@marcelcosta @jupiter_rowland @jdp23

Thank you Marcel! And appreciate your joining into this discussion on your work!

@fediversenews

I appreciate the need to make visible many software. This is part of the decentralization! I can do a second round of analysis looking at these. However, in this first part I focused in the user distribution between servers. I did a first analyisis including the software information (I have shared it, although is not in english), but will be interesting to see the dynamics, too!

I have to say that I did this analysis in my free time, so I am sure that many things can be improved!

@mathias @jupiter_rowland @jdp23 @marcelcosta

Please keep raving about Akkoma, Mathias, your comparative remarks are always interesting.

Regarding some of the other server types that are currently popular, the boundary between healthy enthusiasm and oppressive marketing hype is fluid, and it's good to see a degree of restraint and sobriety in the way in which servers such as Akkoma are discussed.

Ahh ... right, collect the data yourself.

It does strike me though that it's the sort of task that we'd be better off doing more collectively. We could pool the algorithms to get the best one and collect multiple datasets from multiple origins to maximise coverage which can then be merged.

Also, just in case it's useful, here's my quickly hacked together python code for getting all the data from the fedidb API:

# +
from collections import deque
import requests as req

base_url = 'https://api.fedidb.org/v1/'
servers_url = f'{base_url}servers'
# -
# +
server_data = deque()
params = {'limit':40}
n = 0

while True:
	if n%5 == 0:
		print('Loop', n, 'servers', n*40)

	r = req.get(servers_url, params=params)

	if r.status_code == 200:
		d = r.json()
		server_data.extend(d['data'])

		next_cursor = d['meta']['next_cursor']

		if next_cursor is None:
			print('Cursor is None ... FINISHED')
			break
		params['cursor'] = next_cursor

	else:
		print(f'request broke and returned {r.status_code}')
		break

	n += 1
# -
# +
len(server_data)
server_data[0]
# -

@maegul well if nobody else wants to I'll take a crack at it. If mastodon.social is growing more per-existing-user than other largeish sites (so a ratio of > 1.0) I would say it's unquestionably increasing centralization.

To me ratios like last fall -- where some other largish sites were increasing faster than .social not only per-existing-user but in absolute terms -- would be healthy at this point

@tchambers @fediversereport @spla @fediverse @fediversenews @spreadmastodon @marcelcosta

That were my conclusions, yes!

Talking about instances, because at the software level there has been a big centralization.

Sure, but I would like to wait a bit more to understand the trend.

I thought that mastodon.social visibility in media would have centralized the fediverse in October wave and after some months the result was the opposite! So, I would advice for some perspective.

Mastodon

The original server operated by the Mastodon gGmbH non-profit

^{Mastodon hosted on mastodon.social}

I don't know, but I was under the impression that during early or middle parts of the migration wave mastodon.social wasn't ready to scale up so much and so the load had to be spread out.

Now they've built an ability to scale as needed: AFAIU, mastodon.social runs on kubernetes now. I'd imagine the only limitation on their ability to scale relatively quickly is their finances, and I don't know if anyone knows anything about that. Though, I would imagine being in even greater demand would only provide more opportunities to get more funding.

That makes sense! I recently analyzed last splaDS entries and that would be the trend, although macro variation was minimal.

I'll publish the analysis as soon as I have time.

@marcelcosta looking forward to it!

@tchambers Marcel's original numbers from showed significant decentralization since last September but from the info in the archive.org snapshots it seems to me like there was a big decentralization was last fall (when as @maegul says .social closed regs for a while) and at least the US/Western European Mastodon world has been re-centralizing since late March

@fediversereport @spla @fediversenews @spreadmastodon

Looking at @spla's data for the week between 5/28 and 6/4, the changes in users are

Total Mastodon users: +93K
pravda.me: +57K
.social: +13K
pawoo: +3K
everything else: +20K

which has .social capturing at least 40% of the non-Russian/non-Japanese new users. That's a lot!

@marcelcosta @tchambers @maegul @fediversereport @spla @fediversenews @spreadmastodon

Hi! I’ve found the time to analyze a bit more data from spla’s dataset.

First, the absolute number of accounts by software (with mastodon, left, or without mastodon, right).

And then the distribution as a % of the known fediverse (again with and without mastodon).

It is very clear the entry of kbin and growth of lemmy, also. Particularly in the MAU measure.