Now witness the power of this fully operational Fediverse!
https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2025/11/now-witness-the-power-of-this-fully-operational-fediverse/How can you measure the popularity of a social network site? Perhaps by counting the number of active accounts, or the quality of the discourse, or even how many people reply to your witty memes.
Me? I prefer to look at how many people visit my blog from each site. It is an imperfect measure - and a vain one - but lets me know where I should be spending my time. No point posting on a network which is just bots talking to each other, right?
Earlier this year I built a stats-counter for my blog. Every time someone clicks from a website which links to my blog, it records that visit in a database. I get to see which blog posts are doing numbers, and where those numbers came from.
Until fairly recently, the Mastodon social network didn't send referer details. I thought that reduced the visibility of the network and lobbied for it to change. As various Mastodon servers upgrade, and admins opt-in, it is becoming more apparent just how much traffic originates from the Fediverse.
Over the last few weeks, here's how many people have clicked from BlueSky and Mastodon to one of my blog posts.
| Total | Source |
|---|---|
| 1,607 | |
| 752 |
At first glance, it doesn't look good for our elephantine friends, does it? The butterfly sends over twice the traffic. Game over!
But, of course, while Mastodon.social is the biggest instance - it is far from the only one. What happens if we slide down the long tail? Here's all the Mastodon-ish instances which sent me over 10 clicks.
| Total | Source |
|---|---|
| 193 | |
| 120 | |
| 106 | |
| 62 | |
| 59 | |
| 55 | |
| 49 | |
| 48 | |
| 33 | |
| 27 | |
| 26 | |
| 24 | |
| 19 | |
| 18 | |
| 17 | |
| 17 | |
| 16 | |
| 16 | |
| 14 | |
| 14 | |
| 12 | |
| 11 | |
| 11 | |
| 51 |
Ah! Add them all up and you get a grand total of 1,773 visitors from Mastodon-powered sites. That's more than BlueSky.
Now, there are some obvious caveats to the data:
- I have a smaller follower count on BlueSky than I do on Mastodon.
- My posts may appeal more to one demographic than another.
- People may have strict privacy controls which suppress the true volume of visitors.
- There's no way to measure how long someone spends reading my posts.
- RSS and newsletter visitors aren't counted.
- Clicks from apps may not always show a referer.
- Some people may be on multiple services.
- Fediverse users can follow the post directly, so don't need to visit the site to read it.
And yet… no matter how you slice it, Fediverse servers are sending as much traffic as BlueSky!
I think this is brilliant. Web services should be able to scale from small to big - and each ActivityPub-powered site helps power the open Internet.
Just for completeness, this is how Reddit, Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, and Lemmy do over the same period:
If you add up all the Lemmy instances, they send about as much traffic as Facebook and LinkedIn combined. That's not a huge surprise - those platforms hate anyone clicking away to the wider web.
Twitter is basically the Dead Internet. I'm no longer on there, but I do occasionally search it to see who is sharing my posts. The popular posts I write get shared a lot - sometimes by accounts with huge followers - yet there are no comments or retweets and barely and clicks.
I don't do Instagram or Threads, and that might be reflected in their low numbers. But I'm not active on YouTube either - yet people there occasionally link back to me.
Final Thoughts
Firstly, my stats only represent my site. Your site might be very different.
Secondly, I've ignored search engine traffic, big blogs, newsletters, and other sources.
Thirdly, and most importantly, this isn't a competition! The desire for a "winner-takes-all" service is dangerous and disturbing. An ecosystem is at its most vibrant when there are multiple participants each thriving in their own niche.
I want a thousand sites, running a hundred different software stacks, some of which only serve a dozen people, or even a lone participant.
Diversity is strength.
#ActivityPub #BlueSky #fediverse #mastodon #statistics
@blog@shkspr.mobi Such a great read. Thank you for the thoroughness. I loved this. We need a new way to measure the #smallSocial effect.
Right now people saw we fail because they only look at one platform. #BigTech had to invent "monthly active users" to help people understand their "value".
They're trying to measure us the same, but we're nowhere near the same.
We're an evolution and no one will ever truly know how many of us there are.
So I beg folks, don't look at one or two or three instances and say that because some arbitrary number goes down that we're losing or dieing.
No no no. We're growing and learning and finding ways that Big Tech NEVER wanted to exist.
Just because they use a yard stick doesn't mean we need to be constrained by that.
EVERYONE please keep up the incredible work.
I'll fight for this the #restOfMyLife. How about all of you? #RomL #smallSocial #smallWeb #fedi #Fediverse