The biggest surprise for me was the https://hexbear.net count, an instance I hardly interact with.

beehaw.org hexbear.net lemdro.id lemmy.blahaj.zone lemmy.dbzer0.com lemmy.ml lemmy.one lemmy.world lemmynsfw.com sh.itjust.works sopuli.xyz
Community Count 6 33 1 1 1 14 1 39 2 1 1
Community Subscriber Count 133450 663204 17052 15907 53006 356460 16257 851950 33586 16006 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:

awful.systems feddit.org feddit.uk hexbear.net lemdro.id lemm.ee lemmy.blahaj.zone lemmy.ca lemmy.dbzer0.com lemmy.ml lemmy.world lemmy.wtf lemmy.zip mander.xyz sh.itjust.works slrpnk.net sopuli.xyz ttrpg.network
Community Count 1 2 2 1 1 3 1 3 3 10 57 1 3 1 5 3 2 1
Community Active Month Count 2616 7363 5289 2952 2898 8898 11422 14910 13752 54949 338384 3602 12020 11469 37365 10897 10070 4107

Community Count:

Community Users:

    • 𝓔𝓶𝓶𝓲𝓮@lemm.ee
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      It’s big enough to feel their presence in every corner of the platform unfortunately

      I cannot facepalm hard enough when I see lgbt ppl who praise Soviets or North Korea

      • NOT_RICK@lemmy.world
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        Yeah I can’t say I was bothered when LW defederated. I’ve gotten in way fewer stupid arguments since they did the same with Lemmygrad. IIRC LW didn’t even let hexbear federate in the first place.

        • 𝓔𝓶𝓶𝓲𝓮@lemm.ee
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          I don’t like defederations. I prefer to see everything, every post and comment and then block users/instances on my own if it becomes too much.

          Literally a second ago I blocked another tankie, from LW this time. Before I even managed to type this comment fully. But then I don’t shy from making comments that attract them if I disagree with something. So inbox always busy

            • 𝓔𝓶𝓶𝓲𝓮@lemm.ee
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              Yes but this may be a side effect of turning off the points experiment. Instead of getting dopamine from points I only get replies. So it could be that I subconsciously make my comments in a way that is more likely to attract some kind of response.

              My main goal for Lemmy was to break Reddit addiction and I feel gaining likes plays a big part in staying glued to the screen

              • ericjmorey@discuss.online
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                Seems like a good strategy would be to not have every post and comment shown to you if your goal is to break your habit of spending too much time on your phone or PC.

          • li10@feddit.uk
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            3 months ago

            I would much rather signup to an instance that handles that for me.

            As long as the instance is clear about what they defederate from and their reasons, then I’m happy with that. And if I wasn’t, I could choose a different instance.

            • blackn1ght@feddit.uk
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              Our instance is federated with hexbear, lemmygrad etc. I want to be resonsible for what I see and block, I’m really not a fan of defederation unless it’s a last resort (i.e. CSAM or other illegal content).

              I did end up blocking the lemmy.ml instance though, fuck that place. I haven’t even blocked hexbear or lemmygrad.

              • ᴇᴍᴘᴇʀᴏʀ 帝@feddit.uk
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                Our instance is federated with hexbear, lemmygrad etc. I want to be resonsible for what I see and block, I’m really not a fan of defederation unless it’s a last resort (i.e. CSAM or other illegal content).

                Yes, that’s pretty much our take on it: we’ll defederate CSAM (and nonce-adjacent) instances asap, those with lax registration tend to become havens for spammers and trolls, so there is usually a wave of defederating, then someone reaches out to them, it gets sorted and we allow them back in. That tends to be the regular defederation and isn’t controversial. Defederating, for example, Hexbear over, for example, trolling would be a bigger deal and we’d try and speak to the other Admins about it before any permanent banning.

              • li10@feddit.uk
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                lol, forgot I was even on my feddit.uk account.

                I’d already gone through blocking all of that stuff via my app before the defederation stuff happened, but if I were signing up to a new instance I’d appreciate it being blocked by default.

          • TomSelleck@lemm.ee
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            Same here. I’ll curate my personal feed but I’ll occasionally scroll everything just to see what random new instance I’ll find, and to keep myself aware of what the current rhetoric is with the various groups.

          • Blackmist@feddit.uk
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            I think ideally a Lemmy client could connect to a number of instances, and you could add the more contentious ones yourself.

            Some of these places are literally hosting child porn. You don’t want that mirrored to a server that you’re responsible for.

