So far, fedistats has been a journey for me. The original idea was to compute basic statistics and see what interesting things might pop up. But I also wanted to see whether this could be turned into something that is actually useful for people. So I kept using it, coming back to it day by day to see what new trends might be popping up.

And then artificial intelligence really blew up in March. Looking back I cannot even remember how it all started. Something about Meta releasing LLaMa for research purposes and then the inevitable happened, the weights got leaked and people started to get their hands on it, and someone wrote a piece of highly optimized code that meant that you could run the model on your own computer. Suddenly it felt like AI was here. And then OpenAI released GPT-3.5, the biggest language model yet and things just kept accelerating from there. (more...)

Here's another nifty thing you can do on fedistats: You probably have a couple of favorite sites to know what's happening. Many sites also do a good job of putting the interesting articles where you can find them. But sometimes there is too much, or you just want to know what the trending headlines are.

Fedistats let's you see articles aggregated by site. For example, just as I'm writing this, this is what the fedistats view of the Guardian looks like: (more...)

Last time I wrote about gather insights into nodes and their languages and hashtags. This can give better understanding of the communities on different nodes, but how about getting a live insight into what people are talking about?

A couple of years back, I had a project called TWIMPACT that looked at tweets on Twitter and used retweet counts to figure out what people are talking about, and also to compute the impact of a user based on how many retweets they got. I always liked the abundance of interesting data in the stream of posts. Look at this blog post from 2011 for what we did back then (wow, is Twitter so old already?) Twitter always had a difficult relationship with the ecosystem using their API, even way before Elon Musk, so we eventually pivoted to doing real-time data analysis for event data. (more...)

Hey, I'm Mikio and fedistats is my project. I've been building it since January 2023, and I want to talk a bit about what it does and why I built it.

I've always had an interest for social media and ever since Elon Musk took over Twitter last year and I saw people switching over to Mastodon, I thought maybe the time is ripe for an open Twitter alternative. Since then, more people have joined Mastodon, and recently, the total number of signups crossed 10 million. (more...)