Aren't the flagship instances right now essentially lemmy.world and sh.itjust.works? Maybe Beehaw once the re-federation gets figured out? And then kbin.social on the kbin side.

This only matters if you use lemmy.ml, which I would expect to be largely defederated at some point soonish.

[–] dannoffs@lemmy.sdf.org 15 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Lemmy.world at this point is over twice as big as Lemmy.ml, and lemmy.ml isn't even linked on the join-lemmy.org page anymore. It's more of the reference instance than the flagship instance now.

[–] Widget@kbin.social 7 points 1 year ago

Yeah, reference instance sounds more correct.

[–] Nadya@kbin.social 4 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

That does seem to have changed since I last cared to look. As dannoffs pointed out - it seems lemmy.ml was unlisted from the join-lemmy.org instances page where previously it was listed as #1 for the Popular section. They also removed the ## users / month metric so the list is no longer guaranteed to be sorted by popularity.

Just last week - lemmy.world was reporting as 87 users/month and lemmy.ml as 1.6k users/month:

https://web.archive.org/web/20230608170721/https://join-lemmy.org/instances

This has of course changed - and unlisting the instance so that it isn't the most popular instance likely has a lot to do with that. That seemed to happen sometime in the last week - I cbf checking every wayback timestamp to see exactly when.

I've been using Kbin myself so haven't been following Lemmy very closely. Only whatever happens to reach my page over on kbin.

[–] arkcom@kbin.social 1 points 1 year ago

At this point they are definitely getting there, but that only been the case for a few days.