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:
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.
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
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.
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.
that’s the main reason I moved away from lemmy.world
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.
one of their tankie leaders just got caught calling trans issues “western pink washing.”
Your whole post is made up, but this is at least a specific claim that also didn’t happen. Pics or you’re talking shit.
Thats a .ml admin
https://lemmy.ml/post/18761554
see the link to “kristinas post” for The hexbear take on the situation (nutomic is banned from hexbear afaik)
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.
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.
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
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.
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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
Sounds like you waste alot of time with people who don’t deserve it
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
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.
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.
Isn’t your instance federated with hexbear? Seems like it hardly blocks any lemmy instances.
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.
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.
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.
deleted by creator
You can block instances yourself, I personally don’t like when an instance makes that decision for me.
Blocking an instance is just equivalent to blocking all the communities on that instance. You’ll still see the blocked instance’s posts and comments in other instances and (maybe more importantly) the instance will still influence your feed via voting. So if hexbear collectively upvotes or downvotes some post, that will influence your feed. Defederation is the only way to prevent that kind of influence.
Downvotes are disabled on hexbear just fyi. One of the reason people leave a comment with stuff they disagree with. But upvoting yeah, very active userbase very actively upvoting means a lot of my feed on lemm.ee is from hexbear.
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.
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
I disagree with those comments, but they seem pretty mild to have been banned. I just don’t see how it’s productive to ban all liberals the moment they try to explain their views. All that does is push people away who could potentially have been a future ally.
For starters, all liberals have Reddit and Lemmy.world, which are large. Where do leftists have?
Secondly, this comment is indistinguishable from concern-trolling. I’d have to read through your post history or go back and forth with you to know if you were an honest actor or just a troll.
Thirdly, most of us know your views, and have rejected them. Why would we care to hear them? Ask the homeless people in any major city how important discussions of freedom are. So fuck your so-called “productivity.” If you were an ally you’d listen and be an ally.
For starters, all liberals have Reddit and Lemmy.world, which are large. Where do leftists have?
I agree that lemmy.world is a primarily liberal instance, but I haven’t seen the same level of censorship on lemmy.world as I have on hexbear, though I’m open to evidence to the contrary. You can create a space for a specific ideology without resorting to such an extreme level of censorship and lemmy.world is proof of that. Also see my home instance slrpnk.net, we’re a primarily anarchist instance and we haven’t had to resort to extreme censorship to achieve that.
Secondly, this comment is indistinguishable from concern-trolling. I’d have to read through your post history or go back and forth with you to know if you were an honest actor or just a troll.
By what method do you distinguish concern-trolling from legitimate concern? Concern-trolls generally want to shut down discussion, and the whole reason for my concern is that censorship shuts down discussion.
Thirdly, most of us know your views, and have rejected them.
They’re not my views, did you miss the part of my comment where I said I disagree with the comments that got them banned?
if people steer clear of our buses and trains because they’re busy doubling as psych wards and homeless shelters.
is not tame at all it dehumanizes some of societies most vulnerable. Imagine someone who has been in a psych ward or a homeless person reads this, and keep in mind both can be found posting on hexbear.
We don’t live in a tame world, lots of people have deeply problematic viewpoints. When someone who expresses such viewpoints is otherwise well-intentioned it’s better to address them directly and potentially change some minds (or at least plant the seed) than to shun them and further entrench them into a problematic worldview.
Yep, that’s me. You could probably find a few more good examples of me stepping in shit on Hexbear, that’s hardly the first.
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.
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.
There’s actually a lot of lgbt people there, based on their last poll:
https://hexbear.net/post/2687582
you should come post in our extremely active weekly trans megathreads, you’ll see that a lot of your preconceived notions are simply not true.
https://hexbear.net/post/3203892 or https://lemmy.ml/post/19071341
It’s uncanny, so many times when I run into a commenter with a specific axe to grind about hexbear, they got already banned for something weird, in this case 2 days prior
ah, in that case, maybe she should stay far far away from the trans mega :)
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.
Wtf are you talking about? Oh, a .ml user. Ok then.
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
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.
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.
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
Bro my instance just defederated them. Happy to say I’ve never seen their shit
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 didn’t realise committing genocide made people look good, I guess. You know those militaries kill lgbt people too right?
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.
Interesting, I expected them to be much larger
What is hexbear? I never see it in my feed.
Think of it as the Tankie version of The Donald.
Horseshoe theory strikes again.
Political illiteracy strikes again
Yeah, I’m doing my best to learn the concepts but I have a ways to go.
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]
Your instance is defederated from them
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.
