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:

  • FeelzGoodMan420@eviltoast.orgEnglish
    9411·
    3 months ago

    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.

    • ericjmorey@discuss.onlineEnglish
      555·
      3 months ago

      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@gehirneimer.deOP
        243·
        3 months ago

        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)

        • schizo@forum.uncomfortable.businessEnglish
          351·
          3 months ago

          Technical issues with Lemmy are, I think, still driving people to larger instances.

          The big one is that if I make a community on a smaller instance, and gain ANY amount of volume and traction (which is not all that easy to do in the first place) and that server vanishes, shit’s just… dead. It’s gone and not coming back, because you can’t move a community from a dead server to a live server.

          Which means using one of the big, established, funded, stable, working instances is the only rational choice, but that also means I’ll probably just make an account and post exclusively from there, and thus you end up in this cycle of everyone just going to one of the larger instances in preference to any of the smaller ones.

          Everyone goes on and on and on about account portability being very important (which, I suppose it is: I don’t think we need account portability but rather distributed identity independent of the specific platform you’re using, but that’s a whole different technical mess) but for something like Lemmy, being assured that the community you’re working on will survive servers vanishing and a means to “take ownership” in a way that lets you port it to another home if and when your instance dies - because, for the most part, it’s going to at some point - is far far more needed.

          • Blaze (he/him)English
            9·
            3 months ago

            Which means using one of the big, established, funded, stable, working instances is the only rational choice, but that also means I’ll probably just make an account and post exclusively from there, and thus you end up in this cycle of everyone just going to one of the larger instances in preference to any of the smaller ones.

            The size difference between Lemmy.world and lemm.ee could still be improved

          • Socsa@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
            82·
            3 months ago

            It’s that, plus the next largest instance being practically unusable due to hyper aggressive tankie censorship. Getting banned from .ml for not sucking Stalin’s boot hard enough is practically a rite of passage at this point.

        • RememberTheApollo_@lemmy.worldEnglish
          141·
          3 months ago

          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@programming.devEnglish
            2·
            3 months ago

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

      • JackbyDev@programming.devEnglish
        4·
        3 months ago

        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.

    • Monstrosity@lemm.eeEnglish
      19·
      3 months ago

      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.

    • blackn1ght@feddit.ukEnglish
      19·
      3 months ago

      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@lemmy.worldEnglish
        8·
        3 months ago

        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.

    • Ategon@programming.devEnglish
      13·
      3 months ago

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

    • goosehorse@lemmy.worldEnglish
      10·
      3 months ago

      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@feddit.itEnglish
        1·
        3 months ago

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

    • HereIAm@lemmy.worldEnglish
      101·
      3 months ago

      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@lemm.eeEnglish
        10·
        3 months ago

        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@feddit.itEnglish
          1·
          3 months ago

          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 (he/him)English
        41·
        3 months ago

        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

    • BentiGorlich@gehirneimer.deOP
      51·
      3 months ago

      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@lemmy.worldEnglish
          81·
          3 months ago

          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.

        • Socsa@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
          54·
          3 months ago

          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@lemmy.worldEnglish
          45·
          3 months ago

          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.