      • conditional_soup@lemm.ee
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        You’re not really using the fediverse until you’ve been told that you’ll get the bullet, too. Sometimes, it’s exhausting commenting something pretty uncontroversial and then seeing like eight notifications and realizing it was on Hexbear.

        • Transporter Room 3@startrek.website
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          Can you truly say you’ve had the HB experience if you haven’t recieved emoji/sticker/gif spam from people who weren’t alive for 9/11, have never been outside their country, and refuse to listen to opposing views, but know with full certainty that all western countries are 100% full of genociders and colonial rapists who all deserve the glorious death the super benign, extremely peaceful and misunderstood countries of North Korea, China, and Russia who have never once been correctly accused of human rights violations…

          And of course, if they point out that your country has dipped into those things in the past, well your entire worldview is shattered and their whataboutism has solved everything and proves you deserve the death they crave for you.

          • 𝓔𝓶𝓶𝓲𝓮@lemm.ee
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            I am genuinely sad for HB. There are lgbt ppl there, generally dear to me. Seeing them enjoy such cesspit lured in by cultish atmosphere, supporting the very forces that can only destroy but not build anything. It is personal.

          • geneva_convenience@lemmy.ml
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            On the flipside there is the .World experience. Where Julian Assagne is a war criminal. And the destruction of Iraq, Libya and Afghanistan was good because it killed a lot of Muslims and liberated those savage hijab wearing women from being alive.

            • Blaze (he/him)@sopuli.xyz
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              And the destruction of Iraq, Libya and Afghanistan was good because it killed a lot of Muslims and liberated those savage hijab wearing women from being alive.

              Would you have link to such statements? Seems wild

              • Transporter Room 3@startrek.website
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                Yeah, I’ve never once seen anything but criticism over the US’s involvement in the middle east.

                The most I’ve seen is a couple people saying the equivalent of “well SOMEONE had to do something about X” And a bunch of others jumping on them to clarify that X either never existed, or was massively exaggerated and the US isn’t the World Police.

                Genuinely would love to see someone link a good faith comment trying to argue the above, so I can tell them all about how they’re a fucknut

            • btaf45@lemmy.world
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              Julian Assange is a bootlicker and Kremlin stooge who sold us out to the American and Russian billionaires. The Mueller Report proved he was explicitly trying to get Treason Trump elected and working with Putin to push disinformation to that end.

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            I can see why folk don’t like hexbear as they come off as leftist 4chan, but you don’t need to make things up. They often talk about traveling. I agree with a lot of their content and disagree with some, I’ve been to 10 countries. In the plane to France, an African told me how their country is still enslaved to France. Personally I don’t see the value in the immediate destruction of the west, but with their leaderships ardent support for Nazi Germany, Apartheid, the Climate Crisis and assassination of climate activists, others, and now Zionism, they should lose influence through any means necessary.

            • Fidel_Cashflow@lemmy.ml
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              come off as leftist 4chan

              has the largest weekly trans megathread in the entire fediverse, a supermajority of non-cishet users, aggressively bans racism, bigotry and transphobia on sight, has hard-coded mandatory pronoun tags

              make it make sense

              • joyhunter@lemmy.zip
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                Didn’t mean it literally, only that it’s so shitposty that it can overshadow most serious conversations. It is a far better moderated and accepting community. It’s mainly their trans posts that made me better accept trans individuals. And I discourage writing them off like most should with 4chan.

      • Sootius@lemmy.world
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        I cannot facepalm hard enough when I see lgbt people (or anyone) who praise western genocidal military alliances either. What’s your point?

        • Socsa@sh.itjust.works
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          Western alliances which are the only places in the world with a robust LGBT rights framework?

          “Nooooo you can’t just give people rights because it makes you look good!”

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            I didn’t realise committing genocide made people look good, I guess. You know those militaries kill lgbt people too right?

      • OprahsedCreature@lemmy.ml
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        I mean, I don’t know enough about North Korea here but Lenin decriminalized homosexuality in like 1920. Stalin recriminalized it in 1932-33 but for a bit there the Soviet Union was the most LGBT friendly country in the world.

        • 𝓔𝓶𝓶𝓲𝓮@lemm.ee
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          Lemme rest, my palm is all sore

          What’s going on with ppl that won’t even do simple google check before commenting something. I for example would be ashamed to peddle some bullshit that is one top search click to disprove or even common sense

        • jumjummy@lemmy.world
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          What is the point of this, uh, argument? Since then it’s illegal to be LGBT in Russia, so you’re admitting that Russia sucks now? Agreed!

