Sorry for commenting again but I think there is a way for you to do this in a completely open, easy, and privacy-preserving way. You don’t need to access their database.

1. Get a list of instances that you want to look at the subscription patterns for. (All the instances here + Lemmy.world)

2. Go to that instance’s website, click the “Communities” tab at the top, and then click “All” It shows how many users from that instance are subscribed to that community (both communities from that instance and outside of that instance)

If you find a way to automatically (or manually) scrape this data from all of those websites you can create the visualization that you were talking about.

So you were right, the data is open source it is just specific to each website.

No problem just notify me if you ever decide to follow through.

If you are interested there is a professor named Damon Centola that might be interested in dedicating time to gathering that data and might help with the visualization as well. If you are in the sociologist space or just interested you could reach out to him.

Personally I would love to see this kind of project done. But for it to work most people on the servers data that you are working with would have to be informed and given time to answer. I hope you reach out to the administrators of each instance and ask them if they would be ok with this and give them time to ask their users. Knowledge is power and if the visualization was public I think it could be helpful.

Not my title I just crossposted someone else’s but I can change it.

Well that sucks and I hope the communities around you grow to be bigger so they can help more people. As for me I was able to find mutual aid network that is supported by DSA of america so it seems like its more organized and more robust so I think for now it depends on where you are.

Someone else said in response to my comment in a different post that it is sort of a chicken and the egg problem where people have to join the network first before the network becomes useful and I think that’s what is happening here where people aren’t joining therefore they have a lack of organization for those communities.

P.S. Just randomly looked through mutualaid.wiki and it seems you are right. You might have more luck on mutualaidhub.org or just searching up mutual aid on google.

I mean I sorta thought that most people haven’t heard about them but also it seems like a simple enough answer that the fact that most people haven’t heard of it meant that people haven’t been willing to share the idea meaning that something was wrong with the idea.

So I am asking other people that have heard about them about the problems.

This is my answer in another comment on a different post.

I only heard about them recently too so I might give an incomplete answer but the general gist is that mutual aid is when a group of people band together and share whatever resources and services that they have to offer to other people in that group.

So if someone made an excess of vegetables in their garden they would give that to others in the group with expecting anything immediately in return in the hopes that when their fence breaks down and they request help someone with knowledge on how to fix it would be willing to come help.

As for finding mutual aid groups I’ve seen mutualaid.wiki and mutual aid hub but I’m not sure of what else there is.

Yeah I remember reading that article. I just wanted to find a more recent one to remind people of this.

That makes sense. I wonder what a good solution to that would be though?