I’ve been active in the fediverse for a bit over a year now, and it’s been a lot of fun. And part of this experience has been creating various experiments, like charting the network of accounts that follow my creative bots, or making tools that show you all the different fediverse servers your connections are on.
It’s really fascinating to see how the fediverse, which consists of tens of thousands of independent peer servers, operates, and learning about the limitations of this growing network.
For example, here’s a really good chart from @cassolotl that explains how the content in the fediverse propagates.
If you’re running your own, small fediverse server, this shows the importance of your server being well-connected, which can be achieved by simply following and interacting with people from a variety of servers.
And now I wonder, how many fediverse servers know about mine?
According to the tool I mentioned, I have connections, that is followers and accounts I follow, across 787 servers. That’s quite a bit!
But there is more to this. Mastodon has an instance/peers endpoint (documented here) that lists servers that an instance is “aware of”. Some non-Mastodon servers also offer this endpoint. My own server reports 14,855 known instances.
I was wondering how big of a portion of the known fediverse that would be, so, using a list with little over 29,000 fediverse servers from fedilist.com, I wrote a script that lets me check the list of peers on each of them to see how many of these know about me. And here’s what I’ve learned.
- my server knows about 14,855 fediverse instances
- out of the 21,642 servers from the fedilist.com dataset that I checked (skipping unresponsive servers and WordPress sites that use the ActivityPub plugin), 14,538 have the
instances/peersendpoint available - and out of those, 11,500 servers know about mine, which is about 79.1%
| Total | Peers | |
|---|---|---|
| Number of servers | 14,538 | 11,500 |
That’s pretty well-connected!
I still have a few questions about how peers actually work. For example, it looks like peers don’t have to be mutual. I’ve seen instances that list me as a peer, but my server does not. Also, going back to the chart I shared earlier, do peers matter? It seems more important to have followers on these instances.
If you know the answers, or know more about how fediverse peers work, feel free to reach out!