Fediverse

i apparently cannot figure out ascii shrugs, nvm

¯\\\_(ツ)\_/¯ => ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Just so we're clear, what this crawler does is go through all servers that use ActivityPub known to it, and congregate that data to a list of known services (Lemmy, Mastodon, Piefed etc.). How is does that is by querying a standardised end point to get the instance info (.well-known/nodeinfo which will then point to a different path to get the actual info).

For instance, here's what it will collect for feddit.uk:

// curl -s https://feddit.uk/nodeinfo/2.1 | jq
{
  "version": "2.1",
  "software": {
    "name": "lemmy",
    "version": "0.19.10-feddit",
    "repository": "https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy",
    "homepage": "https://join-lemmy.org/"
  },
  "protocols": [
    "activitypub"
  ],
  "usage": {
    "users": {
      "total": 4184,
      "activeHalfyear": 718,
      "activeMonth": 485
    },
    "localPosts": 25750,
    "localComments": 122835
  },
  "openRegistrations": true,
  "services": {
    "inbound": [],
    "outbound": []
  },
  "metadata": {}
}

The important stat here is the localPosts, which is all the posts made by local users in any community, local or remote. It does not include posts by users from remote instances made in local communities. You can also see this data on the instance sidebar in lemmy-ui.

lemmy.zip going down will only reduce aggregated stats for total posts by 47,280, as that's what they report for their localPosts.