State of the Lemmy Federation - Q2 2022 - Exploding Heads
exploding-heads.com
I was curious to see which Lemmy instances were getting the most page views, which were growing quickly, etc. So I picked a free tool called StatShow to make the comparisons. Not sure how accurate it is, but I figured it would serve as a guide. Here is what I found: Top 10 Lemmy Instances by monthly page views 1. Lemmy.ml 2. Lemmy.ca 3. Lemmygrad.ml 4. Lemmy.eus 5. Forum.NoBigTech.es 6. Lemmy.pt 7. Lemmy.cat 8. MidWest.Social 9. Szmer.info 10. Exploding-Heads.com When you look at those to top 10 Lemmy instances you realize what a diverse crowd Lemmy users are: - Lots of different countries, - Lots of different languages, - Lots of different viewpoints. Makes me proud to be part of the Lemmy community. I wanted to give a special mention to 4 of those top 10 Lemmy instances that are growing incredibly quickly. Fastest Growing Lemmy Instances - Forum.NoBigTech.es +227% - Lemmy.ca +195% - MidWest.Social +94% - Lemmy.pt +68% They are clearly doing something very right and with that sort of growth, the Lemmy community is going to be much bigger tomorrow then it is today. Perhaps we could learn from what those individual instances are doing to grow so fast and apply the lessons to help the entire Lemmy community grow even faster. I will update these stats each quarter for those interested.

I put together this list of the top 10 Lemmy instances by page views - mainly to see what I could learn to improve what we are doing and be more successful.

I noticed a few things I found curious, so I thought I might raise them here and see if you had any suggestions/explanations.

I used a tool called SiteShow to gather the info that has a bunch of different data points. (BTW I have no idea how accuate this tool is - if you have a better suggestion for me to use in the future, please let me know).

So here are some of the things I noticed:

None of the Top 10 had a Page Rank from Google or Quantcast. Is there something we can change to get a ranking - which I believe helps improve our directory and search engine rankings? I double checked with another site for a page rank and it found all the instances were ranked (Google PageRank) between 2 out of 10 and 3 out of 10 except Lemmy.ml which was ranked 4 out of 10. Still seems very low - wondering what we can do to improve this?

About half the top 10 instances were indexed with Google, Bing, & Yahoo

But the other half were not.

This surprised me because I thought once a search engine found one of our instances, it would have spidered its way through the rest of the instances. I would have thought being indexed by all the major search engines would be important to bring more traffic and users to our Lemmy communities.

Lastly for the instances that were indexed by the major search engines, as a general rule, they had a lot fewer pages indexed then I would have expected based on the number of posts listed in these instances SideBars. I wonder what we could do to get these search engines to index more of our pages.

What about at the bottom of each post after the comments we lists 3 other “You might also be interested in” links to posts. Say 2 randomly selected from the same community and a third randomly selected from another community? Maybe a 4th randomly selected from a different instance?

Any thoughts/suggestions?

  • nutomicMA
    10·
    2 years ago

    I dont think these statistics are reliable. It seems to be mainly based on Alexa rank, but alexa.com was shut down a few months ago. And it shows lemmy.ml as hosted in UK, while its actually in France, which should be very easy to determine.

    Personally i think that word of mouth is much more important than search engine ranking for a community project like Lemmy.

    • Troll
      4·
      2 years ago

      Personally i think that word of mouth is much more important than search engine ranking for a community project like Lemmy.

      It’s not necessarily one or the other, it can also be one and the other :)

    • TheConquestOfBed
      2·
      2 years ago

      Yeah, their statement about NoBigTech is laughable considering it has 5 users. Not even a mention that Lemmygrad is more active than the rest of Lemmy combined.