Mastodon

Mastodon is free and open-source software for running self-hosted social networking services. Each user is a member of a specific Mastodon instance (also called a server), which can interoperate as a federated social network, allowing users on different instances to interact with each other. This is intended to give users the flexibility to select a node whose policies they prefer, but keep access to a larger social network.

Stats

import requests, json
url = "https://datasci.social/api/v1/instance"
response = requests.get(url) # details on specific host
res = json.loads(response.text)
res['stats'] 

Out[1]: {'user_count': 42, 'status_count': 485, 'domain_count': 8958}

Crawl Script

It hits all MD servers and gets their stats (user count, creation date)

Code

import zipfile, pandas as pd
with zipfile.ZipFile('mastacrawl1.zip', 'r') as z:
   df = pd.read_csv(z.open('mastacrawl1.csv'),header=None) 

print (len(df))
print (f'{df[1].sum():,}','users')

4601
7,824,386 users