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:
And this is making a lemmy.world monopoly, which is bad for the fediverse (still better, than reddit).
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.
You mean like the mastodon app does? https://blog.joinmastodon.org/2023/05/a-new-onboarding-experience-on-mastodon/
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.
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