Hachyderm is the El Paso of the Fediverse

Hachyderm is the El Paso of the Fediverse

It can be kind of hard to understand how big a server (instance) on the Fediverse really is. I know mastodon.social is much bigger than the server I'm on, but how much bigger, really?

So what if we compare the populations of servers to cities?

I built a tool for that! https://arewedecentralizedyet.online/fedicities/

Let's compare mastodon.social, the biggest server on the Fediverse, to the biggest city in the world, Shanghai (pop 24.9M). In comparison, pixelfed.social is like Ahmedabad, India (pop 6.4M). hachyderm.io is like El Paso, Texas (pop 679K). The server I'm on, discuss.systems, is like Eisenhüttenstadt, Germany (pop 32.1K).

Cool but maybe I'm not so familiar with some of those cities. What if we compare to cities in Mexico? (mastodon.social is Mexico City, Hachyderm is Tepic) Or Ontario? (mastodon.social is Toronto, Hachyderm is Caledon).

Play around with this tool, select an area of the world you're familiar with, and get a better sense for how big all these servers really are! Check out what your own server is comparable to!

Hachyderm is the El Paso of the Fediverse

It can be kind of hard to understand how big a server (instance) on the Fediverse really is. I know mastodon.social is much bigger than the server I'm on, but how much bigger, really?

So what if we compare the populations of servers to cities?

I built a tool for that! https://arewedecentralizedyet.online/fedicities/

Let's compare mastodon.social, the biggest server on the Fediverse, to the biggest city in the world, Shanghai (pop 24.9M). In comparison, pixelfed.social is like Ahmedabad, India (pop 6.4M). hachyderm.io is like El Paso, Texas (pop 679K). The server I'm on, discuss.systems, is like Eisenhüttenstadt, Germany (pop 32.1K).

Cool but maybe I'm not so familiar with some of those cities. What if we compare to cities in Mexico? (mastodon.social is Mexico City, Hachyderm is Tepic) Or Ontario? (mastodon.social is Toronto, Hachyderm is Caledon).

Play around with this tool, select an area of the world you're familiar with, and get a better sense for how big all these servers really are! Check out what your own server is comparable to!

@ricci does this mean that self-hosted, single-member instances are hermits in the cave interacting with platonic shadows from the meta-reality, bubbles in the quantum foam?

@jadp I did add a bunch of individual building sizes down at the lower end

@ricci Cool tool!

I took the numbers for the mastodon.nz server I'm on and did some calculations inspired by your tool. If mastodon.social is the equivalent of Shanghai, the world's biggest city, then mastodon.nz would be ~63k, between the New Plymouth and Napier. Those are both excellent NZ cities, although both much smaller than Auckland. That's not necessarily a bad thing. It does underscore how much more colossal mastodon.social is though.

@joncounts It would be interesting and technically possible to add these kinds of limited calculations but I'm not sure how to do it without making a real mess of the UI. Of course, you can already use the tool to scale the whole thing to NZ, in which case mastodon.social is Auckland and mastodon.nz is Brooklyn, Wellington Region

Hachyderm is the El Paso of the Fediverse

It can be kind of hard to understand how big a server (instance) on the Fediverse really is. I know mastodon.social is much bigger than the server I'm on, but how much bigger, really?

So what if we compare the populations of servers to cities?

I built a tool for that! https://arewedecentralizedyet.online/fedicities/

Let's compare mastodon.social, the biggest server on the Fediverse, to the biggest city in the world, Shanghai (pop 24.9M). In comparison, pixelfed.social is like Ahmedabad, India (pop 6.4M). hachyderm.io is like El Paso, Texas (pop 679K). The server I'm on, discuss.systems, is like Eisenhüttenstadt, Germany (pop 32.1K).

Cool but maybe I'm not so familiar with some of those cities. What if we compare to cities in Mexico? (mastodon.social is Mexico City, Hachyderm is Tepic) Or Ontario? (mastodon.social is Toronto, Hachyderm is Caledon).

Play around with this tool, select an area of the world you're familiar with, and get a better sense for how big all these servers really are! Check out what your own server is comparable to!