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.