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Anyone know how a decentralised system like mastadon can meaningfully assess user count? In terms of accounts corresponding to real, distinct people? And has s
by davnicwil 4y ago
Anyone know how a decentralised system like mastadon can meaningfully assess user count? In terms of accounts corresponding to real, distinct people?
And has such an analysis been done to produce the numbers this account is reporting?
- noarchy 4y ago>Anyone know how a decentralised system like mastadon can meaningfully assess user count? In terms of accounts corresponding to real, distinct people? Can Twitter even manage that, given the well known issues with bots?
- jonas-w 4y agohttps://github.com/gallizoltan/usercount https://github.com/gallizoltan/usercount The bot is open source, it crawls the list at https://instances.social https://instances.social and checks on each instance how many users they have and how many toots (statuses) they have.
- numpad0 4y agoTwitter users are routinely making new sub-accounts to manage persona and relationships, so social media account counts don't correspond to skull counts anyway. Hacked Mastodon instances may report entirely bogus numbers too. But humans are nice, generally speaking... it should work as an indication that there are most likely more than few millions who've signed up at at least one of these instances.
- thejohnconway 4y agoMastodon instances report their user user stats via the API. I have a bot the polls about 9000 server federated with my own and just adds them all up. It’s always incomplete, however, because non-Mastodon Fediverse applications like Pleroma and Misskey don’t report user stats.
- rsynnott 4y agoI assume it's not a particularly exact science; in particular it would definitely miss completely defederated instances like Gab and Truth Social, but also likely a lot of small federated ones.