It seems the fediverse is continuing and growing again. Line go up is probably good!
https://fediverse.observer/stats&months=50
Total users are huge now.
There are many websites out there that pull data from the fediverse. So take that with a grain of salt. But anecdotally I am seeing a small rise in people using the various platforms as each get more mature and servers somewhat stabilize.
That's highly odd. Hopefully someone looks into that more - perhaps there's a difference in what instances are allowed to be counted (like pure bot-spam and CSAM ones filtered by one site but not the other? I have no idea).
Personally I think with ai crawlers, instances are coming up with their own ways of combatting the issue and the trackers are getting stuck in the crossfire. I have a few fediverse servers so some show up, some dont depending on the tracker.
Thank you for sharing, especially your first-hand perspective.
Its kinda hard to extrapolate either way honestly. Its easy for me to say that 90+% of the traffic to my tiny home server is AI crawlers now. I have NO idea definitively for the others. When I made a python fix, it jailed quite a few IPs and now its not too much of an issue. But I did notice a couple of status servers like fedidb get incorrectly jailed.
So yeah. Fun times for admins.
Yeesh that's... horrifying. Hopefully new tools can be developed to make that process easier for you in the future.
Thanks! And yeah it sucks! Locally me and a couple of individuals are trying to create a real meshnet. Its going well and got DNS/speeds above 20mbps now haha. But its truely all human traffic.
It doesn't solve this particular issue for anyone else but it is fun to just....throw something up without bot traffic.
I've often wondered if this is where the internet will be headed. Not bc it's "better" than what we had before with the free and open Internet of ye olden days, but in situations where it becomes the only thing that could ultimately survive the onslaught of enshittification.
Theres a book series, a lit rpg called tunnel rat that goes over a "post internet" as part of its lore. Its an interesting thought experiment. And I can see localized meshnets becoming a bit more popular.
With peertube and a city wide network, you stop having to worry about copyright as much.
I'm sure that it could be infiltrated eventually, but so long as it remains small that shouldn't be worth the trouble. It's an intriguing idea! :-P