don’t know what Linux is, then we need to avoid that massive barrier of asking users to pick an instance. And the second massive barrier of registration applications.

How so? Those things do not have anything to do with each other. The concept of Lemmy instances can literally be explained in less than a minute.

Dave ,
@Dave@lemmy.nz avatar

When a user (say, my mother) gets to a page that says pick a server, she would immediately close the page and go do something else. How do you even begin to choose a server? What if you get it wrong? What should you consider when picking a server?

Its a simple concept that can be explained in a minute. But if you don’t have someone sitting next to you that understands it and can explain it, that user is gone.

Registration applications are an unrelated barrier but a barrier none the less. You don’t have to apply to Facebook and wait to be approved. People expect to just be able to sign up and immediately go.

For anyone familiar with the fediverse both of these things seem like non-issues. But for your average Facebook user. Hell, even your average reddit user, they will take one look at either a page telling them to pick a server or a page telling them they have to apply and wait, and unless they are familiar with the Fediverse already then they will back away slowly (or quickly).

When my instance turned on registration applications, there was a 10x drop in the number of registrations, and I’ve heard similar numbers from others.

BentiGorlich OP ,
@BentiGorlich@gehirneimer.de avatar

When my instance turned on registration applications, there was a 10x drop in the number of registrations, and I've heard similar numbers from others.

The question is how much of these registrations are spam accounts. I have open registrations on my mastodon instance and ~70% are spam accounts that I delete within the first day...

Dave ,
@Dave@lemmy.nz avatar

Oh definitely some. At the time we were still in the tail of the reddit surge, we were getting plenty of valid registrations and spam was only starting to take off (which was the reason for closing registrations).

But to my point, I think back to my first Lemmy experience and remember trying to work out which server I should join even though I already had a basic idea about the Fediverse from Mastodon. And I just chose the biggest in the end bpecause how do you choose? Even today I would be wary about joining any server that didn’t have lots of people.

And later I remember hearing about Beehaw then finding a registration application page and not creating an account.

These happened well before the reddit exodus, and I never really got into Lemmy until that happened and I joined Beehaw.

Blaze ,

I usually just mentioned lemm.ee nowadays.

It’s solidly managed, and the second largest instance, so All feed is going to be as populated as the LW one. Also, neutral name (sorry sh.itjust.works)

Dave ,
@Dave@lemmy.nz avatar

Yes they are a good candidate I think. Curious about their sign ups though. Lemmy.world asks people to write “I agree to the TOS” in the answer box. If you do, a bot automatically approves you, if you don’t, a bot automatically declines you. There’s no waiting time.

Lemm.ee states In the “Answer” box below, please state that you agree to follow the lemm.ee instance rules (found in the sidebar of our front page), which has no specific phrase you need to answer, so I’m guessing they manually approve them?

I honestly think registration applications are a huge barrier to anyone not already on the fediverse.

Blaze ,

I’m not completely sure. @sunaurus ?

Dave ,
@Dave@lemmy.nz avatar

Just to be clear, I think registration applications are necessary for anyone without a team of admins across the world.

I’m not saying these instances requiring applications are doing a bad thing. Just that it’s a barrier to entry and given the non-commercial decentralised nature of Lemmy we will never be able to hire thousands of staff to handle reports like Facebook does.

It’s a new problem requiring a new solution, and while I think Mastodon hasn’t solved it yet, I think they are ahead of Lemmy.

Blaze ,

Doubly so since I’m on an instance that is struggling with the volume of content from Lemmy.world because of what is effectively a limit of how much you can get from one instance at a time.

Are you okay lately? I had a look the other day, seems almost fixed:

…lem.rocks/…/federation-health-single-instance-ov…

Aussie.zone on the other is almost a week behind: …lem.rocks/…/federation-health-single-instance-ov…

Dave ,
@Dave@lemmy.nz avatar

We are fine, but it’s not fixed. I have a second VPS running in Finland, using this queue batcher. The Lemmy.world team kindly set up their server to point to this VPS instead of the actual Lemmy.nz server, then the VPS collects all the events and sends them to the Lemmy.nz server in batches of 100.

