Fediverse activity report #1

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According to data collected by FediDB, the activity in the fediverse has been slowing down.

Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.

I don’t particularly care, I am still having a great time, but I thought it would be interesting to see how this affects my own experience.

So I’ve analyzed 3,478 accounts that I follow and/or follow me. Out of those, 2,885 accounts had information about when they were created, and when the last post was made.

Here’s what I found out:

• 1,244 accounts have posted within the past day, that’s 43%
• additional 466 accounts have posted within the past week
• and the following 374 accounts posted within the past month
• the next 154 accounts posted within the past 90 days
• and the next 455 accounts posted within the past year
• and 192 accounts haven’t posted in more than a year

All in all, 59.2% of my connections have posted at least once over the past week. (And some of the non-posters might still be lurking around!)

Below is what this breakdown looks visually.

The length of each bar corresponds to the time between the account’s creation date and the last time it posted, and it’s distance from the right-hand axis tells you how long ago the last post has been made.

So an account that was created in 2016, and last posted in 2020 will have a longer bar than an account that was created in 2023 and last posted today, which will also be closer to the Y axis on the right.

Hope this makes sense!

Below is a long bar chart that consists of more than 2,800 thin horizontal bars, each representing a fediverse account. The length of the bar depends on how many days elapsed since the account was created until it’s most recent post was made. The bar chart is split into sections labeled based on when the group of accounts within that section last posted and is the same as the breakdown in the article above. Each section’s bars are also colored based on the activity, starting with green colors and switching to red hues for less active accounts.

Methodology

I used Mastodon’s accounts/:id/followers and accounts/:id/following endpoints to collect a list of accounts I follow and that follow me. The data from these endpoints typically contains the date the account was created (created_at) and when it last posted (last_status_at). I plotted this information on a vertical bar chart to show approximately how much time elapsed from the account’s creation to the last time it posted, and ordered each account first by the date of the last post, and then by its creation, hoping to reveal some interesting patterns.

Visualization

Chart not rendering? Download a static version. You can also download the anonymized data.