Just saw this on AskLemmy at .ml, thought this and chuckled, and now here we are.
Will take the opportunity to thank our admins for what they do, and all you humans for being here and generally being cool.
this post was submitted on 19 Jan 2025
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sh.itjust.works Main Community
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Personally I would go with Monthly Active Users, e.g. since Hexbear has managed to run off a good fraction of its users over time (which lemmy.world is in the process of doing as well).
This puts sh.itjust.works as #4, which it's been for a good long while, above Lemmy.ml and Hexbear and nearly all other instances.
Link, but the URL does not preserve the options shown, so you have to resort by Monthly Active Users.
I'm one of them. Luigi censoring was the catalyst. I came to Lemmy to get away from corporate censorship. It also doesn't help that it's slow as fuck on desktop compared to the others I tried.
I'm surprised to hear about the slowness issue - I think this is the first time that I have, though I am definitely spoiled at Discuss.Online that has such a great technical admin (he also is the one who was developing Sublinks, before life and a baby intervened:-). Is lemm.ee much faster than lemmy.world for you?
Tbf there is legit fear in the USA that Trump will start to place bans or at least watchlists on social media outlets that Musk does not make money off of. Then again, I thought that LW wasn't really associated with the USA in any way besides having a bunch of users from it, and anyway you have found a perfect solution to the problem - if they don't want it, go somewhere else that does allow what you need.:-)
Yes, MUCH. Sh.itjust.works is much faster as well. I don't know if it's because LW is still on 0.19.3 or what, but it's a very significant difference.
LW isn't associated with the US except for the fact that they're keen to kowtow to corporate censorship to avoid being sued and the like. Since they're by far the most visible instance on Lemmy I can't really blame them and it's probably better that they're more cautious to possibly take some of the heat off of everyone else. As you said, they didn't serve my needs, so I went elsewhere - having that option is what I love about the fediverse.
Lemmy.world has become a pro-censorship toxic shithole lately. Sooo glad I was made to find other instances.
Beauty of the fediverse.. If one place sucks, just find a different one 😊
dang I did not expect .ee to be on top behind .nsfw
At a guess, bc it doesn't have that many communities on it?
Efforts are underway to change that but yeah it definitely lacks the same punch as others - like sh.itjust.works has 5 communities that are each larger, some by almost 3 times, than the absolute largest one on lemm.ee.
That instance seems not so much a "source" of content across the Fediverse as a "destination" for posts made to communities elsewhere.
Then again, very little else compares to Lemmy.World in that regard - it has another 10 communities each larger, some twice as large, as sh.itjust.works does. It would be healthier for the network effects to split that up a bit more... but fortunately their upgrade process over the next few months should help a little.
Man, I just wanted to chant "We're #5", now I have people coming at me with facts. :p
(Jokes aside, I appreciate it. There's nuance to these metrics and what best accounts for 'size', particularly for those cases/services where the metrics reflect a little bugginess anyway)
I think when we yell "five", there should be a spirited booty shake.
🎶🎤🎶Errybody get yer shit onna dancefloor! Now work it. Just work it. Errybody getcher shit n work it🎶
🎤Wanna drive a lamborghini? Drink martinis? You betta work bitch🎤
See, everyone is coming in and talking about different means of measuring instances, the implications for the fediverse and the position of federated services against corporate monoliths like reddit.
But you, verity - you get it.
It's the Non-Credible Defense in me.
Well, now you are on a firm basis to chant being #4!? 😜
sh.itjust.works is at #4 by total posts as well, since hexbear was counted twice in the OP.
It's both amusing and unsurprising that lemmynsfw is second though
Wouldn't total posts bias towards older instances though, counting posts over time rather than activity today? So then good point that sh.itjust.works is so high up by both metrics:-).
While lemmy.ml continues to fall - by active users I think I recall it was #3 at some point, then #4, while now it's #5, where based on the gap below it, it seems likely to remain since users are now more distributed than previously (which is a good thing!:-).
Oh yeah, monthly active users is definitely the better metric, I just wanted to point out that in this case, it falls in the same place either way.
I wonder what the best metric would be for measuring how distributed Lemmy is. Maybe the ratio between total active monthly users vs the top 5 or 10 instances?