          • OprahsedCreature@lemmy.ml
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            Russia began to suck hardest when the US succeeded in turning it into a supercharged version of itself. Every bad bit about Russia you don’t like? It’s where the US is headed, thanks to its own imperialism. “Rainbow Capitalism” is as unsustainable as Rainbow Slavery or Rainbow Fascism.

            • Socsa@sh.itjust.works
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              Lmao, .ml really is on a roll with the whole “we love LGBT rights but hate every country which actually has LGBT rights” cognitive dissonance lately.

    • TexMexBazooka@lemm.ee
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      They have less than 500 MAU. It’s just a bunch of losers yelling at each other.

      Correction, updated data is actually closer to 2k MAU. They are the 4th most active instance, topped by lemm.ee, sh.itjust.works, and Lemmy.world.

    • BentiGorlich@gehirneimer.deOP
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      My guess is that they just needed to have their own community for a lot of stuff because so many instances are defederated from them. Though I am not sure…

      • aasatru@kbin.earth
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        I guess it’s also natural that subcultures that tend to be banned elsewhere are early adaptors of alternative platforms.

        We’re lucky we didn’t exist when the Trump extremists on Reddit went looking for a new home, or they would probably have been one of the biggest fields in this figure. Hopefully when the right wing extremists arrive instance admins will have the good sense to defederate.

      • Binette@lemmy.ml
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        If I remember correctly, Hexbear was there before the exodus. So that wouldn’t make sense.

          • Synapse@lemmy.world
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            Nothing wrong with beehaw as far as I know, but a while ago they defederated lemmy.world because the instance is to big and not moderated enough, or something like that.

          • FundMECFSResearch@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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            No. Just that they’re defederated from lots of big instances so they tend to gave their own communities, which increases their size on chart.

            Unlike Hexbear, they chose to be defederated

    • FundMECFSResearch@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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      They’ve existed for a while. A lot of subscribers are inactive users. Kind of like reddit where a sub can have 5k people and still be inactive.

      • 7U5K3N@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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        I only scroll all for now… Hexbear is the only thing I have blocked. I just got tired of trolly garbage.

      • DarkThoughts@fedia.io
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        Most instances block them so most communities on those instances won’t see them either. Once you find certain communities on instances that don’t block them you suddenly see half the comments being from hexbear, which likely quickly makes you block those communities fairly quickly.

          • moody@lemmings.world
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            You could go visit hexbear and you’d find out pretty quickly. It’s definitely not for everyone.

          • Kroxx@lemm.ee
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            Other comments hit on this but I’ll add a little more. There is a good bit of trolls/trolling, some extreme views, and authoritarian government praise. Things like that.

            Lemm.ee (my instance) is still federated so I see hexbear post/ comments. It’s definitely a more problematic instance imo.

    • WalrusDragonOnABike [they/them]@lemmy.today
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      Not really surprising. 10 out of the 10 most commented posts in the past year are on hexbear (the top 2 being the weekly trans mega threads). Granted, a lot of that is just the hyper-active posting of a few users. Regardless, if you want a trans community, there’s basically no active alternative to hexbear’s traaa here.

        • WalrusDragonOnABike [they/them]@lemmy.today
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          I’m subscribed to pretty much all the trans coms I know of and traa is 90% of the trans content that shows up. Another 5% are other hexbear trans subs. Traa has as many comments in half a month as mtf@blajah has had in its entire existance and as many in a week as trans@blahaj has made in total (the two largest non-hexbear trans subs afaik).

          • ericjmorey@discuss.online
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            This reads like someone telling me that the nazi bar is the only place to go because the nazi bar has people there all the time and the other bars are mostly empty.

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              Cool. Being trans, not tolerating transphobia, and having emotes is comparable to being nazis?

              Also, not suggesting people need to go there because its active. I could go to traa, egg, mtf, agender, enby, etc on reddit, but I don’t want to use reddit and a lot of those communities make hexbear look tame in terms of spamminess and immaturity.

            • Ambii [She/They]@lemmy.ml
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              Did you know: you know you can just say you didn’t read the comment?

              It’d be much faster and way easier on everyone else to know to discard your input!

