Of all the ActivityPub servers that have ever been publicly available, how many do you think are still up today?

#EvanPoll #poll #fediverse #activitypub #sustainability

Hey, all. Very interesting. So, I've mentioned this a few times in the comments, but I've done a survey of about 85,000 servers that have been seen by existing live servers. Of those servers, about 32% reply successfully to a Nodeinfo request. Nodeinfo is a per-server statistics endpoint.

Not all ActivityPub servers support Nodeinfo. Of that same data set, about 8% give a successful 404 or 410 response for Nodeinfo. Some percentage of those are going to be non-nodeinfo Fediverse servers, and with a bit more work I could probably figure out which are which.

So, by my estimate, of these servers, about 32-40% of Fediverse servers seen by other live servers are alive today. The rest return errors, don't resolve, have bad SSL certs, and so on.

Now, there's some dark matter out there: servers that never connected to our large connected component on the Fediverse. We can't know if they're up or down or what. They're unreachable.

Regardless, I'm pretty confident in using the 32-40% number. So, that's in the 26-50% quartile, and that would be my answer.

My guess is that @dansup might have some better data than I do.