I always speculate that instance description length is inversely proportionate to user count. This is a joke, you know, people have a tendency to make rules just in case something happens. It's better to make rules only when you encounter a problem, but some people spend hours and hours deciding rules in a committee and this byzantine list of ways to get banned ends up applying to twelve people. Twelve people just just informally do it. (Famously, every user on DKE was an admin; that's probably the right way to do it when you plan to stay small and chill.)

It turns out that the ratio doesn't hold perfectly, but it is the case that long descriptions do mean fewer people using an instance (and often mean fewer posts; that's the size of the dots, the "V2" part in the legend). So no instances home to more than 100k people have a description longer than 1k, the ceiling for 10k-100k people is 10kB, and the longest description (35,802 bytes) is a Mastodon instance used by 16 people. So, not *quite* but kinda.

The graph is log/log scale, because everything would be dwarfed by outliers if not. (The lower-left corner gets crowded.)

Anyway, just thought I'd throw some of the @fedilist data at removing all of the fun from a joke. (I'm going to keep making the joke.)
instance_description_length_vs_user_count.png