join-lemmy.org runs a crawl of all active Lemmy instances every four hours in order to keep the instance list up to date. These statistics are now publicly available in the following git repo:

https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy-statistics

As described in the readme there are a few different output files available. From full crawl data with the entire output of /api/v3/site and /api/v3/federated_instances, to minimal data which only includes the number of users, posts etc. You can also access historical stats through the git history. In the future we may also to provide additional data, such as a full list of communities.

So here are some ideas what you could do with this data:

• Graphs which can be shown directly on join-lemmy.org (#532).
• Website with detailed filters for instance settings.
• Map of Lemmy instances, showing who they federate or defederate with (like the discontinued lemmymap)

Interestingly our stats differ significantly from other websites. It would be interesting to analyze and find out what's causing the differences: