So... There seems to be a common misconception where people assume all of Mastodon has 180,000 users because mastodon.social says it's home to that number of users.
The real number is closer to 1,5 million. Those 180k are only mastodon.social users and there are like... 3,000 other servers?
I wonder what I should do. 🤔
@Gargron pull account number?
Add?
@thegibson Pull from where tho. Some central aggregating service, one of the few that exist right now. What if it's down? What if it's being slow?
Using total row count of accounts table might be more reliable and more in spirit.
@Gargron @thegibson Maybe have instances whisper information to one another about their user counts--and the user counts they know about--to other instances once a day or so? Two degrees of separation ought to be enough for m.s to estimate a rough head count, no?
Smaller instances, meanwhile, would see a much smaller observable aggregate count, but that'd be interesting too.
@saper @Gargron @thegibson It would avoid reliance on a single centralized service.
Not any more unmanageable than a game of whisper-down-the-alley. (Hence my use of the term.) Thus, not going to provide a painstakingly accurate sum—certainly not as observed from less connected instances—but when you're dealing with ~1.5 million horizon, long tail can fall off without losing significant digits.
"Here's my count, and counts of every server that polled me for toots today" hardly implies mess.
@saper @Gargron @thegibson Alternatively, a store-and-forward network a la Usenet could be used to share small instance-reported statistical packets, without the worry of losing the long tail.
This would eliminate the need for any given instance to reconcile the counts coming in over alternate routes—as the Usenet-esqe messages would self-reconcile on GUID. The trade-off is storage consumed by storing-for-forward those stats-packet messages.
I think a simple count of the lines in the DB would suffice...
No need to get complex for something so simple.
@thegibson @saper @Gargron Right, but the question is how to obtain the counts from a sufficient space of 3,000ish servers to produce an aggregate total.
It was suggested having that done from/to a single point (either polling or pushing) could be problematic. Hence my spitballing.
@Gargron @thegibson @saper Well, if you really are dealing with numbers near 1.5 million, that number won't need to be updated all that often. (Unless growth is really pronounced.)
Easy enough to just have an old McDonald's style banner proclaiming "1.5 Million Accounts Federated" and update the static number therein by hand as needed.
Eugen Rochko
The Gibson đź……
"You do you" is Eu-gen-ics.
Marcin Cieślak