3 ms·

Tracking Mastodon user numbers over time with a bucket of tricks

35 points by edward 4y ago

INTPenis 4y ago
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.
yborg 4y ago
There's already a bot that does this. https://bitcoinhackers.org/@mastodonusercount 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...
- kkkrist 4y ago
  There's also https://fediverse.observer/stats https://fediverse.observer/stats which found my experimental single-user GoToSocial instance within a few hours automatically.
  - zimpenfish 4y ago
    Found my single-user Pleroma and my experimental GoToSocial but hasn't found my Honk.
    - mmastrac 4y ago
      I had to google to make sure these were real and not some sort of tongue-in-cheek comment.
      - dgeiser13 4y ago
        Honk definitely sounds made up.
  - yborg 4y ago
    Even better, I like the breakdown by application.
supermatt 4y ago
Where does this “instances.social” get their list from? Does mastodon phone home to record new instances or something?
- arlort 4y ago
  Instance owners manually register their instances here if they want to: https://instances.social/admin https://instances.social/admin
hombre_fatal 4y ago
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.

35 points by edward 4y ago

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.

yborg 4y ago

There's already a bot that does this. https://bitcoinhackers.org/@mastodonusercount 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...

kkkrist 4y ago
There's also https://fediverse.observer/stats https://fediverse.observer/stats which found my experimental single-user GoToSocial instance within a few hours automatically.
- zimpenfish 4y ago
  Found my single-user Pleroma and my experimental GoToSocial but hasn't found my Honk.
  - mmastrac 4y ago
    I had to google to make sure these were real and not some sort of tongue-in-cheek comment.
    - dgeiser13 4y ago
      Honk definitely sounds made up.
- yborg 4y ago
  Even better, I like the breakdown by application.

supermatt 4y ago

Where does this “instances.social” get their list from? Does mastodon phone home to record new instances or something?

arlort 4y ago
Instance owners manually register their instances here if they want to: https://instances.social/admin https://instances.social/admin

hombre_fatal 4y ago

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.