Rob Ricci @ricci@discuss.systems
Public

With bluesky (mostly) going down for a few hours today, I got to wondering about how decentralized the fediverse really is in terms of where its servers are hosted. I grabbed a server list from fedidb, with network information coming from ipinfo.io .

[EDIT: I did a better analysis on a dataset of 10x as many servers, see discuss.systems/@ricci/1144003 ]

These stats are by the number of *servers* not the number of *users* (maybe I'll run those stats later).

fedidb currently tracks 2,650 servers of various types (Mastodon, pixelfed, lemmy, misskey, peertube, etc)

The fediverse is most vulnerable to disruptions at CloudFlare: 24% of Fediverse servers are behind it. Also note that this means that I don't have real data on where this 24% are located or hosted, since CloudFlare obscures this by design.

Beyond CloudFlare, the fediverse is not too concentrated on any one network. The most popular host, Hertzner, only hosts 14% of fediverse servers, and it falls off fast from there.

Here are the top networks where fediverse servers are hosted:

504 Cloudflare, Inc.
356 Hetzner Online GmbH
130 DigitalOcean, LLC
114 OVH SAS
56 netcup GmbH
55 Amazon.com, Inc.
55 Akamai Connected Cloud
36 Contabo GmbH
33 SAKURA Internet Inc.
32 The Constant Company, LLC
31 Xserver Inc.
28 SCALEWAY S.A.S.
24 Google LLC
23 Oracle Corporation
16 GMO Internet Group, Inc.
14 IONOS SE
14 FranTech Solutions
11 Hostinger International Limited
10 Nubes, LLC

Half of fediverse servers are on networks that host 50 or fewer servers - that's pretty good for resiliency.

There is even more diversity when it comes to BGP prefixes, which is good for resiliency: for example, the cloud providers that have multiple availability zones will generally have them on different prefixes, so this gets closer to giving us a picture of the specific bits of infrastructure the fediverse relies on.

The top BGP prefixes:

55 104.21.48.0/20
50 104.21.16.0/20
48 104.21.64.0/20
41 104.21.32.0/20
41 104.21.0.0/20
38 104.21.80.0/20
32 172.67.128.0/20
31 172.67.144.0/20
28 172.67.208.0/20
28 162.43.0.0/17
27 104.26.0.0/20
26 172.67.192.0/20
26 172.67.176.0/20
23 172.67.160.0/20
19 116.203.0.0/16
17 172.67.64.0/20
17 159.69.0.0/16
16 65.109.0.0/16
14 88.99.0.0/16
14 49.13.0.0/16
13 78.46.0.0/15
13 167.235.0.0/16
13 138.201.0.0/16
11 95.217.0.0/16
11 95.216.0.0/16
11 49.12.0.0/16
11 135.181.0.0/16
10 37.27.0.0/16
10 157.90.0.0/16

75% of fediverse servers are behind BGP prefixes that host 10 or fewer servers, meaning that the fediverse is *very* resilient to large network outages.

Top countries where fediverse servers are hosted:

871 United States
439 Germany
156 France
148 Japan
75 Finland
57 Canada
49 Netherlands
38 United Kingdom
26 Switzerland
26 South Korea
21 Spain
19 Sweden
18 Austria
17 Australia
15 Russia
12 Czech Republic
10 Singapore
10 Italy

And finally, a map of the locations of fediverse servers:
ipinfo.io/tools/map/91960023-e

Rob Ricci (@ricci@discuss.systems)

Thanks to suggestions from others, I did this with a much larger dataset of 27k fediverse servers (10x as many as my last post). This time the data is from https://fedilist.com/instance Here's what I get: CloudFlare does sit in front of a large number of servers (4620) but a smaller percentage: 17% Hetzner is replaced by OVH, barely, as the second most popular host, each host about 11% of fediverse servers Top 10 networks in this dataset: 3000 Cloudflare, Inc. 2471 Hetzner Online GmbH 1009 DigitalOcean, LLC 861 OVH SAS 655 Akamai Connected Cloud 627 netcup GmbH 353 Amazon.com, Inc. 340 IONOS SE 334 Oracle Corporation 327 Contabo GmbH The astute reader will notice that this does not match what I said above re: Hetzner and OVH; this is because the first set of stats counts each *domain* once, and this set counts each *IP address* once. Many of the domains at OVH are hosted from a handful of IP addresses, this is likely due to masto.host but I didn't look deeply. Here are the top 10 IP addresses hosting fediverse servers: 681 94.23.75.107 (OVH) 657 54.38.247.97 (OVH) 481 151.101.3.7 (Fastly) 255 104.21.16.1 (CloudFlare) 251 178.33.220.142 (OVH) 184 50.56.249.138 (Rackspace) 172 217.182.80.236 (OVH) 166 104.22.76.159 (CloudFlare) 144 151.101.131.7 (Fastly) 135 139.99.39.10 (OVH Singapore) Now, the majority fediverse servers are on networks that host *five or fewer* fedivserse servers. Six thousand fediverse servers are the only one on their network. To take out half of the fediverse (remember, we're talking servers here, not users), you'd have to take out more than *three hundred networks*. Top countries in this bigger dataset: 7114 United States 4230 Germany 1248 France 862 Japan 605 Finland 599 United Kingdom 565 Netherlands 529 Canada 221 Australia 217 Switzerland And by continent (as defined by ipinfo): 8874 Europe 7661 North America 1218 Asia 250 Oceania 73 South America 24 Africa Several folks suggested other interesting analyses: * A post that peeks behind the CloudFlare curtain: https://blog.benjojo.co.uk/post/who-hosts-the-fediverse-instances * A cool site that displays similar data in a much more pretty form, and has some per-user data: https://fedi.wrm.sr/ * A graph that shows that while there are big instances of course, users are actually spread across a large set of instances overall: https://aus.social/@Drbruced/114335400872850185 Thanks to the people that brought these to my attention! Finally, a more complete map: https://ipinfo.io/tools/map/190d4a54-1b40-4749-ad1b-17524bed11ea

discuss.systems · discuss.systems

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