I really don’t think the specific date of reddit departure is what shaped the politics of either community, especially not when the one you’re saying was less shaped by reddit was born out of a political subreddit
Hexbear’s site culture is full of in jokes and big on dunking. That’s always going to be abrasive to outsiders, even without the whole thing where all of their many emojis were enormous on other instances
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…
If I remember correctly, Hexbear was there before the exodus. So that wouldn’t make sense.
Hexbear is older than most of the fediverse, and didn’t have federation enabled for years. It’s a very self-sufficient community.
Or because it’s older than most of the other instances
like Beehaw
Is there something wrong with beehaw?
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
Ah that makes sense
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.
That’s probably it
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.
I haven’t even heard of it xd
. world is defederated with hexbear iirc
Oh. Why?
You could go visit hexbear and you’d find out pretty quickly. It’s definitely not for everyone.
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.
What about blahaj?
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).
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.
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.
Gab also was big, but its role for the fediverse wasn’t.
Who or what is/was Gab? 😅
Its like truth social
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
Oh definitely
Do they even have original posters? I thought it was just onlyfans farmers reposting their Reddit content.
It would be the hardest thing to moderate if lemmy blows up though.
Hehehe hardest hehehe
I think it is odd that they have no community in the top 100 anymore when sorted by active users
I think it’s good.
💜Purple slices rise up!💜
Surprised I dont see programming.dev in the data, we definitely have at least 3 communities in the top 100 (programmer_humor, programming, linux)
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
Oh that is unfortunate
Paging @tgxn@lemmy.tgxn.net
I’m here now, thanks for the ping :)
Thanks for maintaining lemmyverse :)
Thank YOU for being the MVP that let me know it was broken! 🤣 🔥
Programming.dev represent! o7
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.
Defederating from Hexbear probably didn’t hurt. I remember when the users were literally flooding
.worldmy 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.
.world pre-emptively defederated from hexbear before hexbear ever entered federation. you are making things up wholecloth.
During the Reddit API exodus I saw it in lots of comments. That’s how I ended up here.
Duplicate instances are a problem imho. You can see the network effect synergy working by how many communities flock to the biggest instance lemmy.world.
There also need to be tools to merge two communities on separate instances, or move them.
Two of my niche instances tried to leave reddit, but then there were two versions, one on .ml and one on .world. Confusing. Maybe there need to be reviews for communities or instances.
I wouldn’t mind so much if there were a way to see duplicate posts across instances. I guess it’d be hard to implement but as it stands unless it’s specifically a crosspost you can’t find other discussions of the same media
Oh yeah absolutely, lemmy definitely needs better cross posting. Currently crossposts are kinda yanky with quote blocks. I’d also love to see reposts that are detected automatically.
I’d also love to see reposts that are detected automatically.
Reposts are based on the URL linked in the post. If it’s the same URL, both posts will display as crossposts.
Is there a way to create a pie like this but on an individual basis?
You mean the spread of the communities you are subscribed to? If so: probably yes, but not an easy one as you have to have access to the data (or more easily: the database)
One amusing bit re: hexbear, it’s been around almost as long as lemmy.ml and lemmygrad.ml, but it seems was only added to the tracker last year, as it shows up as 12 months old, I have to imagine it’s including posts/comments from before that timeframe because bozhe moi:
Even if you divide the hexbear comments by 4 they’d still be in the top
32 excluding the reddit repost bot. Yappers.It’s hard to beat an operation with state funding.
The what now?
Hexbear contains a funded propoganda network filled with bots. All the other content on there is mostly just to lure people in.
But, who’s the alleged state sponsor? Don’t tell me it’s Russia, that wouldn’t make any sense.
Lmfao
Oh come on now. Think a little. What is hexbear all about? LGBT and Communism. Now, guess which two things Putin heads the most? Do you really think that we have money to fund people LARPing as gay commies, on an isolated instance, in an obscure social network, in a country that’s already extremely short on cash because of war? Get your head out the arse.
The least Propogandizing Hexbear User:
https://lemmy.today/post/14825323
Btw its the CCP, moron. Did you think they honestly worship Xi Jinping because hes that charismatic?
I was briefly a Hexbear member pre-federation, and while I don’t have any proof, I left because that was exactly the vibe I got from the place.
“I have a girlfriend but she lives in Canada and doesn’t have any socials”
everyone goes to the most popular one because they think that’s the one with all the things on it that’s how the internet works that’s what everyone’s doing
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 went with it because I figured it had same peering defaults.
It does, which is really nice.
You’re welcome.
I thought they were blocked everywhere. What’s going on? Bunch of bots or something?
No, it’s just a big community by itself already. So while some big instances have it blocked, they have enough users to just have activity from their own instance.
It isn’t big though. They just get kicked out of everywhere else they go for being disruptive assholes, so for every community there’s a hexbear duplicate
lol, what disruption did they do when LW “pre-emptively defederated” them “as a last resort”? Or did they just get banned for being leftists?
