Comment by thedaly@reseed.it on 10 days after 3rd party reddit app shutdown, Lemmy's top 10 instances combine for a thriving userbase of 234,000

Current breakdown at the time of this post sorted by the number of monthly active users:

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

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

Of the top five, sh.itjust.works seems to be the best. Definitely the instance that I would recommend to new users.

I’m currently starting out on Lemmy.world, any reason to switch over?

Not really once you have an account. During the protest lemmy.world and ml were basically unusable though, but either they scaled or people left the servers.

I did try to start with that. My first experience was in may I think and ironically enough, it did not work back then. Probably improved a lot since then.

Because that’s where the most active NCD community is.

Well I would recommend it since it works, hence the name, shitjustworks lol.

In all seriousness, you can’t start a new platform and simultaneously expect to exclude large segments of potential users. Shitjustworks seems to toe the line better than other instances. They ban spam/bots while still allowing most content.

Generally, I recommend avoiding the top two instances if you are considering creating an account, and I would recommend avoiding beehaw for other reasons. So that leaves you at shitjustworks.

I‘m all with you on the beehaw topic, but please keep in mind to recommend smaller instances to newbies, because that‘s what federation is all about. Aside from load distribution (lots of instances are run by individuals or groups on small(ish) machines), you can avoid being independent on single large entities keeping their uptime etc.

TLDR: recommend smaller instances for load distribution to get the best out of a federated world!

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.

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!? 😅)

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

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.

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

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.

I’d second the recommendation to avoid BeeHaw. That’s where I started when I left Reddit. It’s not bad per se there. I wouldn’t say that they are rude or anything. The big problem is that they’ve decided to defederate from many other Lemmy instances.

In case anyone doesn’t understand federation, imagine if you signed up for an email address and then realized that, because the person running the email service decided so, you can’t email anyone at Gmail.com or Hotmail.com. If you have nobody you want to email there (no Lemmy communities you want to interact with there), then it’s not a problem. However, if you decide you really want to join a community there, it gets difficult.

I left BeeHaw and signed up for Lemmy.world.

I don’t understand the big push to defederate from other instances when individual users can block instances as they please.

Individuals can’t block whole instances yet (apart from via a browser extension), once that feature arrives there will be a lot less call for defederation I expect.

I didn’t know that. Thank you for clarifying.

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