TIL that there's an #openstreetmap feature that shows #fediverse instances.

@jorgecandeias @crossgolf_rebel @josh I believe that map uses server hosting location, not audience/membership. I see toot.wales in England (which is where the host is)

@jaz @crossgolf_rebel @josh That's quite likely, and if so it paints a misleading picture of the whole ecosystem. To establish how european something is, ownership is more important than membership and way more important than hosting location, I think.

Otherwise would be a bit like saying something is American because it uses Cloudflare.

Also, the map is incomplete. Where's venera.social, for instance? Nowhere to be seen. (It's a German Friendica instance)

@jorgecandeias @crossgolf_rebel @josh this is why I built a map that is curated to determine if the service is actually in the place or of a place, and to not rely on hosting data. Both have their uses.

@jaz Would https://toot.lv for Latvia have to be manually added?

@jaz@toot.wales @jorgecandeias@mastodon.social @josh@fediscience.org

None of these maps can be 100% accurate, and you have to apply some criteria to create a map like this.

The map with umap involves a lot of manual work, and if you want to enter all 42,000 instances, you've got your work cut out for you.

I see maps like this more as an overview, so you can get a general idea.

@crossgolf_rebel @jaz @josh And that's fine, but woudn't it be more accurate in terms of ecosystem portrait to prioritize largeish instances instead of ignoring them while adding tons of single-user self-hosted stuff? I mean, those are also part of the ecosystem, but they inflate the number of instances for a pretty low overall quantity of users.

@jorgecandeias@mastodon.social This is the Fediverse, where the motto is: spread out.
Large instances cause problems for the entire network. Years ago, mastodon,social was already a problem for all instances, and now it is even more so.

Why should such problem cases still be prioritised when they work against the very purpose of the Fediverse?
It is precisely the possibility of enriching this network with your own instances that sets it apart from all other networks.
And that should always be mentioned, everywhere.


By the way, mastodon.social is the instance that we regularly mute for a week due to massive spam attacks, and we do this several times a year.

@jaz@toot.wales @josh@fediscience.org

@crossgolf_rebel @jaz @josh I won't go into the pluses and minuses of small vs. large instances. I'm thinking exclusively about what kind of map would be more effective in showing the realities of the fediverse to the outside world.

And, to the outside world, a map where every other instance people find is a self-hosted one, will be ignored because "bah, there's nobody there".

That's how they think. And we won't change how they think unless we show them that "actually, there IS people there."

@jorgecandeias@mastodon.social However, this only shows that the Fediverse has not been understood and also that the media has failed to communicate this clearly.

The network is not to blame for the fact that people have stopped thinking for themselves or for what the media write/report.

With the right information about the Fediverse, you can draw exactly the opposite conclusions.
I can't help it if people have allowed themselves to be misled for so long in closed networks. All you can do is provide the information and hope that the right conclusions are drawn.

@jaz@toot.wales @josh@fediscience.org