Is this entering a competition for the most misleading graph? It shows the total number increasing by around 2%, yet makes it appear to be an increase of several orders of magnitude.
I thought that having the X axis very clearly labeled with those seven figure numbers would avoid any chance of people misreading it. I mostly outsourced that decision to Observable Plot, which I think makes good choices most of the time.
I added another chart to the notebook just now which plots from zero - unsurprisingly it’s a straight horizontal line, which I don’t think is nearly as useful.
Just a hint, I know you’re not scraping instances themselves, but if you did plan to, please note that a lot of them have that explicitly forbidden in their rules pages (in addition to robots entry). I know it may not mean much but people are sensitive about it.
Yeah that’s one of the reasons I’m only working with the instances.json data from https://instances.social/ - which works on an opt-in basis from the instances themselves.
Is this entering a competition for the most misleading graph? It shows the total number increasing by around 2%, yet makes it appear to be an increase of several orders of magnitude.
I thought that having the X axis very clearly labeled with those seven figure numbers would avoid any chance of people misreading it. I mostly outsourced that decision to Observable Plot, which I think makes good choices most of the time.
I added another chart to the notebook just now which plots from zero - unsurprisingly it’s a straight horizontal line, which I don’t think is nearly as useful.
https://observablehq.com/@simonw/mastodon-users-and-statuses-over-time
Probably needs more data before the chart itself is more interesting than the technique.
Yeah that’s definitely true - I’m much more excited about how this works than the actual data it’s collected so far.
I’m hoping there will be some interesting shapes starting to emerge in a few days time.
Just a hint, I know you’re not scraping instances themselves, but if you did plan to, please note that a lot of them have that explicitly forbidden in their rules pages (in addition to robots entry). I know it may not mean much but people are sensitive about it.
Yeah that’s one of the reasons I’m only working with the instances.json data from https://instances.social/ - which works on an opt-in basis from the instances themselves.
Aaaaaand it broke 😅 (the plots are empty and the number of users jumped to over 70 million)
Yeah there are some new fake spam instances! I’ll fix that in the morning, got an open issue about it here: https://github.com/simonw/scrape-instances-social/issues/4