Graphs of the sizes of fediverse instances, how common they are, and where the most people are! 🧵
Data pulled from https://instances.social/ (by @TheKinrar) and excludes pawoo and baraag as they're heavily blocked for good reasons (it seems)
Breaking down instances by the number of users into bins (that are quasi human friendly logarithmic), we see that the majority (55%) have 2-50 users, ~33% have 1 user, and almost all instances have less than 5,000 users.
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reshared this
maegul
•Though most instances are very small (in user count), the large instances are very large by comparison. The result is that the 20-30 largest instances host around half of all the users of the fediverse.
This graph is a cumulative percentage of all users starting with the largest instance and descending. By 20th largest, we've got 50% of all users. Mastodon.social hosts ~16%! The top 10 get you ~40%. Note that this includes 2 large japanese instances (mstdn.jp+mastodon.cloud)
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Tim Chambers reshared this.
maegul
•Which for me leads to the question of how many people are on instances of what size (eg, what percentage of all users are on instances with 10-20K users?)
Well, turns out it's pretty even (using the bins from above), from 1K to 1M users, with 10% users in 1K-5K instances and ~13% in 50K-100K instances. Only below 1K user instances do you get a substantial drop off in the number of users on such instances.
Take away for me, plenty of people on 1K to 40K instances!
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maegul
•Taking the data from above, we can make a cumulative percentage graph (line chart) over the same bins as above.
We see that the halfway mark is ~50K users. So half of the fediverse are on instances with 50K or more users, half on instances with less.
Slightly more technically, this line is pretty straight (as users are roughly evenly spread out, highlighted above). Given that the bins are roughly logarithmic-ish, this hints that the distribution is a power law.
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