People used to say how Lemmy.World had ~80% of all users on the Fediverse. I'm not sure if that was older defunct accounts or what. But it does illustrate one thing: does it even matter where user accounts are located, when the federation model means that someone can access the entire thing, minus only whatever someone's instance has chosen to defederate from?
On Mastodon that matters greatly, due to the discoverability aspect, but here on the Threadiverse (or whatever we want to call ourselves to distinguish the forum vs. microblogging nature of our spaces, accessible via Lemmy, some app, Mbin, Friendica, PieFed, Tesseract, perhaps Sublinks one day, etc.)? On that note, my instances (Kbin.social, then StarTrek.Website, Discuss.Online, and now a mix between that and PieFed.social) have mostly been extremely tiny, but I never felt like I was excluded, being able to browse by All.
In fact quite the opposite! Having wandered into [email protected] and lemmygrad.ml and thereby exposing myself to their echo chambers, right inside the very ones hosted on their own instances but due to federation, hosted likewise on my instance as well, I strongly wished that the Fediverse would have been a little less connected - or at least if it has offered me some warning! (The sidebar text is only shown on a "community" page, not an individual post when arrived at via browsing All.)
And then there's communities to consider - so many are on Lemmy.World, but how much should that matter, vs. the users? Moderation though is primarily something related to communities. So like sh.itjust.works doesn't have all that many, there's e.g. [email protected], and lemmy.ca also, like there's [email protected] and [email protected], yet these general-purpose instances have so very many users, even if the communities themselves are mostly on lemmy.world.
If lemmy.world were to go down though, we'd lose a LOT, at least in the short term. Archived copies of older posts would remain cached on remote instances, but a new community would have to be created somewhere in order to allow continued posting.
So I don't think that the Threadiverse is all that distributed - but I also don't think that it matters for us?
It would be nice to see a way of unifying communities on multiple instances for redundancy and improving the situation with redundant communities across instances.
I'd imagine it would probably need to be an opt-in option on a per-community basis where one community can request to unify with another one, then from the other community the moderators can accept or reject the request, then the posts, scores and comments would be mirrored and maintained simultaneously across instances. Differences in block lists between instances would probably be a challenge but not an insurmountable one. Bigger challenge might be latency problems with the mirroring and federation but there's enough existing redundancy protocols that allow for servers with rediculous latency so that's probably also not insurmountable
It's really on the mods to accept to consolidate in one community.
All the issues you mention in your other paragraph are why this is probably never going to happen.
I'm mostly talking out a technical solution for community redundancy, similar to setting up redundant VM hosts or more accurately like redundant network hardware, where the data and configurations all exist on both servers, and might be load balanced to some degree between both servers, but ultimately should one go down there's no loss of uptime as the other server takes over until the time that it's mate comes back online or a new one is setup and connected
But that's infrastructure redundancy, it should rather happen there than at the Lemmy level, no?
Mods are generally not going to surrender their power, especially as differences in moderation techniques is what most often leads to new community formation in the first place:-).
Other than PieFed's Categories of Communities, the only other ways I know of to make Topic aggregations like that is to either find and switch to using an app that provides such (I have heard of at least one, but I don't recall which:-), or else have many Lemmy accounts and constantly switch between them - like one for News, another for Memes, etc. Or you can browse by All, and see mostly only memes and news from the USA all the time:-P.
But PieFed provides numerous methods handle this: not only Categories but also Topics to aid community discovery, and you can trigger Notifications for anything - a person, a comment, post, or even an entire community.
One day very soon I strongly believe that PieFed will surpass Lemmy in terms of usability. It already has in so many ways, though not quite all.
I'm thinking more unifying communities that either have the same mods or for annexing communities with inactive mods, and I keep referring to redundancy because that's the specific purpose in my mind, with the side effect of cleaning up the multiple dead communities with the same name on various instances.
There's a real risk in the Fediverse of the one server hosting a community going offline, and we've already seen at least one notable Lemmy host shamble on as a zombie server with absent instance administrators. Instead of forcing communities to tell eachother to migrate or to recreate themselves on a new instance should one disappear suddenly, by having the community effectively load balanced and replicated across 2 or more instances is a lot more resilient
I fully respect when moderator teams have different opinions running similar communities with different rules and expectations and in not saying that should be taken away. I'm just thinking about technical solutions to improve overall Fediverse health