In 2018, I tried to map the Fediverse for the first time: https://vis.social/@Luca/100606625507856187
Back then, I found 7788 instances that had over a million connections to each other.
Today, I want to create a new visualization. I am using the same script (https://gist.github.com/lucahammer/eb68fc43a34877a304e7b81e5f729c4b) and so far it seems work.
New day, new try.
#Fediverse as of 2022-04-29.
I found 61 266 instances and 6 217 452 connections (peers). This includes non-functional ones because my script can't differentiate them yet.
1 455 returned info about the instance, 2 547 returned peers. That's an indication for the number of active instances which support the v1 API.
What's that pink cluster at the top? 31 998 gab[.]best instances. Or just domains? I assume they tried that to circumvent instance level blocks.
The only instance they are connected to? beehub.
(I wasn't involved with the Fediverse for some years. Feel free to explain what's going on.)
I removed those nodes (which are all dead anyways).
Let's look at the different areas of the big hairball at the bottom.
Left side in blue, seems to be dominated by friendica instances.
Below them in black are the biggest Mastodon instances like mastodon.social and chaos.social.
Bottom right in orange sound Japanese.
Not sure what the top ones in green have in common. They got many incoming peers as well, but no common theme.
If you want to look for an instance yourself, here is a searchable SVG. It's 12 MB and may crash your browser. And you have to use the browser search or scroll a lot to find anything. https://lucahammer.com/projects/fediverse/2022-04-29-fediverse.svg
That's it for today. Next time, I want to integrate this wonderful script by @tfardet and add more information about each instance and remove or mark the dead ones.
https://vis.social/web/@tfardet@fediscience.org/108211618847424673
Let me know, if you are interested in something specific.
@Luca hope you'll manage to get it to work without too much headaches, would love to see an updated version of your map!
@Luca hey, in case it might be of help, I hacked up a couple of functions in Python to ask for info from different Fediverse platforms: https://git.sr.ht/~tfardet/fediverse_net
Looking forward to see your new visualization :)
@tfardet thanks, that saves me quite some time.
@Luca funny, I thought gab finally threw the towel and got out of federation a while ago, so I don't know what these instances/domains are... maybe remnants?
@tfardet I tested some of them and they were all dead. beehub returned them as peers.
@Luca ah, yeah, that damn issue that mastodon instances do not forget peers after X unsuccessful tries over D days and thus keep humongous and meaningless peer lists...
Ah, @Luca, great to see you here as well! Keep up the good work! 💚🤗
First issue: I only got additional info (domain count, status_count, user_count, version) about 273 instances. Not sure if most instances don't share that info or if the API changed and I have to update the script. Will look into it later (maybe).