Hachyderm is the El Paso of the Fediverse
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@DamonWakes hmm, I've tried searching for the same server and I'm getting more global results (a city in Japan) so I'm not sure what's going on here. I did have some bugs related to searching earlier so it seems quite possible I didn't squash them all
@ricci Please do let me know if you figure it out! I'd be keen to have another poke around. It is interesting to see the scale of the servers compared this way.
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Hachyderm is the El Paso of the Fediverse
It can be kind of hard to understand how big a server (instance) on the Fediverse really is. I know mastodon.social is much bigger than the server I'm on, but how much bigger, really?
So what if we compare the populations of servers to cities?
I built a tool for that! https://arewedecentralizedyet.online/fedicities/
Let's compare mastodon.social, the biggest server on the Fediverse, to the biggest city in the world, Shanghai (pop 24.9M). In comparison, pixelfed.social is like Ahmedabad, India (pop 6.4M). hachyderm.io is like El Paso, Texas (pop 679K). The server I'm on, discuss.systems, is like Eisenhüttenstadt, Germany (pop 32.1K).
Cool but maybe I'm not so familiar with some of those cities. What if we compare to cities in Mexico? (mastodon.social is Mexico City, Hachyderm is Tepic) Or Ontario? (mastodon.social is Toronto, Hachyderm is Caledon).
Play around with this tool, select an area of the world you're familiar with, and get a better sense for how big all these servers really are! Check out what your own server is comparable to!
@ricci This is cool. I see the size difference as in mapping mastodon.social to the biggest city in the country I'm in maps what I think as big servers to what I wouldn't consider big enough to be a city, like districts of other cities. Both fedi and the country look too centralized, with software being optimized for huge instances and the central administration assuming everyone lives in the "default city".
(I've also learned the non-fedi fact that there is a city with the population of 307 people, less than a large apartment building.)
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@ricci Hey @hachyderm did you see this
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Hachyderm is the El Paso of the Fediverse
It can be kind of hard to understand how big a server (instance) on the Fediverse really is. I know mastodon.social is much bigger than the server I'm on, but how much bigger, really?
So what if we compare the populations of servers to cities?
I built a tool for that! https://arewedecentralizedyet.online/fedicities/
Let's compare mastodon.social, the biggest server on the Fediverse, to the biggest city in the world, Shanghai (pop 24.9M). In comparison, pixelfed.social is like Ahmedabad, India (pop 6.4M). hachyderm.io is like El Paso, Texas (pop 679K). The server I'm on, discuss.systems, is like Eisenhüttenstadt, Germany (pop 32.1K).
Cool but maybe I'm not so familiar with some of those cities. What if we compare to cities in Mexico? (mastodon.social is Mexico City, Hachyderm is Tepic) Or Ontario? (mastodon.social is Toronto, Hachyderm is Caledon).
Play around with this tool, select an area of the world you're familiar with, and get a better sense for how big all these servers really are! Check out what your own server is comparable to!
@ricci TIL pixelfed is actually big o.O
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@ricci This is cool. I see the size difference as in mapping mastodon.social to the biggest city in the country I'm in maps what I think as big servers to what I wouldn't consider big enough to be a city, like districts of other cities. Both fedi and the country look too centralized, with software being optimized for huge instances and the central administration assuming everyone lives in the "default city".
(I've also learned the non-fedi fact that there is a city with the population of 307 people, less than a large apartment building.)
@lukyan there are so so many small ones, the list I'm using cuts off at 500 to avoid being too gigantic
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RE: https://discuss.systems/@ricci/116022130481291531
I could swear I have seen multiple accounts from multiple servers attack #hachyderm over the last two years for being so goddamn big, like mastodon.social
@draNgNon it's all relative, I guess, I'm sure there are people for who El Paso is the Big City too
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@ricci does this mean that self-hosted, single-member instances are hermits in the cave interacting with platonic shadows from the meta-reality, bubbles in the quantum foam?
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@ricci TIL pixelfed is actually big o.O
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Hachyderm is the El Paso of the Fediverse
It can be kind of hard to understand how big a server (instance) on the Fediverse really is. I know mastodon.social is much bigger than the server I'm on, but how much bigger, really?
So what if we compare the populations of servers to cities?
I built a tool for that! https://arewedecentralizedyet.online/fedicities/
Let's compare mastodon.social, the biggest server on the Fediverse, to the biggest city in the world, Shanghai (pop 24.9M). In comparison, pixelfed.social is like Ahmedabad, India (pop 6.4M). hachyderm.io is like El Paso, Texas (pop 679K). The server I'm on, discuss.systems, is like Eisenhüttenstadt, Germany (pop 32.1K).
Cool but maybe I'm not so familiar with some of those cities. What if we compare to cities in Mexico? (mastodon.social is Mexico City, Hachyderm is Tepic) Or Ontario? (mastodon.social is Toronto, Hachyderm is Caledon).
