cross-posted from: https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/post/27579423
Communities are clustered by common users. I am also part of jlai.lu, a french-speaking instance, that is pretty isolated, while slrpnk.net is very spread out. I find it an interesting view.
This is my first try at creating a map of lemmy. I based it on the overlap of commentors that visited certain communities.
I only used communities that were on the top 35 active instances for the past month and limited the comments to go back to a maximum of August 1 2024 (sometimes shorter if I got an invalid response.)
I scaled it so it was based on percentage of comments made by a commentor in that community.
Here is the code for the crawler and data that was used to make the map:
Language barriers. German feddit.org and Italian feddit.it are also outside. Partly that also might be a country thing. aussie.zone is also a bit outside. The other big group are defederated communities like lemmynsfw, lemmybear and hexbear.
Slrpnk is most English and many topics are relativly intressting to none instance users. So you get that. Besides a bunch of more solarpunk specific communities that is.
So federation seems to work rather well.
Yes, but I find it interesting to see that despite having a theme, slrpnk.net is as spread as generic instances and less clustered as, e.g. programming instances, lgbt, anime or nsfw ones.
I also find it interesting to see which communities bridge users from several instances: /c/ubuntu is the link between the french-speaking world and programming? /c/dragonball is the most mainstream anime community. I also find it interesting that the tankies communities, despite a few bridges, look extremely isolated.
Lemmygrad and Heybear both defederated from other lemmy instances. It is deliberatly its own little network. Both used to be reddit communites, with a long list of enemies for being tankies, so they like the isolation. Other then that I bet lemmy.ml has a lot of the same userbase.