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
Do you mean local communities? If not, I do not understand your statement.
Also: can you explain how searching for communities is worse on smaller instances than on large ones? That does not make sense to me and does not reflect my experience at all.
I run my own instance and the one thing I will say is that I don’t see as much content browsing all on my own instance versus all on lemmy.world. Not sure why that is.
So the way Lemmy works is that a instance will only know about (and have the content of) a community if a user on that instance is subscribed to it. So when you browse All or search, only those communities that someone on the instance is subscribed to are included in the results. On a smaller instance that’s naturally going to be fewer communities.
Now if you search for a specific community by its URL that the instance doesn’t yet know about, it will actually go and fetch it for the first time. What this looks like to the user though is that the search shows no results, then suddenly 5-10 seconds later the results change and the community appears. Which is not a great UX for someone new. So again on an instance with more people it’s a lot more likely that someone else has already searched for and subscribed to what you’re looking for so that you don’t see that issue