Play around with this tool, select an area of the world you're familiar with, and get a better sense for how big all these servers really are! Check out what your own server is comparable to!
@ricci this is awesome but I don’t really get how anchor cities and anchor instances work because the tooltip seems not to respond to touch events and I’m on a tablet
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@ricci this is awesome but I don’t really get how anchor cities and anchor instances work because the tooltip seems not to respond to touch events and I’m on a tablet
@dougwade Oops! should be fixed.
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Hachyderm is the El Paso of the Fediverse
It can be kind of hard to understand how big a server (instance) on the Fediverse really is. I know mastodon.social is much bigger than the server I'm on, but how much bigger, really?
So what if we compare the populations of servers to cities?
I built a tool for that! https://arewedecentralizedyet.online/fedicities/
Let's compare mastodon.social, the biggest server on the Fediverse, to the biggest city in the world, Shanghai (pop 24.9M). In comparison, pixelfed.social is like Ahmedabad, India (pop 6.4M). hachyderm.io is like El Paso, Texas (pop 679K). The server I'm on, discuss.systems, is like Eisenhüttenstadt, Germany (pop 32.1K).
Cool but maybe I'm not so familiar with some of those cities. What if we compare to cities in Mexico? (mastodon.social is Mexico City, Hachyderm is Tepic) Or Ontario? (mastodon.social is Toronto, Hachyderm is Caledon).
Play around with this tool, select an area of the world you're familiar with, and get a better sense for how big all these servers really are! Check out what your own server is comparable to!
@ricci love this!
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@ricci love this!
@georgebaily Great, I'm glad you like it!
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Hachyderm is the El Paso of the Fediverse
It can be kind of hard to understand how big a server (instance) on the Fediverse really is. I know mastodon.social is much bigger than the server I'm on, but how much bigger, really?
So what if we compare the populations of servers to cities?
I built a tool for that! https://arewedecentralizedyet.online/fedicities/
Let's compare mastodon.social, the biggest server on the Fediverse, to the biggest city in the world, Shanghai (pop 24.9M). In comparison, pixelfed.social is like Ahmedabad, India (pop 6.4M). hachyderm.io is like El Paso, Texas (pop 679K). The server I'm on, discuss.systems, is like Eisenhüttenstadt, Germany (pop 32.1K).
Cool but maybe I'm not so familiar with some of those cities. What if we compare to cities in Mexico? (mastodon.social is Mexico City, Hachyderm is Tepic) Or Ontario? (mastodon.social is Toronto, Hachyderm is Caledon).
Play around with this tool, select an area of the world you're familiar with, and get a better sense for how big all these servers really are! Check out what your own server is comparable to!
@mastodonmigration you might like this

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Hachyderm is the El Paso of the Fediverse
It can be kind of hard to understand how big a server (instance) on the Fediverse really is. I know mastodon.social is much bigger than the server I'm on, but how much bigger, really?
So what if we compare the populations of servers to cities?
I built a tool for that! https://arewedecentralizedyet.online/fedicities/
Let's compare mastodon.social, the biggest server on the Fediverse, to the biggest city in the world, Shanghai (pop 24.9M). In comparison, pixelfed.social is like Ahmedabad, India (pop 6.4M). hachyderm.io is like El Paso, Texas (pop 679K). The server I'm on, discuss.systems, is like Eisenhüttenstadt, Germany (pop 32.1K).
Cool but maybe I'm not so familiar with some of those cities. What if we compare to cities in Mexico? (mastodon.social is Mexico City, Hachyderm is Tepic) Or Ontario? (mastodon.social is Toronto, Hachyderm is Caledon).
Play around with this tool, select an area of the world you're familiar with, and get a better sense for how big all these servers really are! Check out what your own server is comparable to!
@ricci This is very cool!
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@ricci This is very cool!
@stefan Thanks! I have this idea to make a sort of a "skyline" for the Fediverse using the same data, with buildings representing the major servers
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@ricci Please do let me know if you figure it out! I'd be keen to have another poke around. It is interesting to see the scale of the servers compared this way.
@ricci @DamonWakes
Its important to remember that if this is based on the number of registered accounts, that the number of *active* accounts can be wildly different.
sdf is a great example. While it has about 70k registered, the number of active accounts runs to a few hundred (i did a bit of digging via the api a few weeks or maybe months ago, I've got a post about it somewhere but sdf search doesnt work properly so i can't find it) -
@stefan Thanks! I have this idea to make a sort of a "skyline" for the Fediverse using the same data, with buildings representing the major servers
@ricci Nice, I like that!
Really love what you've been doing with all the data you're collecting. Definitely let me know when you publish something next time, I'll be more than happy to add a link to it on https://fediverseexplorations.org!
(Or if you prefer, there is a link to the GitHub repo on the Contribute page and in the footer.)
