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:
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.