The domain https://fediverse.observer/ redirects to sedo now.

On October 11th these two commits where made to the repo:

this will be my final release, glad to have contributed since 2011 to some fediverse stats, https://fedidb.com/ is a great resource with more interest

this software is no longer developed

Sad to have lost such a great resource.

  • Zedstrian@sopuli.xyz
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    12 hours ago

    With how important Fediverse Observer is, the developer should have made an effort to hand it and its data over to another member of the community before winding the project down.

      • Zedstrian@sopuli.xyz
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        9 hours ago

        While we should all be grateful for the work the developer put into the project, it’s also not uncommon for open source projects to use life cycle planning to determine potential redundancies if the original developer steps down. As things stand, their contributions are likely to go to waste, whereas ideally others could have picked up the torch from where they left off, preferably with historical data intact.

          • Feathercrown@lemmy.world
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            9 hours ago

            Yup it would have been a good idea

            I understand that you think your response is reasonable, but it’s not; the noncorporate software landscape could never function in the way that your viewpoint would cause

            • 0xDREADBEEF@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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              8 hours ago

              Non corporate software doesn’t last when its just one person maintaining things. Cant expect one person to do everything unpaid. A shame that no one who depends on them can help out.

                • 0xDREADBEEF@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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                  4 hours ago

                  Exactly, the unpaid volunteer should have done that, and if they did no one would be inconvenienced by the unpaid volunteers choice to stop volunteering. It’s the unpaid volunteers duty to think of others before themselves. They failed their duty. A completely unpredictable outcome.

    • Vicinus@piefed.zip
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      19 hours ago

      Yeah. I saw the dead website earlier today and have been trying to figure out how to keep the posts working.

      The fediverse software post, I could rewrite some code to gather fedidb daily (to my knowledge, they don’t have all time series data available), but their MAU math is suspect. So, not a great option, but my only other thought is basically remaking fediverse-observer and I do not have a server or potentially relevant server skill set beyond cron jobs.

      For the threadiverse instances post, I can keep gathering data from the instances I already have in my database, but don’t really have another way to find new ones. Maybe, I could see if I could scrape it from fedidb (I couldn’t get their API working in the past).

      In conclusion, the posts are not in a good place :(

      • GreatWhiteBuffalo41@slrpnk.net
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        15 hours ago

        Man that sucks. But also because I never have before, I want to thank you for all your labor making those posts! I find them very interesting.

      • Pamasich@kbin.earth
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        18 hours ago

        but their MAU math is suspect

        Do they do any math? I assumed it’s simply additive. They get the MAU from individual instances via their crawler, then display a total?
        Differences to other sites is probably due to the set of instances checked, not anything math related.

        • tal@lemmy.today
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          12 hours ago

          Differences to other sites is probably due to the set of instances checked

          https://fedidb.com/software/lemmy?search=lemmy.world&stats=1

          Fedidb doesn’t seem to include lemmy.world, which seems like a substantial omission, as I believe that it’s the largest Lemmy instance.

          EDIT: And my own home instance, lemmy.today, also doesn’t seem to be on there:

          https://fedidb.com/software/lemmy?search=lemmy.today

          The largest user count server that they seem to query is lemmy.ml:

          https://fedidb.com/software/lemmy?search=lemmy.ml

          EDIT2: Your home instance, kbin.earth, does seem to be on there:

          https://fedidb.com/servers/kbin.earth

          • Pamasich@kbin.earth
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            12 hours ago

            That is interesting to know. It doesn’t look like lemmy.world has opted out, judging by their robots.txt.

            • tal@lemmy.today
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              12 hours ago

              Oh, that’s a thought. I didn’t think of checking robots.txt.

              Lemmy.today does have a blanket ban on all bots, which I assume was put into place to help try to reduce scraping load. I’m not sure that the admin, @mrmanager@lemmy.today, realized that it might have cut it out of Lemmy statistics gathering.

              • Pamasich@kbin.earth
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                11 hours ago

                I knew to check robots.txt because of fedidb’s Data Sources page, which specifies what data they get, their user agent, and how to opt-out via robots.txt.

                One thing I’m noticing in regards to lemmy.world, I wonder if they ever disallowed access to the nodeinfo endpoint in their robots.txt in the past. They don’t currently, but the wording suggests that having that rule at any point will forever remove the instance from fedidb. Which could explain what we’re seeing for that instance.

        • Vicinus@piefed.zip
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          1 hour ago

          You’d think it’s straightforward and additive. I added up all their listed instances for a couple different softwares. The math was wrong and overestimated the MAU count. I checked it a few times across a couple weeks. Couldn’t quickly figure out a pattern to how the math was wrong each time.

          Maybe they fixed it in the last ~6 months, but I wouldn’t count on it. I believe it’s the same Dev as pixelfed and loops. So, not sure they’ve done any work on fedidb in years (to my knowledge, they’ve focused on Loops and Pixelfed).

          Edit: to clarify, adding the MAU of all their listed instances for a particular software was lower than the total MAU they reported for the software.

          Edit 2: Just checked their Piefed listings and it’s still wrong. Fedidb states: ~7.0k, actual addition: 6858 MAU.

          • Zedstrian@sopuli.xyz
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            12 hours ago

            Have you contacted them about the discrepancy? Ideally FediDB could just become the new Fediverse Observer.

            Missing out on accurate data about Fediverse growth would really suck. 😕

            • Vicinus@piefed.zip
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              58 minutes ago

              I just confirmed the problem still exists and messaged them via mastodon about it.

              Probably didn’t let them know originally because I didn’t have a mastodon account at the time and already had a good option (fediverse-observer).

  • unexposedhazard@discuss.tchncs.de
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    18 hours ago

    Fedidb is so bad though. Maybe im missing something, but to me it looks like you cant even get a historic user count or comment count graph for any specific software. What use is seeing the current number? Thats just kinda useless if you are trying to get any insight into the general development of the fediverse. The thing is that the old fedidb.org literally had this, but when they moved to .com they fucked it up for some reason.

    • Jupiter Rowland@sh.itjust.works
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      18 hours ago

      FediDB seems to be opinionated as well. It seems like if Daniel doesn’t like a server app, he won’t add it. AFAIK, he has been notified about the existence of Forte, but he still hasn’t added it.

      • anticurrent@sh.itjust.works
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        16 hours ago

        I remember when he changed the metric on which fediverse software were ranked, just so that pixelfed rises up and rank or two !