Tracking Mastodon user numbers over time with a bucket of tricks(simonwillison.net)
simonwillison.net
Tracking Mastodon user numbers over time with a bucket of tricks
https://simonwillison.net/2022/Nov/20/tracking-mastodon/
10 comments
There's also https://fediverse.observer/stats which found my experimental single-user GoToSocial instance within a few hours automatically.
Found my single-user Pleroma and my experimental GoToSocial but hasn't found my Honk.
Even better, I like the breakdown by application.
Every problem that people say Twitter has, Mastodon seems to have but worse.
From the cliques, to arbitrary bans, to servers shutting down (the server I considered joining asked that you autodelete old tweets to save space), to worse UX.
I can’t even think of a thing it does better than Twitter except for, I suppose, acting as a self hosted Twitter, whoever finds that useful.
It’s like Twitter with the politics of Reddit mods and subreddits.
From the cliques, to arbitrary bans, to servers shutting down (the server I considered joining asked that you autodelete old tweets to save space), to worse UX.
I can’t even think of a thing it does better than Twitter except for, I suppose, acting as a self hosted Twitter, whoever finds that useful.
It’s like Twitter with the politics of Reddit mods and subreddits.
Where does this “instances.social” get their list from? Does mastodon phone home to record new instances or something?
Instance owners manually register their instances here if they want to: https://instances.social/admin
This is only Mastodon, not the other softwares. That's why you often see such differing numbers. There are just too many different softwares in the federation to accurately tally users.
https://bitcoinhackers.org/@mastodonusercount
People frequently have multiple accounts on different servers, so the account count is much larger than the number of individuals. Although this was of course true for Twitter as well, I had 3 different Twitter accounts. Which reminds me, I need to change my game accounts that use Twitter for account recovery over to something else before Twitter goes twits-up...