Where is all of the Fediverse?

https://blog.benjojo.co.uk/post/who-hosts-the-fediverse-instances

by yurivish • 2 years ago

116 31 2 years ago

blog.benjojo.co.uk

Share6323• 2 years ago

this looks like lots of people in Germany(Hetzner and Contabo) and France (OVH) are privacy-oriented, more than in other places in the world. does anybody have an idea why ?

thatloststudent2• 2 years ago

I don't think it has anything to do with Germans or French people. Hetzner, Contabo and OVH are just popular (and cheap) providers to host bare metal instances, and they're not big tech. Those two reasons are probably why we're seeing a lot of them.

charcircuit• 2 years ago

and they're not big tech

The major cloud providers charge too much for bandwidth to make hosting a social media site there viable.

Macha2• 2 years ago

Nah, I think from being around privacy communities there is definitely at least a big German presence, and even in EU privacy regulation, Germans have played a part.

At the risk of invoking Godwin's law, I think it genuinely does come down to the Nazis and Gestapo and what those groups did with the information they had. Not saying that every German thinking about their privacy is thinking about that, but it does kind of de-fang the "nothing to hide" argument and that allows a bigger pro-privacy culture to develop.

At the same time there's some notable exceptions, such as their rules around impressums.

notatoad• 2 years ago

it might not be entirely german and french people running these fediverse servers, but don't think it's just a coincidence that if you want a good host for your indie web service your best choices are german or french companies.

Daegalus• 2 years ago

All those providers also have US presences. I'm in the US and have servers in the US and Germany. Not fedi, but Hetzner has good pricing, good reliability for me, and good configs for their vps/cloud offerings.

Propelloni• 2 years ago

Agreed, if you just need a box to run stuff on, Hetzner is hard to beat. I, too, have zero complaints about reliability.

Barrin92• 2 years ago

well I can't speak for France but privacy does play a big role in Germany given that we have ample fairly recent history with surveillance regimes, just watch Das Leben der Anderen it's a great film and it's I think culturally a very German movie on this kind of topic.

We were also one of the last places were Firefox still held a majority of users for a surprisingly long time. I think it's still at about ~20%.

__MatrixMan__• 2 years ago

Often, when I discover a privacy related project that I think is cool, I investigate further and find that a majority of contributors are French. (I think the last time this happened to me was https://cryptpad.fr/ )

So I think you're onto something there.

petre2• 2 years ago

It's just a normal reaction of a ungovernable nation to a state that tries to regulate everything. They are already at the fifth republic, after guillotining their king. On the plus side they also love privacy, there's the right to one's image in France, employers are not allowed to disturb their employees with calls after work hours or during holidays and many other privacy and work related legal safeguards.

miki123211• 2 years ago

Can confirm this, I had quite a few semi-professional interactions with Germans and Germany-adjacent people, and they seem to be all-in on Signal. I can't speak for everybody, as far as I know, this is mainly tech-adjacent people, the rest of the population seems to prefer WhatsApp. With that said, if you need to talk to a German who's involved with tech in any way and using a company-provided platform is not a possibility, you're highly likely to be asked if you have Signal.

devjab• 2 years ago

I think your question is a very hard one to answer because you bundle a bunch of rather complicated things together in it.

Europeans in general are probably more privacy concerned than Americans. Well, sort of. Where Americans, really, really, really, don’t want their governments to invade their privacy, many Europeans are more cool with it because we have a higher trust in our government. On the flip-side, almost no European wants private companies to have any rights over our data, I mean, not enough to not use Instagram or TikTok but still. This is of course a little simplistic since we have countries like Germany which are very privacy concerned in regards to both private and public organisations, and with rather good reason. You also have the French which are rather opposed to private ownership of public services, meaning they have some pretty hardline laws which are keeping much of their public software open source.

