Chris Trottier🎊🎉 It happened! 🎉🎊
8,001,321 accounts on Mastodon!
We went over 8 million within the last hour!
Break out the champagne 🍾🥂
This is a big milestone!🏅
And believe me, millions more will join soon!
Gen X-Wing@atomicpoet I kinda wish all the big 50k+ instances closed sign ups for a while, or at least direct away from them. To spread things out more.
Also hope for less generic instances. I like themed ones.
Tim Ward ⭐🇪🇺🔶 #FBPE@breadbin @atomicpoet But which theme to join, if one has several interests (as most people, surely, do)?
Keiþ 🔭@breadbin @atomicpoet I went for a general instance with a large population because it wasn’t run by one person, and whilst I love astronomy, comedy, politics and many other things I’m not a single topic poster. Also I checked to make sure the instance had a way for me to pay them some money. On the whole though the more instances the better. Then again, we’re free to move around.
@IChewPorridge @breadbin Last I checked, mastodon.online is run by one person 😂
@atomicpoet @breadbin Yeah. Didn’t say I got it right, now did I? 🤣
@IChewPorridge @breadbin FYI, my instance is run by the same guy.
There's a reason that I also self-host a back-up instance.
@atomicpoet @breadbin My social media on here isn’t important enough for me to go that far though technically I would find the exercise fascinating. I thought I would be concerned about shutting my Twitter account down, but in the end it didn’t matter. I had fun on there at the beginning. Good memories, but that’s all.
@atomicpoet @IChewPorridge And that’s the most fragile part of the fediverse (in my mind with what I know). Instances can grow to the point where it’s too much work and too expensive (hardware) for the person who sat it up. I feel it’s better to have 500 50k instances than 50 500k ones.
@breadbin @atomicpoet Almost certainly. I suspect we may have a fall off of the number of instances. Some of the people who set up instances knew what they were getting into, some less so. I prefer to see an instance with a means of getting money, because it does really need someone paid to do the job and the facilities paid for.
@IChewPorridge @breadbin What if I told you that running an instance is cheap? And that if you own a Raspberry Pi, you can even run an instance, for almost nothing, inside your home?
@atomicpoet @IChewPorridge Well RPis are getting expensive :)
Jokes aside, that is such a cool thing. Not that I can run 50k users.
I’ve been hoping that someone would build an image to throw on SD cards or USB sticks that boots directly into a mastodon (or other fediverse app) server. Would be great for testing it out as well as situations when building an ad hoc fediverse would be useful. Let’s say a con or fighting a regime.
@atomicpoet @breadbin That is actually really cool. I love raspberry Pi. I’ve had a 2B and a 3B. Sits there running homebridge, monitoring my network and stashing camera backups.
I don’t have an understanding of the traffic between nodes, but I assume if a local user subscribes to popular hashtags the data volumes could become interesting.
BoudCurrently we have a ~ -0.5 power law distribution [1][2] - the number N of Mastodon instances of size (user count) s is
N \propto s^{-0.54} .
We're top heavy in big instances: most of us are in 10k-1M size instances, despite a weak preference for smaller instances [1][2].
Even populations in the different instance sizes would be s^{-1}.
We could celebrate if we get to 1/s. :)
[1] https://framapiaf.org/@boud/109446420944888648
[2] https://codeberg.org/boud/fedistats_naive (commit 74bbb9e)
Boud (@[email protected])
Attaché : 3 images @[email protected] @[email protected] @[email protected] @[email protected] The #MastodonPowerLaw slope ~ -0.5 in the size distribution affects the political choices of federating #Fediverse communities [1]: * the median of size s of an instance is 3 (mean ~450) * the median of population size N*s is about 60,000 * one instance = one !vote (cf AU Senate) => tiny instances (~3 users/inst) dominate * one person = one !vote (cf AU HofReps) => big instances (~60,000 users/inst) dominate [1] https://codeberg.org/boud/fedistats_naive (commit b82f3b3)
@boud @breadbin @IChewPorridge Many folks (like me) also run small instances but post on large ones too. And this is because if a post of mine gets to be too popular, it can kill an instance. I discovered that problem three weeks ago.
"Kill" in what sense? cpu/bandwidth? or overwhelming the local timeline? I thought that downgrading replies from "global" to "unlisted" helped to avoid overwhelming local timelines.