Fediverse Observer is offline and no longer being developed

The domain https://fediverse.observer redirects to sedo now.

On October 11th these two commits where made to the repo:

this will be my final release, glad to have contributed since 2011 to some fediverse stats, https://fedidb.com/ is a great resource with more interest

this software is no longer developed

Sad to have lost such a great resource.

@vicinus@piefed.zip fyi, this will impact !fedilytics@piefed.zip right?

Yeah. I saw the dead website earlier today and have been trying to figure out how to keep the posts working.

The fediverse software post, I could rewrite some code to gather fedidb daily (to my knowledge, they don’t have all time series data available), but their MAU math is suspect. So, not a great option, but my only other thought is basically remaking fediverse-observer and I do not have a server or potentially relevant server skill set beyond cron jobs.

For the threadiverse instances post, I can keep gathering data from the instances I already have in my database, but don’t really have another way to find new ones. Maybe, I could see if I could scrape it from fedidb (I couldn’t get their API working in the past).

In conclusion, the posts are not in a good place :(

but their MAU math is suspect

Do they do any math? I assumed it's simply additive. They get the MAU from individual instances via their crawler, then display a total?
Differences to other sites is probably due to the set of instances checked, not anything math related.

Differences to other sites is probably due to the set of instances checked

fedidb.com/software/lemmy?search=lemmy.world&stat…

Fedidb doesn’t seem to include lemmy.world, which seems like a substantial omission, as I believe that it’s the largest Lemmy instance.

EDIT: And my own home instance, lemmy.today, also doesn’t seem to be on there:

fedidb.com/software/lemmy?search=lemmy.today

The largest user count server that they seem to query is lemmy.ml:

fedidb.com/software/lemmy?search=lemmy.ml

EDIT2: Your home instance, kbin.earth, does seem to be on there:

fedidb.com/servers/kbin.earth

That is interesting to know. It doesn't look like lemmy.world has opted out, judging by their robots.txt.

Oh, that’s a thought. I didn’t think of checking robots.txt.

Lemmy.today does have a blanket ban on all bots in its robots.txt, which I assume was put into place to help try to reduce (sporadically severe) scraping load. I’m not sure that the admin, @mrmanager@lemmy.today, realized that it might have cut it out of Lemmy statistics gathering.