Ive been noticing some strange things about the lemmy numbers on fedidb. It seems to go up/down quite a bit. https://fedidb.org/software/lemmy
Nothing nefarious, but:
- hexbear seems to be counted twice for some reason.www.hexbear AND hexbear.com
- lemmy.ml claims to have 52.7k users but fedidb states 2093?
- lemmy.world looks correct in everything.
The lemmy.ml user count seems to have dropped by 50k in May/June 2024. After that, it’s just the monthly active users. But the number is right, as reported by https://lemmy.ml/nodeinfo/2.1
I don’t know if the counting method has changed in the past. Because lots of Lemmy instances use very old versions of the software. Lemmy.world for example uses a software version that predates that drop on lemmy.ml
But I think fedidb is a bit all over the place. They don’t make it very clear which numbers go into what calculation and if it’s monthly active users or total, and they sometimes mislabel growth rate vs absolute numbers. They also have hidden instances that might or might not show up in some number. I think it’s alright for a rough overview. But you’d need to pay attention if you’re interested in exact numbers.