Just say 40,000. Which is a pathetic number, but perfectly fine for the type of niche communities budding up here and there across all the domains connected together here.
The fundamental flaw with microblogging is that people follow other people. Those people then spew a bunch of random posts on all sorts of topics. Very few people are consistently interesting, leading to a timeline / feed of random crap with a few nuggets of goodness scattered through it. This is unavoidable because of the person-follows-person architecture.
There are other pernicious effects that come from centering the individual. The narcissism, defensiveness, dunking are all enflamed, rewarded and promoted. Mastodon avoids some of this by not using a recommendation algorithm but the fundamental mistake of centering of the individual remains.
Also short-form content tends to be brainrot that destroys attention spans and reduces complex issues to bite-sized hand grenades to lob at The Other.
Combine hand grenades with narcissism and news/politics and the result is kinda predictable in hindsight.
Hexbear essentially predated federation iirc, then migrated to Lemmy when that became possible. Hexbear is I think roughly the 3rd oldest instance - sorting its posts by Old shows that it is 4 years old, while lemmygrad.ml is 5 years old, and lemmy.ml is 6 years old. Lemmy.ca in Canada and the Finnish sopuli are both also 4 years old, mander.xyz is 3 years old, but Lemmy.world, by far the largest instance with ~80% of all users, is only ~2 years old, being formed at the time of the Rexodus.
Read some more about it here (don't click the link there to follow further - in true hexbear trolling fashion it will simply take you to a picture showing a pig in the act of pooping, you have been warned) and especially here, e.g.:
Two of the sites listed there, Hexbear (aka. chapo.chat) and Bakchodi, do not federate. They are not part of the Fediverse, but they are using Lemmy. Hexbear is actually running their own fork of Lemmy.
TLDR: bc they felt like it, then they didn't, now it seems like they almost do again, bc facts are nearly always stranger than fiction:-).
I don't, because if that happens either others will have done a more thorough job (because it's something they care about - I have my own obsessive areas that I'm the one doing that stuff for), or if they haven't then I have much bigger problems to deal with (e.g. war in Europe).
Yeah I need to take another look at piefed. Thanks for the read.
But man the best part is the resources it consumes. Let me remind you that Lemmy puts a load of 12 on the server, when I turn off Lemmy the load with the other 13 web services running on the server is 0.5 and when I turn on PieFed the load is 1.
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