this post was submitted on 16 Oct 2025
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Script idea to discover underappreciated Lemmy instances (lemmy.dbzer0.com)
submitted 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago) by Davy_Jones@lemmy.dbzer0.com to c/fediverse@lemmy.ml
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I’ve been thinking about discovering underappreciated Lemmy instances. GitHub’s awesome-lemmy-instances used to serve a similar purpose, but it hasn’t been updated in a long time, and I haven’t found anything else like it.

I got the idea from this post about finding decentralized communities in the Fediverse. I’m thinking of a Lemmy bot that tracks Lemmy instances, calculates the average number of active users and standard deviation, and identifies instances with activity below the average plus two standard deviations. It would then rank these underutilized instances by performance metrics like uptime and response time, and periodically update a curated list on Lemmy to guide users toward instances that could use more participation.

I'd love feedback on how you would go about doing something like this. And specifically how to rank by performance.

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[–] asudox@lemmy.asudox.dev 12 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago)

You don't need to calculate the average number of active users. If you do, it will be wasted resources and you probably will miss a few dozen.

Simply request the instance's NodeInfo.

NodeInfo 2.1 (which Lemmy does implement) and I think 2.0 as well require implementors to provide correct user usage statistics. So you have total users and average active users per month/half year calculated on request.

This also means you can provide this service for other platforms that support NodeInfo.

Making a GET request to /.well-known/nodeinfo will give you the links to the instance's NodeInfo documents.

In fact, you can recursively begin from some random known instance, get a list of other instances it is federated with, get their NodeInfo and repeat the process. NodeInfo also provides the name of the software (check schema).

You can use that.

FEP: https://codeberg.org/fediverse/fep/src/branch/main/fep/0151/fep-0151.md

Schema: https://nodeinfo.diaspora.software/schema.html