Post APnQl2Xq250Yyr2HMe by mala@mastodon.social
 (DIR) More posts by mala@mastodon.social
 (DIR) Post #APnQl1u8PhFUziSZTk by simon@fedi.simonwillison.net
       2022-11-20T07:06:11Z
       
       0 likes, 0 repeats
       
       I put together my own system for tracking the total number of Mastodon users over time, as reported for the instances tracked by https://instances.social/It's a delightful (to me) combination of different tricks - git scraping, my git-history and s3-credentials tools, Datasette Lite and an Observable notebook to plot the chart at the end.I describe how it all works in detail here: https://simonwillison.net/2022/Nov/20/tracking-mastodon/Or you can jump straight in to play with my notebook: https://observablehq.com/@simonw/mastodon-users-and-statuses-over-time
       
 (DIR) Post #APnQl2Xq250Yyr2HMe by mala@mastodon.social
       2022-11-20T07:23:49Z
       
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       @simon I have a question! ✋When you set up something like this, do you anticipate it running forever? And if so, do you set up something else to check if it breaks, or for you to remember to check in on it?
       
 (DIR) Post #APnQl3jZbvzOfXXAIK by simon@fedi.simonwillison.net
       2022-11-20T07:13:53Z
       
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       This is a good example of me forcing myself to live the "If you do a project, you should write about it" rule - I was SO tempted to get this thing working and then go to bed, but I made myself do the extra 45 minutes of work to turn it into a blog post.https://simonwillison.net/2022/Nov/6/what-to-blog-about/
       
 (DIR) Post #APnQl5OjQOVRpTnY5Q by simon@fedi.simonwillison.net
       2022-11-20T07:19:45Z
       
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       Added a disclaimer to the notebook at https://observablehq.com/@simonw/mastodon-users-and-statuses-over-time - just in case people start taking those numbers as the gospel truth as to the human population of Mastodon