So, I was thinking that I joined Lemmy.World because Lemmy had more users than MBin. But today I was looking at https://mbin.cocopoops.com/ and started seeing MY posts. I knew Mbin could have different instances. I knew Lemmy could have different instances. And I knew they all federated together.
But I didn’t know Mbin could federate with Lemmy. But I’m sure Lemmy/Mbin probably won’t federate with Pixelfed, or Peertube.
Mbin, piefed, and Lemmy are essentially reddit replacements. So they should be in a circle. It doesn’t matter how many users Mbin has, or piefed has, or Lemmy has. It matters how many the full circle of federated reddit replacements have. Because thats the true circle of users that you can interact with.
So what we need is a website that you enter an instance, and it tells you how big your circle would be on that platform, and a list of federated, and defederated instances with it.
So Lemmy.World would have a pretty high circle. While hexbear would have only itself, if I understand right.
Generally speaking, all the major instances are federated with all the other major instances.
The differences are the super tiny instances (which are generally effectively zero traffic) and the controversial instances (mostly tankies). Said controversial instances don’t want to advertise that nobody can stand them and the rest of the instances don’t want to deal with the bullshit from bringing it up again.
I think it would be a nice novelty to visualize this. But I don’t think there would be much actionable information coming out of it and , because this is The Internet, it will likely lead to harassment and brigading.