Just wanted to share a thread for those who don't regularly venture out of the bear site. Can't cross-post since it's defederated. It's small but has some numbers about community counts, active users, etc and links to more info from https://lemmyverse.net/. Thought it was notable that Hexbear shows up no matter how you sort it.
OP image is community count sorted by active users in the last month.
Edit: sorted by comments
I'm sorry if this is cringy, I literally only use HB (lurker), what's .ml and why do they hate us? I was linked directly to HB when I started using, and haven't ventured off until today but is .ml just Reddit with less users?
Lemmy.ml is the instance the lemmy creators own. They are also communists but its become a general instance (filled with liberals) since the reddit exodus. Lemmy.world is just reddit but with less users and is unfortuantly the largest instance by far. They "premptively defederated us, as a last resort" before we even enabled federation.
Ahh, so ml likes HB? I'm not super plugged into drama usually, but the libs make my blood boil. I had to uninstall Reddit, at this point it's literally all just us propaganda.
Basically yes but if you don't want to gaze at a sea of liberals constantly your only real options are here and lemmygrad.ml
What's lemmygrad, just other marxist community?
It's a more explicitly Marxist-Leninist instance instead of left unity like Hexbear and has more serious comms than shit posting.
I think ML are radical centrists who just want all teams to have fun and are ideologically opposed to censorship and defederation. The other instances are libs who start banning and blocking as soon as they hear something about communism that they don’t understand
Desslines has stated that they believe instances that jump to defederation of larger instances are dooming themselves, and they want Lemmy.ml to be the "face" of Lemmy.