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:
If the dbzer0 instance allows piracy talk but I'm signed up to an instance that doesn't allow it, can I talk in their community or do I risk being banned from mine?
In other words, are my comments stored on their instance or on mine?
Lemmy stores your posts and replies on both your host server and on the server of the community.
One interesting behavior to note here that is different from reddit is that while comments on reddit belong to the profile of the person commenting and is then imported to view in the subreddit (this is why you can edit comments after being banned, and why there visible in your profile even if removed from a subreddit), on lemmy the target community is instead authoritative and your host server will by default respect a deletion by community mods on different servers by also removing that comment from your profile.
You can talk on their instance. If the moderator of your instance dis not wanted you to interact with this other instance they would have block it.
That I'm not sure. But I think there is a copy of the content you accessed on your instance. Maybe someone administrating an instance could answer you better than I did.
Your comments are stored on both. The "canonical" version would be on your home instance but every instance that is federated with your instance would get a copy of your comments. I think it's even possible to have your content removed from one instance but not another. One of my posts shows as removed in the mod log but isn't actually removed.