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Michael Stanclift

Seeing reporting that Mastodon has reached 15 million user accounts, but this is wholly incorrect.

My own crawler shows that from 11,478 instances the total number is 8.46 million accounts.

FediDB shows from 11,242 instances the total number is 7.31 million.

Fediverse Observer shows from 10,551 instances the total number is 9.07 million.

libera.site shows 12,669 instances and 8.77 million.

The official Join Mastodon API shows 9,724 instances and 8.59 million.

Why the variance? Because, decentralized network. 🤷

Across all five data sources it's approximately 11,133 active instances and 8.44 million accounts.

Not 15 million.

19 March at 15:46 | Open on vmst.io
6 comments
Lauren Weinstein

@vmstan ProTip: Don't make a big deal about trying to find ways to calculate LOWER user numbers than other sources have calculated. PR101.

19 March at 15:58 | Open on mastodon.laurenweinstein.org
Michael Stanclift
Uraael

@lauren@mastodon.laurenweinstein.org @vmstan@vmst.io Truth above all is more useful than useful falseness, surely?

19 March at 16:08 | Open on blahaj.zone
rigrig

@lauren @vmstan I haven't done any checking at all, so I can't be absolutely sure some of those numbers don't count the same accounts.
Meaning there could be up to 42 million accounts!

19 March at 16:10 | Open on social.tubul.net
FinchHaven

@vmstan

I challenged the author of those posts everyone is hyping recently about their data collection and data analysis and they refused to answer any questions

This was the Very Olden Times(s) when the author actually had their screenshots titled "Fediverse"

I asked why their datasets kept showing bizarre, unexplained spikes that caused radical rescaling ot the graph and they would not respond

Whoever is put out those posts is just running clickbait IMO

This is from back in November of 2022 by the file timestamp

@vmstan

I challenged the author of those posts everyone is hyping recently about their data collection and data analysis and they refused to answer any questions

This was the Very Olden Times(s) when the author actually had their screenshots titled "Fediverse"

I asked why their datasets kept showing bizarre, unexplained spikes that caused radical rescaling ot the graph and they would not respond
19 March at 16:01 | Open on sfba.social
slyborg

@vmstan Charitable interpretation is that this is the total number of users *ever* including now gone instances, which would of course be double counting since most of such users would have migrated elsewhere.

To some extent this is arguing over how tall the shortest dwarf is - Fediverse total users ever is a small fraction of Threads monthly active, for example. “Twitter minus Nazis” turns out not to be a generally compelling reason to switch. Which probably explains the enduring existence of Nazis.

19 March at 16:41 | Open on vmst.io
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