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  • Rob Ricciricci
    Feb 6, 2026, 5:53 AM

    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! arewedecentralizedyet.online/f

    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!

    A screenshot comparing the size of Fediverse servers to world cities
    Screenshot comparing Fediverse servers with Mexican cities
    Screenshot comparing the size of Fediverse servers with cities in Ontario, Canada
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  • Joseph A di Paolantoniojadp@mastodon.social
    Feb 6, 2026, 6:20 AM

    @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?

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  • Rob Ricciricci
    Feb 6, 2026, 6:21 AM

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

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  • Jon Sullivanjoncounts@mastodon.nz
    Feb 6, 2026, 6:20 AM

    @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 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.

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  • Rob Ricciricci
    Feb 6, 2026, 6:24 AM

    @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

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  • Jon Sullivanjoncounts@mastodon.nz
    Feb 6, 2026, 6:28 AM

    @ricci Interesting. That works too, although I had to look up Brooklyn, NZ 😄 I see it's a suburb of Wellington city. (I need to spend more time exploring Wellington.)

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  • Rob Ricciricci
    Feb 6, 2026, 3:02 PM

    @draNgNon it's all relative, I guess, I'm sure there are people for who El Paso is the Big City too

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  • Rob Ricciricci
    Feb 6, 2026, 7:31 AM

    @DamonWakes hmmm... I assume this is after doing multiple searches, or is it on initial page load? Look like something isn't get cleared out properly

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  • Damon L. WakesDamonWakes@mastodon.sdf.org
    Feb 6, 2026, 7:38 AM

    @ricci It's just done it first try on a fresh start in Firefox Focus (which shouldn't preserve anything between sessions). Any chance it's because I'm searching for mastodon.sdf.org?

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  • Rob Ricciricci
    Feb 6, 2026, 7:43 AM

    @DamonWakes hmm, I've tried searching for the same server and I'm getting more global results (a city in Japan) so I'm not sure what's going on here. I did have some bugs related to searching earlier so it seems quite possible I didn't squash them all

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  • Damon L. WakesDamonWakes@mastodon.sdf.org
    Feb 6, 2026, 9:33 AM

    @ricci Please do let me know if you figure it out! I'd be keen to have another poke around. It is interesting to see the scale of the servers compared this way.

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  • botvolutionbotvolution@mastodon.sdf.org
    Feb 6, 2026, 10:16 PM

    @ricci @DamonWakes
    Its important to remember that if this is based on the number of registered accounts, that the number of *active* accounts can be wildly different.
    sdf is a great example. While it has about 70k registered, the number of active accounts runs to a few hundred (i did a bit of digging via the api a few weeks or maybe months ago, I've got a post about it somewhere but sdf search doesnt work properly so i can't find it)

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  • Emily_Semily_s@mastodon.me.uk
    Feb 6, 2026, 7:37 AM

    @ricci This is a pretty cool way to think about things. Really interesting thank you.

    I appreciate the option for not scaling things. Knowing mastodon.social is equivalent to the entire population of Preston is fascinating.

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  • Rob Ricciricci
    Feb 6, 2026, 7:40 AM

    @emily_s yeah that was how I originally built it, but it ended up with a lot of cities that are probably not as globally well known so I decided to make the scaling the default

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  • Lukyanlukyan@lukyan.eu
    Feb 6, 2026, 10:27 AM

    @ricci This is cool. I see the size difference as in mapping mastodon.social to the biggest city in the country I'm in maps what I think as big servers to what I wouldn't consider big enough to be a city, like districts of other cities. Both fedi and the country look too centralized, with software being optimized for huge instances and the central administration assuming everyone lives in the "default city".

    (I've also learned the non-fedi fact that there is a city with the population of 307 people, less than a large apartment building.)

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  • Rob Ricciricci
    Feb 6, 2026, 2:59 PM

    @lukyan there are so so many small ones, the list I'm using cuts off at 500 to avoid being too gigantic

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  • Doug Wadedougwade@mastodon.xyz
    Feb 6, 2026, 6:23 PM

    @ricci this is awesome but I don’t really get how anchor cities and anchor instances work because the tooltip seems not to respond to touch events and I’m on a tablet

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  • Rob Ricciricci
    Feb 6, 2026, 10:13 PM

    @stefan Thanks! I have this idea to make a sort of a "skyline" for the Fediverse using the same data, with buildings representing the major servers

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  • Stefan Bohacekstefan@stefanbohacek.online
    Feb 6, 2026, 10:17 PM

    @ricci Nice, I like that!

    Really love what you've been doing with all the data you're collecting. Definitely let me know when you publish something next time, I'll be more than happy to add a link to it on fediverseexplorations.org!

    (Or if you prefer, there is a link to the GitHub repo on the Contribute page and in the footer.)

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  • Rob Ricciricci
    Feb 6, 2026, 10:20 PM

    @stefan Cool, will try to remember to do it :)

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  • uRiusabach@leftodon.social
    Feb 7, 2026, 1:40 PM

    @ricci
    Cool!
    I'm actually in Toronto, ON. Driving to Caledon today...
    (Living in a large apt. building, if you compare my server size to mastodon.social)

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