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:
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.
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.
Are you okay lately? I had a look the other day, seems almost fixed:
https://grafana.lem.rocks/d/bdid38k9p0t1cf/federation-health-single-instance-overview?orgId=1&var-instance=lemmy.world&var-remote_instance=lemmy.nz
Aussie.zone on the other is almost a week behind: https://grafana.lem.rocks/d/bdid38k9p0t1cf/federation-health-single-instance-overview?orgId=1&var-instance=lemmy.world&var-remote_instance=aussie.zone
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).
Very interesting, thanks!