@GossiTheDog Fediverse Observer while not as pretty has accurate daily numbers for individual services.

Fediverse Observer checks all servers in the fediverse and gives you an easy way to find a home.

Fediverse Fediverse Servers. Find a Fediverse server to sign up for, find one close to you!

(fediverse.observer)

@spaduf @GossiTheDog Oh, I'm not sure if it is cool to locate all the private servers on a map?

@GossiTheDog I am still wondering where mastodon is on users since they took down their hourly update several months ago. I recall that they had passed 15million and growing. What is the new magic number? @Mastodon #MastodonUsers @mastodonusercount

@sergiodomeyko @Mastodon @mastodonusercount that account wasn’t run by Mastodon. There’s various ones, try @usercounts.

@GossiTheDog @Mastodon @mastodonusercount @usercounts this was the account i was following. take a look at the numbers

@sergiodomeyko @GossiTheDog @Mastodon @mastodonusercount
Ya that one shutting down is what inspired me to spin this one up. I can't speak for who ran that account, why it shut down or what exactly contributed to it's counts but I've changed the source code that powered it because of some shortcomings it had. If an instance grew or shrank too fast it would ignore the count and if someone redirected a domain or had dev/stage domains it duplicated the numbers. It also relied on instances.social.

@nobs @spaduf what's "private" about a Fediverse instance...?🤨

Even if they completely turn off Federation, if they're on a server broadcasting to the internet, there's literally nothing private about it.‍️

@usercounts does this bot calculate *only* Mastodon users or is it all of Fedi?

@BeAware 🤨If someone is self-hosting in the fediverse, you probably see his*her place of residence in this map, right?
There is literally nothing private about it anymore, indeed.
@spaduf

@nobs @spaduf IP addresses aren't that precise for home locations due to the IPs going through the ISP. They'd get a rough estimate at most.

Nothing on the internet is ever "private" unless it's behind end-to-end encryption.

@BeAware I'm really not an expert of these issues. This map just seems to be a weak standard of data privacy to me.

@nobs just trust me, it's not an issue. This doesn't do anything except show where it would be a good idea to sign up if you're looking for a local instance.

@BeAware Just to be clear: people didn't add their servers to the map themselves, right?

@nobs nah, there's sites like https://www.iplocation.net/ that can do it automatically.

For example, just typing Freiburg.social into that site, it shows me that it's probably hosted somewhere in Nuremberg, Germany.

@nobs @BeAware no, but if the location is derived from the IP address, it may have approximation that ranges easily between 50 and 500 kilometers

@BeAware sorry I missed this. Right now it's anything that complies with mastodon API structure. Namely, the /api/v1/instance endpoint and /api/v1/instance/peers is used to learn about new instance URLs. Future state might include Misskey API compatibility as per the poll I recently ran.