It keeps us up to date, but it’s cheating 😆

Last I heard Aussie.zone doesn’t have this setup, but they do have a prefetcher (or rather, Nothing4You, who made the queue batcher, is running a prefetcher for them). This basically takes the new comments and posts from Lemmy.world, and sends a request to Aussie.zone to fetch that post. Because this happens outside the normal federation queue it can be done in parallel. It means when Aussie.zone receives the federated activity from Lemmy.world, it already has it, so it can reply quicker and process more events per second. Lemmy clears out activities older than a week in a weekly scheduled job, which is why you will see Aussie.zone’s backlog drop a bit once a week. They won’t get that content from Lemmy.world, it’s just lost. Because of the prefetcher, it’s likely just up/down votes (which can’t be prefetched).

Blaze ,

Very interesting, thanks!

Blaze ,

Isn’t this a bit ironic coming from someone on a LW account? Genuinely asking 😄

Persen ,

I made the account here, when it wasn’t as popular and I’m way too lazy to migrate.

AchtungDrempels ,

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?

nutsack ,

never heard any of these wizard terms sorry

AchtungDrempels ,

I have no clue what you’re on about.

Dave ,
@Dave@lemmy.nz avatar

I explained in another comment to someone else, but to recap Lemmy.world has lemmy’s registration applications feature turned on, but behind the scenes they run a bot to approve everyone who types the requested thing in the box. You sign up, type the thing in the box, and you get immediate access.

Compare this sign up process to the instance that the Lemmy devs run on Lemmy.ml.

Now to be clear, I’m not saying it’s unjustified. Trolls and spammers are a problem on Lemmy and we need more tools to help. Most instances require registration applications and I think that’s necessary for anyone without a team of admins across the world.

But that doesn’t change that it’s a big barrier to entry. Facebook has thousands of people able to respond to reports in a short period of time. Decentralised non-commercial Lemmy instances can never meet this, so we have a problem that needs a solution.

Xeroxchasechase ,

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

cordlesslamp ,

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

BenchpressMuyDebil ,

you’re doing your part in keeping the federation healthy and decentralized o7

Emperor ,
@Emperor@feddit.uk avatar

https://c.l3n.co/i/SbIsE5.jpg

Pandantic ,
@Pandantic@midwest.social avatar

Me too.

MystikIncarnate ,

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

AVincentInSpace ,

awful.systems is up there?

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

Omniraptor , (edited )

How are they awful? I’ve had one bad and cringy interaction with them but nothing too out of the ordinary

AVincentInSpace ,

i was more referring to the fact that as a snark community they don’t necessarily represent the best of us

repungnant_canary ,

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

BentiGorlich OP ,
@BentiGorlich@gehirneimer.de avatar

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
Kolanaki ,
@Kolanaki@yiffit.net avatar

My instance doesn’t even make the list. 🥲

arkthos ,

But we probably all make it onto some list ^^

tgxn ,
@tgxn@lemmy.tgxn.net avatar

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
lemmyverse.net/inspect
lemmyverse.net/inspect/versions

BentiGorlich OP ,
@BentiGorlich@gehirneimer.de avatar

I 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

tgxn ,
@tgxn@lemmy.tgxn.net avatar

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 github.com/tgxn/lemmy-explorer

BootyBuccaneer ,

Ohh, you’re the author?? I remember stumbling into these a while back. Those are neat! Great job.

tgxn ,
@tgxn@lemmy.tgxn.net avatar

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.

LiveLM ,

Lemmy.zip mentioned 🥳🥳🥳

cat ,

we exist!!

LarmyOfLone ,

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.

Blaze ,

!fedigrow 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 !android and !askandroid 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.

tigeruppercut ,

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

LarmyOfLone ,

Oh yeah absolutely, lemmy definitely needs better cross posting. Currently crossposts are kinda yanky with quote blocks. I’d also love to see reposts that are detected automatically.

Blaze ,

I’d also love to see reposts that are detected automatically.

Reposts are based on the URL linked in the post. If it’s the same URL, both posts will display as crossposts.

blue_berry ,
@blue_berry@lemmy.world avatar

Piefed has topics, so different fediverse communities can be viewed through the Fediverse-topic for example

NostraDavid ,
@NostraDavid@programming.dev avatar

Programming.dev represent! o7

bleistift2 , (edited )

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.

Blaze ,

The title says “the 100 biggest Lemmy communities”

I guess the 2 communities are !ich_iel and !europe

bleistift2 ,

Aww. I confused “communities” for “instances” when I read the title. Thanks for pointing it out.

Blaze ,

You are welcome!

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