9 months after setting up an instance for friends, what do we think of the experience?
The experience of setting up a
#Pixelfed instance online deserves its own article because there are so many topics to cover, such as the cost of hosting, the technical skills required, friends’ reluctance to create accounts, bugs in the software and apps, and the difficulty of finding relevant content.
Today, however, we'll just share some
#statistics. The most difficult part of setting up our own instance was importing content. We had to retrieve accounts and posts from other Fediverse instances and import them manually, one by one, which can take hours or days.
But all the effort spent finding new accounts was worthwhile: over time, our instance slowly and organically grew. So here are today's statistics, 9 months later:
The instance is connected to 4,000 other servers. Most of the accounts we’re connected to belong to just a few instances (img 1):
1. mastodon.social — 9,6k
2. pixelfed.social — 5,3k
3. piaille.fr — 1,1k
4. mastodon.art — 926
5. chaos.social — 835
6. mstdn.social — 835
7. troet.cafe — 787
8. mas.to — 652
9. pixelfed.com.br — 592
10. mastodon.online — 561
The dominance of mastodon.social and pixelfed.social is concerning. When they are down, our instance receives very little content.
Second point:
#hashtag. The most popular hashtags on an instance show the types of posts that typically appear on users' timelines. In a sense, they represent the current state of the instance and can influence the environment that users will encounter.
With + than 150k unique hashtags, the 10 most popular are (img 2):
#photography #nature #art #landscape #naturephotography #photo #fotografie #architecture
And the currently trending hashtags are: (img 3)
#photography #nature #art #naturephotography #landscape #photo #fotografie #blackandwhite #architecture #birds #silentsunday #travel #monochrome #flowers #painting
This means that users on our instance will see many nature, art, and animal photos on the global timeline. Generally, there’s little spam or politics - when they exist, it comes from accounts on
#Mastodon. The advantage of smaller, closed instances for a group of friends is that we avoid the spam/bot issues found on larger
#Fediverse instances.
That's all for today. :)
plavansky
Hibipix Admin
Fredensborg
Nicolas
Pixelfed Statistics
Michael Lyon
fihu
Linh Pham
Vedfolnir - AI Accessibility