Gregory's ServerFedi's blowing up.
Not *super* scientific, but I dug up some old data in a thread about the shittiest instance ever made, and while looking for a graph, I found a screenshot (with query, I think I was probably trying to show people how to do it) listing which instances had sent the largest number of posts to FSE. The timestamp on that image is May 21, 2020, which seems plausible enough to me for the time the screenshot was taken: the instances that no longer exist were all still active those months ago.
The data, as you can see from the query, is a count of all activities of type 'Create' (a post) or 'Announce' (a repost) over the last three days, aggregated by instance. Here's the query, you can do similar if you are running Pleroma (I don't have an equivalent query for Misskey/Masto/etc. but I expect it'd be easy enough):
:mycomputer: select count(split_part(actor, '/', 3)) as count_3day, '72 hours'::interval/count(split_part(actor, '/', 3)) as avg_freq, split_part(actor, '/', 3) as host from activities where data->>'type' in ('Create', 'Announce') and inserted_at > CURRENT_TIMESTAMP - '72 hours'::interval group by split_part(actor, '/', 3) order by count(split_part(actor, '/', 3));
(The reason the count is done by `split_part(actor, '/', 3)` is that Pleroma has an index for that.)
I thought I'd re-run that query, see where things were, how they compared. I didn't have this data at the time, but the fedilist.com crawler lists 7,272 total instances (2,426 of which have open registrations) and 4,388,262 total accounts. Those numbers have been going up steadily. (The crawler finds a little more than 17 new instances a day, on average; a lot of them are short-lived, some are not. Of the 4,413 instances that are newer than the crawler's first crawl, 2,091 are still up.)
A lot of things have changed! pl.smuglo.li dickkickextremist.xyz, niu.moe, etc., no longer exist. :pressf:
At the time, the highest-volume instance was pawoo.net: we got a post from them almost every thirty seconds! Now we get a post from pawoo.net every 19 seconds. Seven instances now have higher volume than the highest-volume instance in May of last year. FSE itself is producing a new post every 24 seconds (up from every 41 seconds), just short of doubling post volume. baraag.net nearly doubled its output, neckbeard.xyz nearly tripled it, and spinster.xyz went from a post every 7m40s (563 over 72 hours) to one every 1m15s (3,412 over 72 hours), and that's just the posts that have federated to FSE. KiwiFarms is more than twice as active as it was.
So it looks like fedi's getting way more active! That's all even without considering the new instances that didn't exist back then, like poa.st sending FSE a poast every 11.7 seconds on average.
Granted, it's got some statistical problems, being two random 3-day slices, sampled when the mood struck me. But it's a really massive upswing in activity, too big and spread across too many servers to just be a blip, and it lines up with the crawler's statistics.
posts_from_instances.png
posts_from_instances--2021-10-14.png
Not *super* scientific, but I dug up some old data in a thread about the shittiest instance ever made, and while looking for a graph, I found a screenshot (with query, I think I was probably trying to show people how to do it) listing which instances had sent the largest number of posts to FSE. The timestamp on that image is May 21, 2020, which seems plausible enough to me for the time the screenshot was taken: the instances that no longer exist were all still active those months ago.
The data, as you can see from the query, is a count of all activities of type 'Create' (a post) or 'Announce' (a repost) over the last three days, aggregated by instance. Here's the query, you can do similar if you are running Pleroma (I don't have an equivalent query for Misskey/Masto/etc. but I expect it'd be easy enough):
:mycomputer: select count(split_part(actor, '/', 3)) as count_3day, '72 hours'::interval/count(split_part(actor, '/', 3)) as avg_freq, split_part(actor, '/', 3) as host from activities where data->>'type' in ('Create', 'Announce') and inserted_at > CURRENT_TIMESTAMP - '72 hours'::interval group by split_part(actor, '/', 3) order by count(split_part(actor, '/', 3));
(The reason the count is done by `split_part(actor, '/', 3)` is that Pleroma has an index for that.)
I thought I'd re-run that query, see where things were, how they compared. I didn't have this data at the time, but the fedilist.com crawler lists 7,272 total instances (2,426 of which have open registrations) and 4,388,262 total accounts. Those numbers have been going up steadily. (The crawler finds a little more than 17 new instances a day, on average; a lot of them are short-lived, some are not. Of the 4,413 instances that are newer than the crawler's first crawl, 2,091 are still up.)
A lot of things have changed! pl.smuglo.li dickkickextremist.xyz, niu.moe, etc., no longer exist. :pressf:
At the time, the highest-volume instance was pawoo.net: we got a post from them almost every thirty seconds! Now we get a post from pawoo.net every 19 seconds. Seven instances now have higher volume than the highest-volume instance in May of last year. FSE itself is producing a new post every 24 seconds (up from every 41 seconds), just short of doubling post volume. baraag.net nearly doubled its output, neckbeard.xyz nearly tripled it, and spinster.xyz went from a post every 7m40s (563 over 72 hours) to one every 1m15s (3,412 over 72 hours), and that's just the posts that have federated to FSE. KiwiFarms is more than twice as active as it was.
So it looks like fedi's getting way more active! That's all even without considering the new instances that didn't exist back then, like poa.st sending FSE a poast every 11.7 seconds on average.
Granted, it's got some statistical problems, being two random 3-day slices, sampled when the mood struck me. But it's a really massive upswing in activity, too big and spread across too many servers to just be a blip, and it lines up with the crawler's statistics.
posts_from_instances.png
posts_from_instances--2021-10-14.png
