I don’t think subscriber count is a useful metric, look here, subscriber count keeps growing but number of comments made decreased by a lot (apparently reddit was hit hard from the API changes).

I don’t know what you can do with that kind of data, but maybe doing the same thing for active users is better.

Edit: Dang, the pictures didn’t come through very readable. Sorry. I’m going to leave it like this for now. It’s late and I need to go to bed.

Edit 2: It looks like the pictures can be enlarged for better viewing in Jerboa but not on desktop. Weird.

Interesting. I pulled your .csv into a spreadsheet to tinker a bit (though I really should be sleeping right now). I’m not entirely sure what to do with it, but here are a few basic charts I threw together for kicks. Maybe someone more code savvy than me can create an interactive tool to sift through all the data.

Most subscribed communities across Lemmy:

Here’s a comparison of where the subscribers originate for two of the big technology communities. What are all those lemmy.world users doing subscribed to a Beehaw community? Maybe those are lemmy.world that had subscribed before Beehaw defederated from lemmy.world?

Speaking as an admin, it’s really interesting data! Thank you for that.

The data could be better if I used the API or added the information from lemmyverse.net on the total subscriber counts but I spent a lot of time on this as is and don’t know how to use the API.

Your approach may have ended up being for the best. lemmyverse.net can’t index lemmy.world (broken DB => broken API => “well, we didn’t want to be part of the fediverse anyway”), and if you’d tried to use their API yourself, it might have totalled your project the same way it did for lemmyverse.

So there’s a fancy graph to be made here!

P.S. On the post that inspired this post, there was some discussion about whether Lemmy users would like this to be done. So if you guys don’t like it I will delete the data.

Appreciate the express concern over privacy etc!!