              • OprahsedCreature@lemmy.ml
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                3 months ago

                Horseshoe theory is essentially Latte-Flavored horseshit

                The horseshoe theory does not enjoy wide support within academic circles; peer-reviewed research by political scientists on the subject is scarce, and existing studies and comprehensive reviews have often contradicted its central premises, or found only limited support for the theory under certain conditions.[6][8]

                Wikipedia: Horseshoe Theory

      • Skua@kbin.earth
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        It’s essentially where reddit’s old Chapo Trap House community went after reddit banned them in 2020. It started federating with the rest of the fediverse some time last year, but there was a bit of a culture clash between it and some other larger instances and several of them defederated it

        • OprahsedCreature@lemmy.ml
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          To be fair, that’s because liberalism is closer to fascism than any sort of leftism, and many of these instances have a strongly liberal user base because many were with Reddit longer than most leftists were.

      • JohnDClay@sh.itjust.works
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        It’s an instance mostly based around authoritarian communism. They got banished from Reddit quite a bit before the black out.

      • NOT_RICK@lemmy.world
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        It’s a leftist server. LW defederated from them months ago because they have some, well, interesting takes on things like the war in Ukraine. I can’t recall the exact cited reasons for defederation but I’m sure you could find the defederation post on lemmy world’s announcements page.

        • cows_are_underrated@feddit.org
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          Most instance defederated from because they are tankies that talk a lot of bullshit. However, im not entirely sure if I would really call them leftists. More like communistic Authoritarians, yes, communism is something mound mostly in left communities, but not to sure if their takes on human rights for people with other opinions and stuff like that makes them really left.

          • NOT_RICK@lemmy.world
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            I’d be comfortable calling many of them red fash but I was trying to be diplomatic.

        • thoro@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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          .world never federated with Hexbear from what I remember. I’m pretty sure they were on the block list before Hexbear got federation completed. There was no single incident as far as I know.

  • wiki_me@lemmy.ml
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    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)

  • FeelzGoodMan420@eviltoast.org
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    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.online
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      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
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        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.business
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          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)@sopuli.xyz
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            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.works
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            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.

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          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.dev
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            3 months ago

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

      • JackbyDev@programming.dev
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        3 months ago

        Whole 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.ee
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      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.uk
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      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.world
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        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.dev
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      3 months ago

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

    • goosehorse@lemmy.world
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      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.it
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        3 months ago

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

    • HereIAm@lemmy.world
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      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.

      • Preflight_Tomato@lemm.ee
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        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.it
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          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)@sopuli.xyz
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        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
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      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.world
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          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.works
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          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.world
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          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.

  • Ategon@programming.dev
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    3 months ago

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

    • Ategon@programming.dev
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      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

  • cron@feddit.org
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    3 months ago

    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.

  • Resol van Lemmy@lemmy.world
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    3 months ago

    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.

  • jay@mbin.zerojay.com
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    3 months ago

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

  • KillingTimeItself@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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    3 months ago

    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.

    • qaz@lemmy.world
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      3 months ago

      Lemmy.world has kept open signups open during every large Reddit exodus while many others didn’t. It’s also decently reliable, has decent moderation and is well known. The reason why people didn’t move after is probably because instance migration on Lemmy isn’t possible* so they just stick with what they use.

      *Yes I don’t consider exporting/importing followed communities a migration

    • Eiri@lemmy.world
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      3 months ago

      I heard what lemmy is. I googled Lemmy. I downloaded an app. I pressed sign up. I ended up on Lemmy.world.

      I’ll be honest I don’t even really understand what different instances do.

      • pseudo@jlai.lu
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        3 months ago

        They can be oriented to some type of content: For example, the many feddit.something are targetting people by countries or langages (.it, .uk, etc.). slrpnk.net is solarpunk oriented, mander.xyz science oriented. Litterature.cafe is books, reading and writing oriented.
        And they can offer different moderation policies: People on lemmynsfw.com probably want to see NSFW content. lemmy.world has a policy against it. lemmy.dbzer0.com allow for open discussion about piracy that many instances forbid and so on.

        It you don’t see the difference in instances, it is probably that you are about fine on your local instance. But if one day, you hear about a community you can’t access, maybe that is because it is blocked by lemmy.word and you could access it from another instance

        • Scrollone@feddit.it
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          3 months ago

          If the dbzer0 instance allows piracy talk but I’m signed up to an instance that doesn’t allow it, can I talk in their community or do I risk being banned from mine?

          In other words, are my comments stored on their instance or on mine?

