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.
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.
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)
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?
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!
If you exclude blocked instances, you’re a lot higher than #5…
Yeah, we’re pretty much #2, which seems thematically appropriate :)
I got here as a kbin.social refugee and I can’t say I have any complaints.
more like #4 considering the hexbear duplicate
Did hexbear go through mitosis?
(Or are they going through mitosis like how USSR did in 1991? 🤣)
Good spot. I also want to know, but I fear the backstory…
It’s the same one, not sure why it’s reported twice.
That orb they have a puppet instance the same way ask their users have puppet accounts.
I’m surprised lemmy.ml isn’t on there, it seems really big from my limited experience.
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.
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
based on the creation date advertised by the instance, lemmy.ml exists since 2019-04-20. lemmy.world exists since 2023-06-01.
Huh, you’re right. In fairness this is cropped from an image shared on the AskLemmy .ml thread, so I’m not 100% sure what’s going on there. Edit: Image is legit. Weird…
They’re just loud. Like a terrier.
Does that include the NSFW instances?
Perhaps the list originally started at 0…
All this instance flexing has me feeling like a friend trying to get his other friends to like each other. Can’t we all get along? I mean, at least the ones that don’t promote hate and fascism?
Tbf, Hexbear, Lemmygrad, and Lemmy.ml all promote hate via being tankies. And the latter two tangentially support fascism because they support Russia in the current war, because 'Murikkka bad and therefore anyone that hates them must then be good
I mean this is the ideal. Most of the time I’m right there with ya. I’m just really attached to this instance - doesn’t mean that others are bad for not being on this (upon review, actually somewhat problematic) list.
*#4, hexbear (ew) is on there twice.
All I see is sjw being #2.
![[sh.it.post] We're #5! We're #5!](https://sh.itjust.works/pictrs/image/58e76358-5e82-4f03-b7ed-a6754b7875b9.jpeg){kind=link}