Gregory's Server@Gargron I'm curious about how you collect stats across servers, what your expectations are about the quality of the data you collect across servers, and the options mastodon admins have for omitting themselves from your methods of stats collection.
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 @peptostate I go through slightly more effort to ensure that the numbers I collect are from Mastodon servers and not, say, Pleroma masking itself as Mastodon, and to exclude servers that are Mastodon forks that have disabled federation. Running Mastodon in limited federation mode does not expose these statistics, as I am also not interested in capturing statistics of servers that are not properly part of the network.  @Gargron That all makes a lot of sense to me. Many thanks for answering to this degree of detail. I am rooting for your success! |
@peptostate Mastodon exposes total and active user numbers through its public API. Separately, there is also a public API listing other domains a server is aware of. Like many people I am running a stats aggregator that crawls over these APIs to understand how many Mastodon servers are up and how many total and active users there are. It is not a guarantee that a server that exists will be crawled, but then some servers have inflated numbers, so it is neither a lower nor upper bound estimate.