@evan There must be an enormous number of one-person servers, so the number of surviving servers need not tell much about the Fediverse as a whole.

@mrdk As far as I can tell, about 47% of live servers are single-user.

What do you mean that the lifetime of servers doesn't tell much about the Fediverse as a whole?

@mrdk Also, as far as I can tell, about 55% of all Fediverse users are on the top 20 biggest servers. About 88% are on the top 100; about 99% are on the top 1000 biggest servers.

@evan @mrdk do you follow a particular methodology or data source to get these stats? It'd be nice to know (and make a note).

@omkar_foss

The method is adding the user count for the top N servers and then dividing that by the total user count for the Fediverse (or at least all known servers).

You can get the user count from a server using Nodeinfo.

https://nodeinfo.diaspora.software/

@evan Thank you!

@omkar_foss not all Fediverse software supports Nodeinfo, so it's an estimate rather than a measurement.

You also have to know that a server exists. There's a Mastodon API endpoint that shows which other servers a server has seen; you can use that to do a breadth-first survey of the network.