That’s just one part of your question, however, because you also talk about companies like Hetzner. These companies are positioning themselves very favourable for the eventual European exodus from American clouds. Many people on HN might not be too aware or just how much money Microsoft and Amazon are raking in from the European public sector. It’s with good reason too, well, maybe less with the yearly price hikes. Anyway, about two decades ago we stated moving our “iron” into the cloud in the Danish public sector, at first it was by “renting” hardware with companies somewhat similar to Hetzner, except you owned the hardware and just rented the racks and housing. Around a decade ago, most business cases made Azure a very attractive replacement, partly because of how Microsoft sells licenses to enterprise partly because your very talented IT operations people could use their skills in Azure. AWS also gained some good ground, but here in Denmark it’s basically all Microsoft and economically speaking this is the biggest piece of the IT pie in my country. (Probably in any EU country really).

The EU isn’t happy about this for a range of reasons. Some of them are economic, others are defense oriented. In the green energy sector, finance and other “vital” industries the EU has decided that having everyone hosted in Azure is maybe not a good idea. Then there are the privacy concerns, danish citizens might be ok with their medical history being online for the Danish healthcare systems to use, but they’re not ok with the data being used to train LLMs. Now… it’s tinfoil but with all the privacy scandals you also really can’t blame people for not believing that Microsoft honours their agreements to actually let no one (not even the NSA) snoop. There are also EU and US relations, I think Trump 2016 was a system shock for the EU. There is a reason we trust US tech companies and not Chinese tech companies, and that trust has been irreparably shaken. So for the past few years, we’ve seen a huge spike in interest in the field of EU alternatives to Azure and AWS because a lot of people are hoping to have places themselves in good spots if/when things start to move.

It’s not going to happen all at once, and it’s not going to happen fast. But even if you score a single EU city’s contract for 4-8 years, you can frankly keep your company running just on that. What has helped this position even more is the price hikes in Azure. Even in the private sector, everyone is weighing their options around here. Many have already left, some cancelled their planned moves but we’re all doing the calculations.

YetAnotherNick2• 2 years ago

Quite the opposite actually. Hetzner asks my passport to verify me.

petre2• 2 years ago

They do take abuse very seriously. If die Polizei asks for your info, because you've been operating an illegal torrent tracker, they could hand it over, having verified it with your id.

junto• 2 years ago

History basically. Privacy isn’t a fringe issue here in Germany. It’s baked into society, our politics and our culture. The CCC is known even to older people. Even though we have to register where we live with our local registration office those records are strictly not centrally stored. If you move between Bundeslände (state) your records are transferred from one to the other. Centralization of records helped the Nazis identify Jews for example. The Stasi watched everyone in East Germany. Signal is very popular. Large US social networks are not trusted by default. Our press still has more teeth than in many other neighboring countries as well.

mahomedalid• 2 years ago

~3 millions of active users vs ~300 M on XTwitter. Not bad, considering the amount of bots in twitter.

kibwen• 2 years ago

considering the amount of bots in twitter

Or, even worse, the number of Twitter users on Twitter.

bluish29• 2 years ago

Regarding that, is there any estimation for the amount of bots on the fediverse? I'm sure it will be interested to know that (in terms of percentage and bot categories).

edit, I'm not interested in the comparison with twitter percentage wise or make any comparison with centralized social media.

kemotep2• 2 years ago

I guess the trick is determining the definition of “bot”. Is it how many “users that are software programs” vs “users that are disingenuously engaging with the platform to spread or amplify specific kinds of content that are either programs or real people”?

Mastodon and Twitter likely have a similar percentage of total active users that are the former. I would speculate that Mastodon may even have more bots as a percentage of active accounts than Twitter because it is a smaller platform. Think news posting accounts that just link an article the second it is published.

Twitter, being a much larger mainstream platform probably has significantly higher percentage of users being the later kind of bots compared to Mastodon because they would have more of an impact on Twitter and Mastodon admins are more likely to just ban or defederate from instances that spread content that they don’t want to engage with.

akuchling• 2 years ago

Many bots are on bot-specific instances, like https://botsin.space/ or the very new https://beep.town/ .

idatum• 2 years ago

Mastodon using a local instance (not mentioned) has been good in my experience so far. I've had fun and useful technical exchanges, as well as healthy general random chats. I think I've been able to control what is in my "feed" well enough. So far.

I do not think Mastodon (or especially Lemmy) are immune to the outrage culture of X and the like.

My guess: More growth ahead for the Fediverse, outside of areas discussed, and it will degrade rapidly.

Where is all of the Fediverse?

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