 Wildebeest, Cloudflare's Mastodon competitor, looks like a failure to me. According to fediverse.observer, Wildebeest has 6 accounts. That's not 6 MAUs, but 6 TOTAL accounts! the-federation.info is even more harsh with its counts. They can only find 1 Wildebeest account. I've done a manual spot check on accounts. I've found no humans, only bots. What about servers? I only count 44 nodes, and none of them have open registrations! These graphs tells quite the story! 30 comments
 Here's the local feed from another Wildebeest server: https://social.jasnell.me/public/local It features one message from 1 month ago, which says, "Tap tap tap. Is this thing on?" 🤣 I really don't think Cloudflare will be a threat to the Fediverse. At least, not any time soon.  @atomicpoet This is interesting, but I wonder if it's because #Cloudflare did not take time to understand the #Fediverse culture. Both #Medium & #Flipboard’s instance communities are far more active, but the leaders of each took the time to know the Fediverse culture (well, rather #Mastodon culture). @darnell I think that's a pretty good assumption. I've read an interview about Wildebeest with Cloudflare's CTO, and he seemed incredibly clueless about Fediverse culture. It's funny, when Wildebeest was announced, there were a whole lot of tech bros who seemed really excited about it -- and pushed back against the notion that Wildebeest wasn't a good project. They claimed Wildebeest's vertical integration with Cloudflare would be a game changer. Well, where are those tech bros? And why aren't they using Wildebeest? Were they just being contrarians for the sake of being contrarian?  I think that launching without full portability suppressed enthusiasm. I would have started a single user instance, but I need an escape hatch. @mkarliner At first, I had a "let's reserve judgment and see what happens" perspective. But within a day, I realized that they weren't going to be good Fediverse citizens. @atomicpoet @freakinbox Just the name Wildebeest kind of gives away the whole FUD nature of the thing. @atomicpoet I am still running my Wildebeest instance. It's definitely beta and there are problems with interoperability between Wildebeest and Mastodon, such as Hashtags. @nthomasgsy Do you actively use it? Has anyone, besides yourself, registered on your server? @atomicpoet it was just for me, no other users. I'm still happy running it for now to see where it goes - https://nptcomputing.xyz @atomicpoet seems to be working now. Latency was pretty bad for a minute there. Perhaps services had to start up after not being used for a while. https://wildebeest.fediverse.observer/nptcomputing.xyz @atomicpoet@mastodon.social one day I got frustrated from Cloudflare blocking fetching attempts of Tachiyomi and mentioned them in a very angry post @atomicpoet is it possible they're somehow not being recognised and are counted as mastodon nodes? @Sbectol @atomicpoet doubt it, they seem to report themselves as Wildebeest in the nodeinfo API and that's what many of the Fediverse mapping tools use. example: https://cloudflare.social/nodeinfo/2.0 @Sbectol Anything is possible, but I doubt that's the case. There's really no reason to spoof, not when mastodon.social currently federates with cloudflare.social. Again, I count 44 Wildebeest servers. Most of them are barren. Here's another example: https://social.macleod.space/explore @atomicpoet question is do Cloudflare care or was it just a tech demo for their Lambda replacement? @atomicpoet it's succeeded in that we are both talking about a service we'd have never heard about without its creation. It gave them something to blog about and sales to talk about to customers. It does seem somewhat elaborate, usually tech demos for cloud services are more 'hello world' than real applications, but I guess they had some free developer time and they took a chance.  @atomicpoet I did take a look at it, but it looked far too confusing to set up requiring all sorts of different parts of their service, and other services such as GitHub! All they need is a massive "Deploy on CloudFlare" button that asks you to link it to a domain, but no. It's confusing. It's long-winded. Plus, doesn't it defeat the point of decentralised if the idea is that you host it all on CloudFlare - one service? |
Gregory's Server
This is the local feed of Cloudflare's official Wildebeest server.
It's supposed to be their flagship, a demonstration of everything good about Wildebeest.
And all I see is one lonely bot, @radar, that periodically posts about "Internet trends".
Nobody interacts with this bot. There are no likes, comments or boosts on any of its posts.
Quite frankly, this is pathetic.
https://cloudflare.social/public/local/