Discussion
Fediverse Observer is offline and no longer being developed
The domain https://fediverse.observer redirects to sedo now.
On October 11th these two commits where made to the repo:
this will be my final release, glad to have contributed since 2011 to some fediverse stats, https://fedidb.com/ is a great resource with more interest
this software is no longer developed
Sad to have lost such a great resource.
https://fedilist.com is a good alternative
There is fedisea.surf From the Pixelix team, and it has way more data than fedidb it seems
Wow, since 2011?
With how important Fediverse Observer is, the developer should have made an effort to hand it and its data over to another member of the community before winding the project down.
yup, the volunteer shoulda volunteered more
While we should all be grateful for the work the developer put into the project, it’s also not uncommon for open source projects to use life cycle planning to determine potential redundancies if the original developer steps down. As things stand, their contributions are likely to go to waste, whereas ideally others could have picked up the torch from where they left off, preferably with historical data intact.
Yup, the volunteer shoulda did that.
Neither FediDB nor FediIndex provide filtering or searching instances by language :/
There’s also the FediIndex which, however, isn’t as convenient to use.
Fedidb is so bad though. Maybe im missing something, but to me it looks like you cant even get a historic user count or comment count graph for any specific software. What use is seeing the current number? Thats just kinda useless if you are trying to get any insight into the general development of the fediverse. The thing is that the old fedidb.org literally had this, but when they moved to .com they fucked it up for some reason.
FediDB seems to be opinionated as well. It seems like if Daniel doesn’t like a server app, he won’t add it. AFAIK, he has been notified about the existence of Forte, but he still hasn’t added it.
I remember when he changed the metric on which fediverse software were ranked, just so that pixelfed rises up and rank or two !
Damn. I definitely made good use of that website.
@vicinus@piefed.zip fyi, this will impact !fedilytics@piefed.zip right?
Yeah. I saw the dead website earlier today and have been trying to figure out how to keep the posts working.
The fediverse software post, I could rewrite some code to gather fedidb daily (to my knowledge, they don’t have all time series data available), but their MAU math is suspect. So, not a great option, but my only other thought is basically remaking fediverse-observer and I do not have a server or potentially relevant server skill set beyond cron jobs.
For the threadiverse instances post, I can keep gathering data from the instances I already have in my database, but don’t really have another way to find new ones. Maybe, I could see if I could scrape it from fedidb (I couldn’t get their API working in the past).
In conclusion, the posts are not in a good place :(
Oof the stats shown in your last post there make the Threadiverse look very unhealthy.
For one, the total Lemmy MAUs falling down to the <30k range (at the high mark during Rexodus it hit ~65K, and we held steady at ~45K for a long time it seemed, iirc).
And for another, if I am interpreting the HYAU correctly then literally thousands of people who had accounts here are simply walking away and never coming back. This is crucial bc these are not people who were too daunted by the complexity of learning about the Threadiverse, picking an instance, making an account on it, and joining communities - they were already here, and now they are not here anymore.
Perhaps they are avoiding coming here (even once) during the upcoming season of Western elections, with all the contentious content that is already flooding this place leading up those, but then they might come back later? Given past trends, I doubt it, though anything is possible.
The Threadiverse looks to be slowly shrinking. Perhaps the existing people on it post more often, but with an ever-diminishing pool of recipients for that content. This will lead to a feed-forward cycle where even fewer will want to join.
And to be clear I don’t blame those people who left in the slightest - I find myself visiting here far less often than I used to as well. There’s only so much politics that I want to argue about before I find myself missing the ability to discourse on some other, any other, topic.
I think I can alleviate some of your worries. The instance post only shows the top 20 instances for a software (Lemmy has 287 active, Piefed: 59, Mbin: 16).
My Fediverse Growth Post is a better indicator for the Threadiverse’s health. From there you can see the Threadiverse is only down 2.1% from a year ago (-847 MAU). From what I’ve seen over the last >6 months, is that the Threadiverse, and most of the fediverse, grow in short spurts and then slowly declines until the next spurt.
So, unfortunately, we aren’t having continuous positive growth, but I’d say we are stable. I think stable is fine as all the fediverse developers are still adding functionality/interconnected-ness (’this isn’t our final form’).
For HYAU (Half-Year Active Users), I think it’s important to remember that lots of times people move instances, so their old account will eventually stop being counted as active (I personally have 2 old accounts). From the Fediverse post, you can see there were 42889 MAU 6-months ago and 42276 MAU 3-months ago (-613 MAU). So, even though you may see >1000 HYAU drop off in a given week, the total number of active users over that next 3 months stayed relatively the same (-1.4%, not -28% (-1000 MAU x 12 weeks)).
I think the most important information in the instance post is MAU/HYAU (%) ("Stickiness"), which indicates how well an instance holds onto its users (they keep coming back). I think >60% should be the goal of every instance (67% is currently the peak for non-small instances (>30 MAU)).
It might be worth a study to figure out why there is such a discrepancy across instances. For example, is it correlated to UI issues/customizability, reliability/up-time/longevity, admin/mod behavior, instance rules, federation/de-federation, inter-instance activity (communities/posts/comments), etc.
Regarding politics, I can’t really say what an average or new user experiences. I’ve curated/blocked massive amounts of political content. It might be worth having an instance that initially auto-blocks all politics communities for a new user. I don’t recall exactly, but I think Tesseract? was like that, but the dev/admin was sketchy about what they were doing and then melted down when called out for hiding things. So, it seems the idea had some popularity, but needs/ed a better implementation.
Man that sucks. But also because I never have before, I want to thank you for all your labor making those posts! I find them very interesting.
Glad you enjoy them :)
Just need to figure out how to keep them going properly. I have a couple thoughts I’ll look into tomorrow. Hopefully one of them bears fruit.
Glad you enjoy them :)
Just need to figure out how to keep them going properly. I have a couple thoughts I’ll look into tomorrow. Hopefully one of them bears fruit.
but their MAU math is suspect
Do they do any math? I assumed it's simply additive. They get the MAU from individual instances via their crawler, then display a total?
Differences to other sites is probably due to the set of instances checked, not anything math related.
Differences to other sites is probably due to the set of instances checked
fedidb.com/software/lemmy?search=lemmy.world&stat…
Fedidb doesn’t seem to include lemmy.world, which seems like a substantial omission, as I believe that it’s the largest Lemmy instance.
You’d think it’s straightforward and additive. I added up all their listed instances for a couple different softwares. The math was wrong and overestimated the MAU count. I checked it a few times across a couple weeks. Couldn’t quickly figure out a pattern to how the math was wrong each time.
Maybe they fixed it in the last ~6 months, but I wouldn’t count on it. I believe it’s the same Dev as pixelfed and loops. So, not sure they’ve done any work on fedidb in years (to my knowledge, they’ve focused on Loops and Pixelfed).
o7 I used that site a lot
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Someone can make an instance, its code is AGPL gitlab.com/diasporg/poduptime
diasporg / Poduptime · GitLab