this post was submitted on 10 Jul 2023
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Fediverse

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A community to talk about the Fediverse and all it's related services using ActivityPub (Mastodon, Lemmy, KBin, etc).

If you wanted to get help with moderating your own community then head over to [email protected]!

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Learn more at these websites: Join The Fediverse Wiki, Fediverse.info, Wikipedia Page, The Federation Info (Stats), FediDB (Stats), Sub Rehab (Reddit Migration), Search Lemmy

founded 2 years ago
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Current breakdown at the time of this post sorted by the number of monthly active users:

  1. lemmy.world: 101,013 total users / 27,472 active users
  2. lemmy.ml: 41,972 total users / 4,905 active users
  3. beehaw.org: 12,270 total users / 4,178 active users
  4. sh.itjust.works: 17,509 total users / 3,381 active users
  5. feddit.de: 8,675 total users / 2,935 active users
  6. lemm.ee: 10,348 total users / 2,751 active users
  7. lemmynsfw.com: 22,967 total users / 2,310 active users
  8. lemmy.fmhy.ml: 8,777 total users / 1,704 active users
  9. lemmy.ca: 5,072 total users / 1,656 active users
  10. programming.dev: 5,058 total users / 1,242 active users

Source: https://the-federation.info/platform/73

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[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago (2 children)

I wouldn't recommend small instances to newbies. New users will likely use the All feed a lot, until they discover the communities they like. And on a small instance the All feed isn't going to have as many communities in it. Also the experience of searching for communities is worse on a smaller instance.

I think these aren't problems for experienced users but I don't think we want to expose newbies to them if we can help it.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Do you mean local communities? If not, I do not understand your statement.
Also: can you explain how searching for communities is worse on smaller instances than on large ones? That does not make sense to me and does not reflect my experience at all.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

I run my own instance and the one thing I will say is that I don't see as much content browsing all on my own instance versus all on lemmy.world. Not sure why that is.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

So the way Lemmy works is that a instance will only know about (and have the content of) a community if a user on that instance is subscribed to it. So when you browse All or search, only those communities that someone on the instance is subscribed to are included in the results. On a smaller instance that's naturally going to be fewer communities.

Now if you search for a specific community by its URL that the instance doesn't yet know about, it will actually go and fetch it for the first time. What this looks like to the user though is that the search shows no results, then suddenly 5-10 seconds later the results change and the community appears. Which is not a great UX for someone new. So again on an instance with more people it's a lot more likely that someone else has already searched for and subscribed to what you're looking for so that you don't see that issue

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

Why wouldn't the All feed have as many communities on small instances? Does federation have to be 'consensual'?

Also, I noticed I can reply to comments on this thread but not the post itself. Does this have to do with federation or is it a limitation of Jerboa or smthn?

(Also - TIL feddit.it is located in Finland!? 😅)

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

All is based on every community that someone subscribed to on an instance, so smaller instances generally have less communities.