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  • TheOneSwitTheOneSwit@det.social
    Apr 25, 2025, 9:49 AM
    retooted Rob Ricci

    With bluesky (mostly) going down for a few hours today, I got to wondering about how decentralized the fediverse really is in terms of where its servers are hosted. I grabbed a server list from fedidb, with network information coming from ipinfo.io .

    [EDIT: I did a better analysis on a dataset of 10x as many servers, see discuss.systems/@ricci/1144003 ]

    These stats are by the number of *servers* not the number of *users* (maybe I'll run those stats later).

    fedidb currently tracks 2,650 servers of various types (Mastodon, pixelfed, lemmy, misskey, peertube, etc)

    The fediverse is most vulnerable to disruptions at CloudFlare: 24% of Fediverse servers are behind it. Also note that this means that I don't have real data on where this 24% are located or hosted, since CloudFlare obscures this by design.

    Beyond CloudFlare, the fediverse is not too concentrated on any one network. The most popular host, Hertzner, only hosts 14% of fediverse servers, and it falls off fast from there.

    Here are the top networks where fediverse servers are hosted:

    504 Cloudflare, Inc.
    356 Hetzner Online GmbH
    130 DigitalOcean, LLC
    114 OVH SAS
    56 netcup GmbH
    55 Amazon.com, Inc.
    55 Akamai Connected Cloud
    36 Contabo GmbH
    33 SAKURA Internet Inc.
    32 The Constant Company, LLC
    31 Xserver Inc.
    28 SCALEWAY S.A.S.
    24 Google LLC
    23 Oracle Corporation
    16 GMO Internet Group, Inc.
    14 IONOS SE
    14 FranTech Solutions
    11 Hostinger International Limited
    10 Nubes, LLC

    Half of fediverse servers are on networks that host 50 or fewer servers - that's pretty good for resiliency.

    There is even more diversity when it comes to BGP prefixes, which is good for resiliency: for example, the cloud providers that have multiple availability zones will generally have them on different prefixes, so this gets closer to giving us a picture of the specific bits of infrastructure the fediverse relies on.

    The top BGP prefixes:

    55 104.21.48.0/20
    50 104.21.16.0/20
    48 104.21.64.0/20
    41 104.21.32.0/20
    41 104.21.0.0/20
    38 104.21.80.0/20
    32 172.67.128.0/20
    31 172.67.144.0/20
    28 172.67.208.0/20
    28 162.43.0.0/17
    27 104.26.0.0/20
    26 172.67.192.0/20
    26 172.67.176.0/20
    23 172.67.160.0/20
    19 116.203.0.0/16
    17 172.67.64.0/20
    17 159.69.0.0/16
    16 65.109.0.0/16
    14 88.99.0.0/16
    14 49.13.0.0/16
    13 78.46.0.0/15
    13 167.235.0.0/16
    13 138.201.0.0/16
    11 95.217.0.0/16
    11 95.216.0.0/16
    11 49.12.0.0/16
    11 135.181.0.0/16
    10 37.27.0.0/16
    10 157.90.0.0/16

    75% of fediverse servers are behind BGP prefixes that host 10 or fewer servers, meaning that the fediverse is *very* resilient to large network outages.

    Top countries where fediverse servers are hosted:

    871 United States
    439 Germany
    156 France
    148 Japan
    75 Finland
    57 Canada
    49 Netherlands
    38 United Kingdom
    26 Switzerland
    26 South Korea
    21 Spain
    19 Sweden
    18 Austria
    17 Australia
    15 Russia
    12 Czech Republic
    10 Singapore
    10 Italy

    And finally, a map of the locations of fediverse servers:
    ipinfo.io/tools/map/91960023-e

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