@fediversenews
So poking around fedidb.org, I thought I'd do some back-of-napkin analysis (ie procrastination).
* 50% of #fediverse users are on the largest 20 instances
* ~50% of MAU are on the largest 28
* 77% users are on instances with >10k users (largest 130)
* 73% MAUs on >10k instances
* Of largest 20 user growth/mnth (over prev 3mnths) is ~1-2% ... with 2 major outliers:
- misskey.io: 30% (See @atomicpoet to follow the *key story)
- #mastodon.social(!!): 5%
/1
So poking around fedidb.org, I thought I'd do some back-of-napkin analysis (ie procrastination).
* 50% of #fediverse users are on the largest 20 instances
* ~50% of MAU are on the largest 28
* 77% users are on instances with >10k users (largest 130)
* 73% MAUs on >10k instances
* Of largest 20 user growth/mnth (over prev 3mnths) is ~1-2% ... with 2 major outliers:
- misskey.io: 30% (See @atomicpoet to follow the *key story)
- #mastodon.social(!!): 5%
/1
maegul
in reply to maegul • • •It's current trend is to grow by the equivalent of the 23rd largest instance per month while most (ie largest) instances are growing by 2% per month (ie a few thousand).
/2
maegul
in reply to maegul • • •If you were admining an instance that cares about safety, when do you start with the "federate" list rather than "defederate" list and ignore all the big ones (>20k?)
Anyone doing this sort of analysis properly? Could #fedidb include such?
/end
maegul
in reply to maegul • • •Of 150 largest instances (min 8k users, extent of my "analysis"), the MAU/Total User ratio had no relationship with the total user count. Said ratio varies from 0-40% with outliers 48, 53, 75%.
Though, all high MAU ratio instances are small.
That is: all >30% MAU ratio instances have ~30k or fewer users. So small instance community is probably working well, but not reliably so?
maegul
in reply to maegul • • •Which means that ~20% of the fediverse users not on the core/central 150 instances are spread out amongst ~20,000 instances.
I'm guessing many of these are self-hosting, but it'd be very interesting to look through all of the data to get a clear picture.
Otherwise, there are probably many small community instances out there ... which is awesome!
stuart
in reply to maegul • • •instances.social sees about 17k instances. These account for ~25 million statuses/month - far short of the billion @Gagron and others have posted. With ~1.6 million MAU (av 660/month each) this is implausible.
Maybe the ~4k extra instances you see may comprise the largely de-federated including prolific spambots pumping out nearly a billion which go nowhere near any instance with a decent blocklist.
Do you have a view?
royterdw
in reply to maegul • • •maegul
in reply to royterdw • • •Monthly Active Users. Number of users that have been active in the past month. I don't know how "active" is defined exactly.
spla :senyera: :vim:
in reply to maegul • • •@royterdw @fediversenews
royterdw
in reply to spla :senyera: :vim: • • •Paul Rohr
in reply to maegul • • •infosec.exchange 19,510/53,408 = 36.5%
hachyderm.io 16,098/46,990 = 34.3%
troet.cafe 12,748/39,331 = 32.4%
If you're categorizing these as small instances based on their MAUs (instead of overall users), then by my count there are only 6 such "non-small" instances.
maegul
in reply to Paul Rohr • • •I don’t follow what you mean by 6 non-small instances?
Paul Rohr
in reply to maegul • • •I only skimmed down to the >20k cutoff, but agree that many of the older/larger instances tended to have lower MAUs. Those three outliers definitely outshine their similarly-sized peers. (Unclear why they're doing a better job at staving off churn.)
Normal Sized Tony
in reply to Paul Rohr • • •Paul Rohr
in reply to Normal Sized Tony • • •maegul
in reply to Paul Rohr • • •Joana de Castro Arnaud
in reply to maegul • • •From instances.social, today: range of # of users, versus # of instances. For example, 234 instances have 400 to 1000 users. No MAU stats, sorry.
1-3 9447
4-9 3043
10 |- 40 1924
40 |-100 687
100 |- 400 622
400 |- 1K 234
1K |- 4K 278
4K |- 10K 82
10K |- 40K 79
40K |- 100K 17
100K |- 400K 9
400K |- 1M 1
1M+ 1
maegul
in reply to Joana de Castro Arnaud • • •Awesome! I was hoping someone would have these numbers. So about half of instances are single user?
Actually, I think what counts as large isn’t merely statistical, but functional. Once an instance has too many people it can be harder to moderate and more suspicious when it comes to federation, because even 0.1% of users can be dodgy and ruin it. I allude to this in my comment about safety. What’s “too many”? I guessed 10,000. But it’s complex obviously.
