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.

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

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.

I mean there was a murder of some billionaire sometime back but it didn’t seem to change anyone’s mind.

Source:

[1] independent.co.uk/…/barry-sherman-honey-murder-bi…

[2] nytimes.com/…/bob-lee-stabbing-san-francisco.html

I have also heard about Keet.

But then the deeper question is “why do you think these other people don’t deserve these things?” and then they tell you all about how they are sinful, lazy, violent, or whatever else that they use to justify shunning those other people which is obviously incorrect but it is what they believe so if they actually believe all of that stuff then obviously they are gonna be hostile towards those kinds of people.

It is better to understand and try and remedy why people are doing awful and horrible things than dismiss and judge them because the first option actually can lead to a solution and the other is going to isolate them and make the problem 10x worse.

Being empathetic is the first step to forming trust. Also by the way even though I am saying all of this it doesn’t mean that if someone is being rude to you or insulting your friends you should just turn the other cheek and let them stomp all over you. What it means is that you have to be assertive with who you are and what you stand for but also being willing to listen and understand (not necessarily accept) what other people are saying.

All that I am saying is that I think we are way past the time were voting is the most important thing we should be doing to make the situation better. People in power are going to make whatever they want illegal and use political justifications for them. There have been many states that have majority blue and majority red power and this same shit of empowering the status quo is common in both kinds of states. So I don’t believe either party is going to protect my rights if it doesn’t benefit them somehow and instead I am going to trust in the direct actions I and people that want change are actually taking to make things better.

If they were to vote for their values who would they vote for?

The democrats aren’t upholding these values either and while I agree that they are much better than the current republican party it doesn’t mean that voting for them would be voting in their interest but instead in the least bad option.