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   Evan Prodromou 🇨🇦🇺🇸🇬🇷🇵🇸 (evan@cosocial.ca)'s status on Saturday, 03-Oct-2026 08:07:25 JST Evan Prodromou 🇨🇦🇺🇸🇬🇷🇵🇸

   Hey, all. Very interesting. So, I've mentioned this a few times in the comments, but I've done a survey of about 85,000 servers that have been seen by existing live servers. Of those servers, about 32% reply successfully to a Nodeinfo request. Nodeinfo is a per-server statistics endpoint.

   • Embed this notice
     Evan Prodromou 🇨🇦🇺🇸🇬🇷🇵🇸 (evan@cosocial.ca)'s status on Saturday, 03-Oct-2026 08:07:20 JST Evan Prodromou 🇨🇦🇺🇸🇬🇷🇵🇸

     in reply to

     • Daniel Supernault

     My guess is that @dansup might have some better data than I do.

   • Embed this notice
     Evan Prodromou 🇨🇦🇺🇸🇬🇷🇵🇸 (evan@cosocial.ca)'s status on Saturday, 03-Oct-2026 08:07:21 JST Evan Prodromou 🇨🇦🇺🇸🇬🇷🇵🇸

     in reply to

     Regardless, I'm pretty confident in using the 32-40% number. So, that's in the 26-50% quartile, and that would be my answer.

   • Embed this notice
     Evan Prodromou 🇨🇦🇺🇸🇬🇷🇵🇸 (evan@cosocial.ca)'s status on Saturday, 03-Oct-2026 08:07:22 JST Evan Prodromou 🇨🇦🇺🇸🇬🇷🇵🇸

     in reply to

     Now, there's some dark matter out there: servers that never connected to our large connected component on the Fediverse. We can't know if they're up or down or what. They're unreachable.

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     Evan Prodromou 🇨🇦🇺🇸🇬🇷🇵🇸 (evan@cosocial.ca)'s status on Saturday, 03-Oct-2026 08:07:23 JST Evan Prodromou 🇨🇦🇺🇸🇬🇷🇵🇸

     in reply to

     So, by my estimate, of these servers, about 32-40% of Fediverse servers seen by other live servers are alive today. The rest return errors, don't resolve, have bad SSL certs, and so on.

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     Evan Prodromou 🇨🇦🇺🇸🇬🇷🇵🇸 (evan@cosocial.ca)'s status on Saturday, 03-Oct-2026 08:07:24 JST Evan Prodromou 🇨🇦🇺🇸🇬🇷🇵🇸

     in reply to

     Not all ActivityPub servers support Nodeinfo. Of that same data set, about 8% give a successful 404 or 410 response for Nodeinfo. Some percentage of those are going to be non-nodeinfo Fediverse servers, and with a bit more work I could probably figure out which are which.

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     Evan Prodromou 🇨🇦🇺🇸🇬🇷🇵🇸 (evan@cosocial.ca)'s status on Saturday, 03-Oct-2026 09:14:37 JST Evan Prodromou 🇨🇦🇺🇸🇬🇷🇵🇸

     in reply to

     • Space Catitude 🚀

     @TerryHancock 55k dead servers seems like a pretty long tail to me.

   • Embed this notice
     Space Catitude 🚀 (terryhancock@realsocial.life)'s status on Saturday, 03-Oct-2026 09:14:39 JST Space Catitude 🚀

     in reply to

     @evan

     That's interesting. I figured there'd be a LONG tail of servers that someone spun up, ran for a few days, and then shut down.

     But maybe there are, but live servers wouldn't remember them?

     It seems like it would be a good design for them to eventually forget inactive accounts?

     I know that some accounts are listed by my server as "inactive", simply because no one on my server follows them anymore (but following back to the origin server, they are still there and active).

   • Embed this notice
     Evan Prodromou 🇨🇦🇺🇸🇬🇷🇵🇸 (evan@cosocial.ca)'s status on Saturday, 03-Oct-2026 09:19:10 JST Evan Prodromou 🇨🇦🇺🇸🇬🇷🇵🇸

     in reply to

     More data about servers:

     - 27K live servers.
     - 47% have one user.
     - 55% of all users are on the top 20 servers.
     - 88% of all users are on the top 100 servers.
     - 99% of all users are on the top 1000 servers.

   • Embed this notice
     Evan Prodromou 🇨🇦🇺🇸🇬🇷🇵🇸 (evan@cosocial.ca)'s status on Saturday, 03-Oct-2026 12:32:51 JST Evan Prodromou 🇨🇦🇺🇸🇬🇷🇵🇸

     in reply to

     I think there might be ways to find the dark unconnected Fediverse servers using something like Common Crawl.

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     Evan Prodromou 🇨🇦🇺🇸🇬🇷🇵🇸 (evan@cosocial.ca)'s status on Saturday, 03-Oct-2026 22:29:50 JST Evan Prodromou 🇨🇦🇺🇸🇬🇷🇵🇸

     in reply to

     • wakest ⁂
     • Rob Ricci
     • Minoru

     @minoru @ricci @liaizon wow, that is remarkably close to my numbers!

   • Embed this notice
     Minoru (minoru@functional.cafe)'s status on Saturday, 03-Oct-2026 22:29:51 JST Minoru

     in reply to

     • wakest ⁂
     • Rob Ricci

     @ricci So, my crawler has been running for 5 years, and it also pulls data from other sources like the-federation.info, fediverse.observer, fedidb.com etc. Its database has 44142 alive nodes and 777384 dead ones, so the answer is 5.4%. If .gab.best and .cheeseland.xyz are excluded, then only 98621 nodes are dead and the answer is 30.9%.

     Someone in the thread suggested that nodes might be pruning their peers lists from dead nodes. Judging by the negligible difference between Evan's number and my number, no pruning is done.

     BTW, my crawler currently tracks 22 newly discovered nodes, i.e. ones that were seen in someone's peers list but whose NodeInfo hasn't been checked yet. I'm happy the Fediverse keeps growing _^

     @liaizon @evan

   • Embed this notice
     Rob Ricci (ricci@discuss.systems)'s status on Saturday, 03-Oct-2026 22:29:52 JST Rob Ricci

     in reply to

     • wakest ⁂
     • Minoru

     @liaizon @evan well... what I'm doing is using a list of servers that are currently up, and just getting nodeinfo for them, so I do have a list of *some* historical servers that are gone now, but I doubt it's anywhere near as good as Evan's data.

     Someone who might have good data is @minoru who has been crawling the lists of federated servers for several years now to make https://nodes.fediverse.party/ (the list I use), and would have probably have a bunch of no-longer-reachable nodes in his database, including ones that were only known by nodes that are themselves no longer up, etc.

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     wakest ⁂ (liaizon@social.wake.st)'s status on Saturday, 03-Oct-2026 22:29:53 JST wakest ⁂

     in reply to

     • Rob Ricci

     @evan the data that @ricci pulls from for arewedecentralized is a bit more complete

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     Evan Prodromou 🇨🇦🇺🇸🇬🇷🇵🇸 (evan@cosocial.ca)'s status on Saturday, 03-Oct-2026 22:59:48 JST Evan Prodromou 🇨🇦🇺🇸🇬🇷🇵🇸

     in reply to

     • Dr Kim Foale

     @kim I think I can do that!

   • Embed this notice
     Dr Kim Foale (kim@post.lurk.org)'s status on Saturday, 03-Oct-2026 22:59:49 JST Dr Kim Foale

     in reply to

     @evan i would love a breakdown on the one user servers if you did a followup to this. are these actual servers in actual use, or developer test servers?