Joana de Castro Arnaud
in reply to maegul • • •And I agree: things are more complicated than just number of users. My guess is that the moderators' work is proportional, not only to the # of users of the instance, but also to the # of users, of other instances, visible from the instance.
maegul
in reply to Joana de Castro Arnaud • • •I would guess that instances 2 or 3 users could very well be single-user instances with a couple of accounts for various purposes, but point taken.
There's probably an interesting issue around how the number of moderators scale with the size of an instance and how it needs to scale for effective moderation. Moreover, this scaling may very well change as the fediverse grows and more mainstream users come over.
AlisonW ♿🏳️🌈
in reply to Joana de Castro Arnaud • • •Joana de Castro Arnaud
in reply to AlisonW ♿🏳️🌈 • • •Unfortunately, I didn't find easy-to-collect MAU stats on instances.social, so I can't estimate actual users, instead of accounts sitting idle.
I wonder if the percentage of active users on a instance is related to the instance's size...
AlisonW ♿🏳️🌈
in reply to Joana de Castro Arnaud • • •Small instances are more likely to be personal so more used or not used at all, I agree .
maegul
in reply to Joana de Castro Arnaud • • •maegul
in reply to maegul • • •Like, there's a clearly a centralisation event occurring here likely to only get bigger given the defaults in the app, and also likely willfully chosen by many of the users.
/2.5
maegul
in reply to maegul • • •Even misskey.io, whose growth is nuts (~30%/mnth), in absolute terms that's the same as mastodon.social's (~50k users /mnth) where mastodon.social is >5x bigger than misskey.io and clearly positioning itself to grow more as the openly default mastodon instance.
/2.6
Eric Redegeld💻🏎️☀️🙋💖
in reply to maegul • • •Jupiter Rowland
in reply to maegul • • •mastodon.social is only so big and growing so quickly because there's more and more railroading going on. First, it was only convenience: It's the biggest instance with the most action, and when you wanted to invite someone over from Twitter, you didn't have to look up a matching instance for them. Just railroad them to mastodon.social and let them spend three months or so believing that mastodon.social is Mastodon.
However, a key component in the on-boarding of new users is the official Mastodon app. What do you do when you want to join a new online service? You install the app with the same name from the Apple App Store or the Google Play Store. In this case, it's the official Mastodon app. Just about nobody (except for me and a few other übergeeks) uses the desktop or F-Droid.
And the official Mastodon app currently railroads new users hard straight to mastodon.social, not even shying away from black patterns.
Ne10
in reply to Jupiter Rowland • • •#mastodonsocial
And then there are the not so much "übergeeks", just real professionals who have so much stuff on phones for professional reasons . . . . . . and only using desktop browser
What is it exactly, you are complaining about ?
Jupiter Rowland
in reply to Ne10 • • •I'm just saying that, unlike what @maegul said in the post I've replied to, newcomers don't deliberately choose #mastodonsocial over other instances. They're either not given a choice in the first place, or they're being steered towards mastodon.social by not making them want to look up other instances (or what instances are).
Arindam Basu
Unknown parent • • •stuart
Unknown parent • • •People fire up test instances, dev instances. Some are incapable of keeping them running when they hit an issue. Others get bored or run out of money after last year's Twitter influx.
Really active and personal instances could be still be growing. Worth checking.
Mark Prior
in reply to stuart • • •Instance Collection | mrp.net
www.mrp.netotso
Unknown parent • • •är det bra eller dåligt?
jag har Pleroma på Raspberry Pi 4
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eshep
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maegul
in reply to eshep • • •I'd only add that then having platforms for congregation into various communities with moderation etc really gets you into flexible and diverse social media territory.
My little lens on it is that it decouples hosting and community management and allows us users to not be bound to the identity/culture of an instance while still being members of large/vibrant/thriving communities.
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eshep
in reply to maegul • •As it stands, most people believe they they are limited to the community and focus of the instance they join.
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Joana de Castro Arnaud
in reply to eshep • • •Fediverse News reshared this.
maegul
in reply to Joana de Castro Arnaud • • •I mean, just generally, that seems like one honking good idea.
Might also help with the constant "hashtag fediblock" problem of people constantly policing/arguing what it's/not for.
Also, should any instance run into trouble, having another users can look to for any information from their admin on what's going on would also be useful.
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Kevin Davidson
in reply to maegul • • •However, I do think there should be an in-universe, out of band mechanism for admins to communicate. To notify about issues, pass along hints for blocking, share knowledge.
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Kevin Davidson
in reply to Kevin Davidson • • •Fediverse News reshared this.