4mo ago

Anyone know why lemmy user counts looks so strange on fedidb?

FediDB, Fediverse Network Statistics

Ive been noticing some strange things about the lemmy numbers on fedidb. It seems to go up/down quite a bit. https://fedidb.org/software/lemmy

Nothing nefarious, but:

1y ago

Should Lemmy buy ads on Reddit?

2 comments

Yeah I dunno why hexbear appears twice but it's always been like that on fedidb.
Lemmy.ml does have 52.7k total accounts, but again it has always just displayed the active users on the total user count on fedidb. No idea why.
There's a couple other sites that track fediverse stats, but they're also a bit wonky in certain aspects. The second one is really fucked up now, it only seems to display a handful of servers. Used to work better a year ago. But definitely useful to cross reference when fedidb is inaccurate about certain things.
https://lemmy.fediverse.observer/dailystats
https://the-federation.info/platform/73

The lemmy.ml user count seems to have dropped by 50k in May/June 2024. After that, it's just the monthly active users. But the number is right, as reported by https://lemmy.ml/nodeinfo/2.1
I don't know if the counting method has changed in the past. Because lots of Lemmy instances use very old versions of the software. Lemmy.world for example uses a software version that predates that drop on lemmy.ml
But I think fedidb is a bit all over the place. They don't make it very clear which numbers go into what calculation and if it's monthly active users or total, and they sometimes mislabel growth rate vs absolute numbers. They also have hidden instances that might or might not show up in some number. I think it's alright for a rough overview. But you'd need to pay attention if you're interested in exact numbers.