Recently, the Hard Fork and Search Engine podcasts teamed up to release their own social network. Well, not really a new social network, but rather an instance of Mastodon, which is just one of many software packages that run on the ActivityPub protocol. The collection of ActivityPub-enabled servers is commonly known as the "fediverse", and the new instance was called The Forkiverse.
This is just the latest in several rounds of migration to Mastodon, the previous having coincided with Elon Musk's takeover of that other microblogging site (I forget the name). But how big is the Forkiverse? Where does it fit into the larger picture?
Fortunately, since ActivityPub is by nature public, it's relatively to get this data. I was able to download a complete set of data on ActivityPub servers from a service called FediDB.
- Mastodon
- Misskey
- Other
The fediverse, plotted on a log scale, has a peloton-like shape, with a few leaders followed by a large group. mastodon.social (the "default" server) is by far the largest, followed by just a few servers with over 1000 monthly active users. This category includes The Forkiverse (near the front), and my own home server indieweb.social.
What I found really interesting in the data, though, were the huge number of servers with between 10 and 100 monthly active users. These servers must represent some kind of stable community: remember, they are monthly active users. Yet I wondered why they've stayed away from the big players: are they groups of people brought together by some specific purpose or pre-existing social ties?
Alas, most of these small servers don't have description fields, a property of ActivityPub that allows a server to state its intended purpose. But since a few do, I built a quick API to query descriptions of mastodon servers with between 10 and 100 monthly active users. You can see a random sample of those here:
- Boriken.social is a Mastodon instance for the Puerto Rican crowd both home and abroad. Boriken.social es una instancia de Mastodon para la comunidad boricua en el archipiélago y en la diáspora.
- Bienvenue sur ecologie.social !
- asso.lgbt est une instance Mastodon hébergeant des collectifs et associations féministes et LGBTQIA+ en France.
I really hope that the fediverse has a bright future. It feels like (the best of) what the web used to be like: quirky, non-conforming communities of people who've found a home outside of the big platforms. I hope that more people with existing followings will create instances like The Forkiverse to bring people to the fediverse, but I also love that small servers of friends or colleagues are using ActivityPub to carve out their own online spaces.