I started on lemmy.world, then decided to learn self-hosting server infrastructure and made my own instance. Found a script that allows me to "auto-discover" all communities from given instance URLs, so I just added the instances that interest me. Boom, I have an instance with all of my favorite instances searchable and discoverable on "All".

For those interested in the script you can find it here. Do note that you should NOT use the default settings and make sure to use an instance whitelist, otherwise it'll pull every instance ever.

I really want to see a data viz of whether/how much users are spreading out. Anyone got the data on user counts over time by instance?

That's exactly what I thought when I signed up. Well not in those terms because I didn't know much vocabulary for it then. But in general I like underdogs, so I went with a smaller one. I have no idea how big any of them actually are, but I know the big 2, and a handful of other common ones.

Given I haven't advertised it anywhere, I'll take this opportunity to shamelessly plug the open instance I run: leminal.space.

The default theme's a bit quirky, but you can change that in your settings if it's not your bag.

Can we make a thread of these smaller servers that are open to new registrations?

If I may start: I am running communick.news, which is one of the many Fediservice servers that I provide on Comunick. The first 250 registrations on communick.news server will be free forever, after that access will be only for paid customers. At the moment, there are ~30 slots taken.

To register, just sign-up and in the "application" question just let me know how you found out about the instance.