Current breakdown at the time of this post sorted by the number of active users:
- lemmy.world: 101,013 users
- lemmy.ml: 41,972 users
- beehaw.org: 12,270 users
- sh.itjust.works: 17,509 users
- feddit.de: 8,675 users
- lemm.ee: 10,348 users
- lemmynsfw.com: 22,967 users
- lemmy.fmhy.ml: 8,777 users
- lemmy.ca: 5,072 users
- programming.dev: 5,058 users
why are so many lemmy.ml users not active compared to .world or beehaw?
lemmy.ml is very old, because it’s run by the devs of lemmy.
Beehaw has a number of news and politics communities. As one might imagine, there’s livelier debates and discussion and lots of new things to discuss almost every day.
I’m going to use the past tense here. Reddit was more than anything a news feed, at least originally. I suspect that their early days created a lot of momentum around politics, national and world news, since they are naturally bountiful sources of content.