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.
(which lemmy.world is in the process of doing as well)
I'm one of them. Luigi censoring was the catalyst. I came to Lemmy to get away from corporate censorship. It also doesn't help that it's slow as fuck on desktop compared to the others I tried.
I'm surprised to hear about the slowness issue - I think this is the first time that I have, though I am definitely spoiled at Discuss.Online that has such a great technical admin (he also is the one who was developing Sublinks, before life and a baby intervened:-). Is lemm.ee much faster than lemmy.world for you?
Tbf there is legit fear in the USA that Trump will start to place bans or at least watchlists on social media outlets that Musk does not make money off of. Then again, I thought that LW wasn't really associated with the USA in any way besides having a bunch of users from it, and anyway you have found a perfect solution to the problem - if they don't want it, go somewhere else that does allow what you need.:-)
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)
At a guess, bc it doesn't have that many communities on it?
Efforts are underway to change that but yeah it definitely lacks the same punch as others - like sh.itjust.works has 5 communities that are each larger, some by almost 3 times, than the absolute largest one on lemm.ee.
That instance seems not so much a "source" of content across the Fediverse as a "destination" for posts made to communities elsewhere.
Then again, very little else compares to Lemmy.World in that regard - it has another 10 communities each larger, some twice as large, as sh.itjust.works does. It would be healthier for the network effects to split that up a bit more... but fortunately their upgrade process over the next few months should help a little.
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!:-).
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.
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...
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.