          • Natanael@slrpnk.net
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            3 months ago

            Lemmy stores your posts and replies on both your host server and on the server of the community.

            One interesting behavior to note here that is different from reddit is that while comments on reddit belong to the profile of the person commenting and is then imported to view in the subreddit (this is why you can edit comments after being banned, and why there visible in your profile even if removed from a subreddit), on lemmy the target community is instead authoritative and your host server will by default respect a deletion by community mods on different servers by also removing that comment from your profile.

          • JackbyDev@programming.dev
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            3 months ago

            Your comments are stored on both. The “canonical” version would be on your home instance but every instance that is federated with your instance would get a copy of your comments. I think it’s even possible to have your content removed from one instance but not another. One of my posts shows as removed in the mod log but isn’t actually removed.

          • pseudo@jlai.lu
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            3 months ago

            You can talk on their instance. If the moderator of your instance dis not wanted you to interact with this other instance they would have block it.

            are my comments stored on their instance or on mine?

            That I’m not sure. But I think there is a copy of the content you accessed on your instance. Maybe someone administrating an instance could answer you better than I did.

        • Eiri@lemmy.world
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          3 months ago

          So which instance an account is from matters regarding which communities you can join? Huh.

          • Schadrach@lemmy.sdf.org
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            3 months ago

            Only insofar as some instances block communication from some other instances. Not mine though, that’s actually one of the reasons I picked it. That and it being by an org that’s older than the web and runs a public unix server and a bunch of retrocomputing type services as well as fediverse stuff. They started out as a dialup anime BBS.

    • Demdaru@lemmy.world
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      3 months ago

      About lemmy.world - when running from reddit, it was literally first on the list of advised ones everywhere. Also, biggest, so it had most communities. I am actually pretty much only aware of .world, .dbzer0 and sh.itjust.works. From the normal ones anyway.

      lemmy.ml is basically an instance made by creators of lemmy from what I know.

    • ByteOnBikes@slrpnk.net
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      3 months ago

      I bounced between a few instances and .world seemed to always be up and available. Not to mention all the communities on .world.

      I don’t have an allegiance. Open more communities in other instances or migrate the .world ones there.

      I just want to post.

    • FiniteBanjo@lemmy.today
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      3 months ago

      If I am not mistaken, ML was made by a couple of Fediverse Developers, but their moderation policies are comparable to Elon Musk so nobody goes there.

      World has good branding, will moderate, and has some of the best uptime stats.

    • Jiggle_Physics@lemmy.world
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      3 months ago

      When I first got on Lemmy I signed up for a small instance my friend was on. Mostly ended up lurking. Before ditching that account, because I forgot the password, and was looking to go to a different instance anyway, I looked up what instances had the most federations. world had a lot, and no hexbear. It also has a old style interface, and blocks NSFW content, so I can more safely browse in public/at work. So I switched to it with my main and then separately logged into places with open NSFW content.

    • Leate_Wonceslace@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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      3 months ago

      Defederating from Hexbear probably didn’t hurt. I remember when the users were literally flooding .world my inbox circlejerking about being the biggest and best instance and that any instance that defederated from them was full of transphobic Nazis.

      Edit: I have a shit memory. I don’t remember what instance it was, but the circlejerking and the defederation slander definitely happened.

      • IceHouse@lemmy.zip
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        3 months ago

        Are you from another dimension as everyone else where this happened? Because they never federated in the dimension I live in. Very interesting you’re able to cross this gap, does the name Nelson Mandella mean anything to you?

        • Leate_Wonceslace@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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          Yeah, it must have been on a different instance. I have a terrible memory for places, which probably bleeds over. I distinctly remember the circlejerking and getting lots of messages about how people who don’t like Hexbear are transphobic, though.

      • Fidel_Cashflow@lemmy.ml
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        3 months ago

        .world pre-emptively defederated from hexbear before hexbear ever entered federation. you are making things up wholecloth.

    • auzy@lemmy.world
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      3 months ago

      In my case, I went to the biggest one after leaving beehaw.

      I left beehaw because it was clear there was a double standard for one admin between minorities and the rest of us where an admin overlooked someone from a minority acting like a total ass and starting a fight… and blamed me simply because my opinion half agreed with an article that was posted.

      Which was such a pity because they other admin there is awesome (and I loved the idea of the instance), but I’m worried it will become a echo chamber eventually unfortunately where you simply can’t discuss things, but only agree with people

  • recursive_recursion [they/them]@programming.dev
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    3 months ago

    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