GitHub - DanielS684/LemmyFediverseData
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I was recently inspired by this post made by @mookulator@mander.xyz to get the subscription statistics for a list of Lemmy instances.

I did this by scraping the data from the Communities tab from every Lemmy instance listed on the awesome-lemmy-instances from GitHub. So all of this data is available publicly.

I separated it as follows:

Local instance: The instance that the data is being scraped from

Community: The name of the community

Community instance: The instance that the community is hosted on

Local Subscription count: The subscription count of that community coming from the local instance

If the Local instance is equal to the Community instance the Subscription count is actually the total number of users subscribed to that community across the Threadiverse.

Since I was web scraping these websites the data is a bit rough because I had to convert stuff like 42K into 42000 so it isn’t going to be 100% accurate.

Also, this scrape doesn’t include instances that weren’t on the list when I pulled the CSV and alternatives to Lemmy like Kbin or Mastodon users subscribing to Lemmy communities.

This was gathered over the course of a day starting from 12:00 PM EST to about 7:00 PM EST today.

The data could be better if I used the API or added the information from lemmyverse.net on the total subscriber counts but I spent a lot of time on this as is and don’t know how to use the API.

I hope someone uses this to make a data visualization of subscription patterns for Lemmy because I would really like to see that.

P.S. On the post that inspired this post, there was some discussion about whether Lemmy users would like this to be done. So if you guys don’t like it I will delete the data.

  • wiki_me@lemmy.mlEnglish
    6·
    1 year ago

    I don’t think subscriber count is a useful metric, look here, subscriber count keeps growing but number of comments made decreased by a lot (apparently reddit was hit hard from the API changes).

    I don’t know what you can do with that kind of data, but maybe doing the same thing for active users is better.

    • Danterious@lemmy.dbzer0.comOP
      2·
      1 year ago

      Yeah, I was thinking of scraping the active users as well but from what I observed when trying different instances, the active users aren’t counted separately by instance so the active users would just be all the active users on that community no matter where they are from. That info is already available on lemmyverse.net so I didn’t want to copy it.

      I bet there is a way to do this with the Lemmy API but I don’t have a good understanding on how to use it so I am just waiting for someone more knowledgeable than me to try this again but with more care.

      Edit: Unrelated but I went through the subreddit stats for a bunch of subs and it seems like posts and comments for a lot of them have dropped off after the API changes so that seems bad for Reddit and good for us.