The biggest surprise for me was the https://hexbear.net count, an instance I hardly interact with.
| beehaw.org | hexbear.net | lemdro.id | lemmy.blahaj.zone | lemmy.dbzer0.com | lemmy.ml | lemmy.one | lemmy.world | lemmynsfw.com | sh.itjust.works | sopuli.xyz | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Community Count | 6 | 33 | 1 | 1 | 1 | 14 | 1 | 39 | 2 | 1 | 1 |
| Community Subscriber Count | 133450 | 663204 | 17052 | 15907 | 53006 | 356460 | 16257 | 851950 | 33586 | 16006 | 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:
| awful.systems | feddit.org | feddit.uk | hexbear.net | lemdro.id | lemm.ee | lemmy.blahaj.zone | lemmy.ca | lemmy.dbzer0.com | lemmy.ml | lemmy.world | lemmy.wtf | lemmy.zip | mander.xyz | sh.itjust.works | slrpnk.net | sopuli.xyz | ttrpg.network | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Community Count | 1 | 2 | 2 | 1 | 1 | 3 | 1 | 3 | 3 | 10 | 57 | 1 | 3 | 1 | 5 | 3 | 2 | 1 |
| Community Active Month Count | 2616 | 7363 | 5289 | 2952 | 2898 | 8898 | 11422 | 14910 | 13752 | 54949 | 338384 | 3602 | 12020 | 11469 | 37365 | 10897 | 10070 | 4107 |
Community Count:
Community Users:
The problem is most likely people that are new to the fediverse/lemmy just not understanding it and choosing a "default", popular instance. I was going to pick it as a safe option when I first came here but it was under load and wasn't accepting new users, where I then had to find another instance and settled on feddit.uk.
It would be good if lemmy instances could have the option of "load balancing" new users, so if the current instance has way more active users than it's federated wtih then it disables registration but recommends other, smaller instances to the user.
We just need a way to make it easy to seamlessly transfer both users and communities to another instance then it really won't matter if one gets disproportionately large because a shutdown won't affect anything. Ideally the inner workings should be as invisible to the end user as possible.
Great to have you with us. 👍