Simon WillisonNov 20, 2022

I put together my own system for tracking the total number of Mastodon users over time, as reported for the instances tracked by https://instances.social/

It's a delightful (to me) combination of different tricks - git scraping, my git-history and s3-credentials tools, Datasette Lite and an Observable notebook to plot the chart at the end.

I describe how it all works in detail here: https://simonwillison.net/2022/Nov/20/tracking-mastodon/

Or you can jump straight in to play with my notebook: https://observablehq.com/@simonw/mastodon-users-and-statuses-over-time

Mastodon instances

Show threadSimon WillisonNov 20, 2022

This is a good example of me forcing myself to live the "If you do a project, you should write about it" rule - I was SO tempted to get this thing working and then go to bed, but I made myself do the extra 45 minutes of work to turn it into a blog post.

https://simonwillison.net/2022/Nov/6/what-to-blog-about/

What to blog about

You should start a blog. Having your own little corner of the internet is good for the soul! But what should you write about? It’s easy to get hung up …

Show threadSuvash Thapaliya 
@simon I'm really terrible at 'turning it into a blog post'. Something I need to work better on.
Nov 20, 2022 at 12:02pmWeb