Data on sending a post into the fediverse

So I was wondering the other day about how long it typically takes for a post from my self-hosted fediverse server to reach all of my followers.

First, some technical details about the server itself.

• My fediverse server is hosted on DigitalOcean
• It has 2 virtual CPUs
• 4 GB of memory
• and a 50 GB SSD disk

According to a tool I built for exploring your fediverse connections, at the time of the poll I had 2,521 followers spread across 740 servers.

Here are the top 10 servers:

• mastodon.social: 422 connections (15.2%)
• mstdn.social: 96 connections (3.5%)
• hachyderm.io: 90 connections (3.2%)
• mas.to: 74 connections (2.7%)
• botsin.space: 70 connections (2.5%)
• mastodon.online: 69 connections (2.5%)
• fosstodon.org: 65 connections (2.3%)
• infosec.exchange: 44 connections (1.6%)
• mastodon.world: 38 connections (1.4%)
• indieweb.social: 30 connections (1.1%)

The poll itself was set to be visible only to my followers, for obvious reasons, so here’s a screenshot if it.

Note that I did not boost the poll after posting it, as not to affect the experiment, but because of that, and it being a Sunday morning, it may have resulted in a smaller sample size.

It would definitely be interesting to expand this experiment with data on my followers geographic location, if this information was available.

For now I’m only running one isolated test, perhaps I’ll do this a few more times to get more data points. I just wanted to share the preliminary results and maybe inspire folks to run their own tests. Feel free to share what you learn!