Home of the sh.itjust.works instance.
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.
Wow. So great. Amazing. Truly exceptional.
Damn right!
This is the instance I direct everyone to, it’s been the most reasonable AND least bothersome.
5/7
Im not seen as a specific subset like if I were to move to blahaj or Midwest (which would be my next two picks). I like being seen as 'just a person'
It, quite literally, just works.
So? Is there a contest?
So!? We're #5! Or 4! Or something!
(Not everything needs a point - I just felt like posting this. Though it does look like it's started a discussion about the relative size of lemmy and different instances, which is neat to think about once in a while - or disheartening depending on your perspective)
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.
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.
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?
Hexbear is counted twice, so you're actually #4.
This image is a bit disheartening, ngl
im still relatively new to lemmy and am crossposting or whatever the term is , from lemmy.world but its mind boggling that the tankie sect is as big as it is on here.
They really aren't, 4k monthly active users out of 43k
4k too many
Your instance defederates from hexbear and grad already. You can choose to block ml in your account settings
But then what would they complain about?
I imagine feddit.nl is nowhere near the top but I sort of like it that way.
20th by monthly active users, accounting for hexbear double entry
https://fedidb.org/software/lemmy
Definitely a good position
Certainly enough to keep the instance afloat I assume!
This is upsetting as fuck. This one picture just made me realize that Lemmy is likely never going to get much bigger. The top is just an exact clone of Reddit, meaning there's no reason to use it over Reddit, and the next three are active propaganda mills filled with fascists and tankies. After that you get normal servers. That's a terrible look. That guarantees anyone new joining will likely join one of those 4 and will either think "what's the point, this is just Reddit with a percent of the users" or "JFC these people are all Nazis" or worst of all which seems to already be the case "finally, somewhere I can speak freely about those dirty Ukrainians/Palestinians/Americans/Women/LGBTQ/OtherMinorities!"
It is far worse than that imho, sadly.
For one, we are most definitely actively getting smaller, both since the Rexodus and also since just earlier this year. I think people are returning to Reddit but wherever they are going it is not here. We lack sufficient content for them, despite having the good apps that Reddit used to. This is software built by tankies, and has authoritarian purposes baked into the core.
And for another, a Google search for "Lemmy", after the singer, pulls up as the top instance lemmy.ml, which notably uses a Local rather than All feed by default. So it's just absolutely full of posts hating on the USA, UK, Germany, and anyone else who opposes the interests of Russia and China and North Korea. THIS is what "Lemmy" is, to people who don't use DuckDuckGo as their primary search engine.
It may already be too late to reverse this trend: we lost the momentum of the Rexodus, and we won't even be honest about who and what we are now, which would be a prerequisite for change - we are a Nazi bar.
An example of our authoritarianism is the modding tools here. The fact that we have a modlog at all is awesome, but the fact that it just says "mod" rather than who removed something, while simultaneously offering no modmail to communicate with whoever did it in order to ask why, is not. Also reports don't federate. Lemmy was built by the admins of lemmy.ml, and if we want more of a non-authoritarian experience - e.g. a modmail - it seems we would have to build such ourselves?
Also, on Reddit (at least, prior to the Rexodus, I dunno if it still does today?) when a post is removed the post link remains viable, and people can still have discussions within it. On Lemmy, a capricious mod can remove something entirely. Imagine writing our a long response (such as I've done here:-), only to find after all of that that the post has been removed in the meantime and I can't even respond to the person I was talking to, even if they were not the OP. Nor can I even finish reading through the comments - they are just, poof, gone.
As authoritarian as Huffman made Reddit into, we are so very similar - not at the top, obviously, bc open source makes all the difference, but when it comes down to the actual user experience, e.g. how a Redditor will look at us and judge this place to be, based on how we will treat them (and I haven't even begun here to get into how centrists from the USA will feel in this leftist dominated environment!:-P). We have the seeds to be more, but we won't make the computer code to make that happen.
Pretty good assessment! When I was using Reddit I used it like a lot and the way the Reddit admins treatet it made it not feel like home. I spent like so much time there so I ended up deleting my account. It wasn't even the powermods or admin scandals although what kinda pushed me over the edge was the exclusivity contract with google. Only google was now supposed to be able to use web crawlers on Reddit. I use Qwant as my main search engine and didn't like the way they gate kept the content made by people. Then only google is supposed to be able to train their AI with this data. They act like they own what I upload and create and I loved the idea of lemmy so I migrated to a german instance. After the big FUCK SPEZ on r/place I think a mod of r/ich_iel Hubi got like banned or something for a certain time so they decided to push for a migration to feddit.de, later feddit.org after feddit.de went down.
Reddit is already a left leaning platform in a political sense and lemmy is on another level. Even if you block out all the tankie instances. Sad to see the number of users slowly dropping bit by bit. It around the same but I'm kinda like just waiting for it to get better but it might never will. I'm a real sucker for FOSS and privacy so to think lemmy might now ever become more popular is sad to me.
If we don't grow then we'll shrink merely due to attrition. Or perhaps I'm overblowing things out of proportion, but I definitely am saying that we won't simply grow as if by magic - that would take effort, and part of that is making this place welcoming enough for others besides ourselves to want to come here. Which we really struggle with, despite how great this space truly is, in part bc perhaps the people that we most want to come here - comic artists and the like - are not like us.
In particular they may not care about politics at all, or even have a different stance than most of us. I mean centrist, bc Alt-Right MAGATs can just fuck all the way off! So... do we want to remain as we are, or change to become more inclusive and invite them in? We can do whatever we want, but it takes being honest and then making it happen. And right now we are an Alt-Left Nazi bar, just as X is an Alt-Right one, leaving the biggest place in the middle as... sigh, Reddit.
more like #4 considering the hexbear duplicate
Did hexbear go through mitosis?
(Or are they going through mitosis like how USSR did in 1991? 🤣)
I got here as a kbin.social refugee and I can't say I have any complaints.
If you exclude blocked instances, you're a lot higher than #5...
You just made me realize that for me they are number one as I've got the other 4 blocked.
Yeah, we're pretty much #2, which seems thematically appropriate :)
I'm surprised lemmy.ml isn't on there, it seems really big from my limited experience.
No really, .ml isn't even in top 10? Did they opt-out from these statistics or are they that small?
https://fedidb.org/software/lemmy
Edit: well I guess they really are that small. But total posts they have at 147k, what is going on here?
so small and yet so loud
Honestly I think their higher upvote / post ratio is a better formula. Most of Lemmy has too little engagement on it's posts for my tastes.
based on the creation date advertised by the instance, lemmy.ml exists since 2019-04-20. lemmy.world exists since 2023-06-01.
Post on an instance are not necessarily the right metric to how active the users of an instance are, just how many large and active communities are there.
Does that include the NSFW instances?
Perhaps the list originally started at 0...
