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

What is #cosocialca? Federated social communications for #Canada, structured as a #coop

In the word’s of original catalyst @evan —

I think my hope is that we have a legal entity, the co-op, that runs one or more servers for its members.

One server is pan-Canadian http://cosocial.ca with more specific geographic ones available as we launch them (kitsilano.example, winnipeg.example, newfoundland.example).

We want local communities, but membership is in the whole org

#nomoa

Here's your irregular reminder that:

Twitter was a multi-billion dollar company with thousands of employees.

Mastodon is a niche hobbyist product run by volunteers

The fact that we're being seen as a viable alternative to them is an admission that a federated, decentralized future is not only possible, but desirable.

Mastodon is not one thing, or one place. It's a network of many things and many places. We don't have a spokesperson (I mean, there's me. I'm the official spokesperson for 💯 of the fediverse, but beyond me there is no spokesperson) we don't have consensus on moderation or blocking or tools or what is good and what is bad. Some of us are professional SREs and Sysadmins, some of us aren't. Some of our instances have been around for 5+ years, some won't be here in six months.

And that's good! All of it, every last bit of it is good.

We're wrestling power away from the billionaire class, in real time, and reclaiming it for the People.

"Those are the five computers of the world market, together directly controlling $5.8T of the world’s assets, roughly 2/3 the value of the total amount of gold in the world. Indirectly, their influence through app stores, subscription fees, software providers who are dependent on their services, resellers and so on is significantly larger.

And it’s important to consider them together, because the veneer of competing in an open market only goes so deep."

https://deprogrammaticaipsum.com/five-computers/