a couple days ago, we were wondering how many people are on the fediverse
today, it occurred to us to ask: is there really one fediverse?
- 🎒 💭
like, there's ActivityPub, a format which allows certain kinds of servers to synchronize messages
and there's all these server softwares that use ActivityPub in compatible ways
but every network has communities, and with instance blocking, those communities can be pretty meaningfully defined on a software, not just a social level
and the social level is doubled in the software anyway, because if no-one on example.net follows anyone on example.com or vice-versa, they don't see each other
- 🎒
so, like, back shortly after the is-Musk-buying-Twitter rush of signups, we tried to find counts of how many active users there were on the fediverse, and we found contradictory results
but that's because we were ... I mean, we might as well try to count how many active users there are on phpBB
a lot of these servers aren't trying to be counted
- 🎒
@packbat the One Big Fediverse does not exist, and has not for a long time, and we are long past the point where technical and social solutions could be introduced to “fix” this
i do not think this should be seen as a flaw but there is definitely still a big missed opportunity in all the fragmentation that’s occurred
