I'm trying to build some stats/models for Fedi instance scaling, and active users would be a really useful input, but all I can easily find is total users.
Anyone know a simple way to get instance MAU/DAU?
(I know some instances have published this data, but I don't really want to assume the same ratio across lots of instances.)
@sgf Do you want to count a user as active if they made any public posts?
@robryk Ideally even just actively browsing, but recent posting would be a reasonable proxy.
Note that Mastodon has its own API, but it also exposes (as it has to) server-to-server ActivityPub. That gives you an (IMO saner) way to request many things that Mastodon API also allows you to request. Sadly, I don't think it exposes a "all listed posts" collection anywhere.
@robryk Thanks. I think it's probably not going to be that useful for specifically this request, but I hadn't thought of that and will bear it in mind for some of the other analyses I want to do.
@robryk Oh, hang on! I've just discovered https://docs.joinmastodon.org/methods/instance/#activity . I suspect "logins" might be what I want. I'll investigate a bit more later.
@robryk The timeline feed with local seems to get the (non-reply?) posts, but I'm mostly trying to look for lightweight ways of doing this without scraping lots more data.
Looking at the API, I believe they're admin dashboards reporting this kind of thing, but they're for admins. :)