Chris Trottier<p>FediDB respecting robots.txt has resulted in appr. 2M Fediverse accounts no longer being counted.</p><p>Prior to this change, <a class="hashtag" href="https://atomicpoet.org/tag/fedidb" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#FediDB</a> counted 12,923,233 accounts. Now it counts 10,868,233 accounts. </p><p>Now let me be blunt: respecting robots.txt is a good thing. But now when we look at <a class="hashtag" href="https://atomicpoet.org/tag/fediverse" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Fediverse</a> accounts, it must clearly be seen with the acknowledgement that these only count services that <em>haven’t</em> opted out of tracking. </p><p>So when people compare user counts of <a class="hashtag" href="https://atomicpoet.org/tag/bluesky" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Bluesky</a> vs. the Fediverse, remember that Bluesky has the luxury of a more complete count because <em>they</em> host all accounts there. In contrast, the Fediverse is actually decentralized, and a good many services simply do not want to be tracked – and are therefore not counted.</p><p><a href="https://fedidb.org/" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">https://fedidb.org/</a></p><p><span class="h-card"><a class="u-url mention" href="https://piefed.social/c/fediversenews" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">@<span>fediversenews</span></a></span></p>