Hey, I am relatively new to the federated web and I only use lemmy currently. But I love the idea of an alternative social web ecosystem that is not ruled by big corporations. To see how the fediverse has developed in 2020 I decided to look into the stats (stats go from 2nd January 2020 til today) over at https://the-federation.info/:

No. of nodes:

6043 --> 7849 (+29.9%)

Users per Node:

817 --> 840 (+2.8%)

No. of users:

3,597,652 --> 4,153,555 (+15.5%)

Active users (6 Months):

1,348,965 --> 1,175,150 (-12.9%)

Active users (1 Month):

476,457 --> 432,75 (-9.2%)

Active users ratio:

0.132 --> 0.104 (-21.2%)

So before I say something about these numbers I want to warn you that these numbers are not the really correct because not all instances of the fediverse are not correctly listed in these statistics. This might be for a variety of reasons but I guess most of the unlisted instances just want to stay under the radar. However, I still think that these stats can give us an indication how things are going in the federation.

If we look solely at the number of nodes (+30%) and registered users (+15.5%) we can see that these numbers have risen within the last year. It might not be incredible growth that indicates mainstream adoption but I think it is nothing to be concerned about.

However, if we look at the active user stats we can see that activity activity has steadily decreased over the year. It seems like we have lost roughly 13% of active users within this year.

Tbh I don’t really know how to judge these numbers as I am pretty new to all of this. So I wanted to ask the users who have been here longer and might even use several federated services. Did you notice a decrease in activity? Is the fediverse healthy? If not, what might be the reason that the active user stats are on a downwards trend and how might we be able to change this?

  • Kinetix@lemmy.ca
    0·
    4 years ago

    I wouldn’t pay any attention to the numbers beyond the suggestion that “there’s some people here using some services”.

    Did in to any of the projects - look at Matrix, the 2nd largest number of nodes, for example, and see that there are 0 users using it, 0% of the time for a total of 1 huge ghost town. (If you wanted to interpret the lack of reporting detail in that fashion)

    Look at Pleroma, the next highest number of nodes, and see there’s no active users reported.

    I think that over time, as more nodes from more projects are set up, are being used and aren’t reporting all the various details that the-federation.info could report on, the less useful the statistics there will be, especially around the ‘active users’ stats.

    Last example - lemmy - Lemmy’s over-reporting users (Lemmy seems to count all the users it knows about (?) - not just the local users on an instance) and not reporting those ‘active user’ stats either.

    So, I’d say the fediverse is doing fine - but you can’t really tell what’s going on from the-federation.info.