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:
Active users is the standard metric used to check how much a service is used (at least as far as i know. its what i see when i look at stuff published for investors).
hexbar is on the sixth place in term of number of active users with 1.8K , lemmy.world is 18K (enable the "active users" column and sort by it to see the full list)
anyone have any guesses as to why lemmy.world is so big? Scale/size advantage? Reliability advantage? Name recognition? What do we think is the culprit here.
And whilst i'm here, anybody want to explain the source of lemmy.ml to me? I only know it as the instance where mad people yell at me from lol.
perhaps a more "ambiguous" federation system would be better. having community instances is nice and all, but having one literally just be lemmy.world seems a little bit antithetical to me.
A barchart might be better as the comparison of instances with the most subscribed accounts doesn't mean much I feel
we have some users that register but are inactive and/or are infrequently active which could be a sign of lurkers or bots but empty accounts don't mean much when it comes to the health of an instance.
However; if we look at each community's active monthly and daily users it can tell another story and that data compared against Reddit's could be useful for anyone seeking alternatives
I'm rambling with little sleep but hopefully what I've said make a little bit of sense
Duplicate instances are a problem imho. You can see the network effect synergy working by how many communities flock to the biggest instance lemmy.world.
There also need to be tools to merge two communities on separate instances, or move them.
Two of my niche instances tried to leave reddit, but then there were two versions, one on .ml and one on .world. Confusing. Maybe there need to be reviews for communities or instances.
One amusing bit re: hexbear, it's been around almost as long as lemmy.ml and lemmygrad.ml, but it seems was only added to the tracker last year, as it shows up as 12 months old, I have to imagine it's including posts/comments from before that timeframe because bozhe moi:
Even if you divide the hexbear comments by 4 they'd still be in the top 3 2 excluding the reddit repost bot. Yappers.
everyone goes to the most popular one because they think that's the one with all the things on it that's how the internet works that's what everyone's doing
If i'm understanding the last graph right, it's showing the total number of active monthly users per instance's top communities, filtered by the overall top 100 communities?
So if an instance has activity spread out over many niche communities, that activity isn't represented on this graph?
I would think having a diversity of smaller communities is more in-line with the spirit of the fediverse, I'm not sure of the value in slicing the data in this way.
Your data quality is questionable. You list only 2 communities for feddit.org. Lemmy Explorer has 148. I doubt that they’re all ‘suspicious’. And if they are, then that flag is itself suspicious.