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:
I knew hexbear was big but not that big
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
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.
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
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.
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.
Hey, aren’t you the one who dropped a diaper load because Hexbear removed your comments justifying supporting candidates who were pro genocide?
https://hexbear.net/modlog?page=1&actionType=All&userId=27562
You can block instances yourself, I personally don’t like when an instance makes that decision for me.
I cannot facepalm hard enough when I see lgbt people (or anyone) who praise western genocidal military alliances either. What’s your point?
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!”
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.
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
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!
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.
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…
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.
If I remember correctly, Hexbear was there before the exodus. So that wouldn’t make sense.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
.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.
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.
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).
OFL, what is going on with this hexbear? And is there any reason behind the name?
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)
Always nice to see lemmynsfw doing well. Those guys are going to bring a lot of people here
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
I think it is odd that they have no community in the top 100 anymore when sorted by active users
Do they even have original posters? I thought it was just onlyfans farmers reposting their Reddit content.
It’s a real mystery, where could these instances possibly be located?
(apologies for derailing, I don’t know where else to post this)
“Private” in these fedi-surveys are just a complicated way of saying “behind Cloudflare” without saying behind Cloudflare for some reason.
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.
I added it to the main post :) And yeah should have done so in the initial post as well…
2 observations:
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Wow I didn’t think hexbear was that large. That’s unfortunate…
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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.
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.
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)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
As someone out of the loop, why is hexbear bad? Alternatively, what is hexbear about?
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.
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.
Surprised I dont see programming.dev in the data, we definitely have at least 3 communities in the top 100 (programmer_humor, programming, linux)
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
What do you mean by “manually counted”? And what did you use to generate the chart? Is that a Google API?
I looked at the community list in programming.dev (from https://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
In this list it doesn’t seem like it: https://lemmyverse.net/communities?order=active_month
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 https://programming.dev/communities that programmer humor has way more active users than most communities here
Their deploy pipeline is broken as well. So I think that is the reason for the old crawl date
And here the diagram by community subscriber count:
Oh that would be interesting as well. I will do that. Checking back in 2h :D
