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📅 2023-06-07
Cosmos has been up and running since the start of 2022, collecting gemlog posts and other feed entries around Geminispace. I thought it would be interesting to take a closer look at the data.
This chart shows the number of URLs appearing in the Cosmos database by week. Over the past 18 months, feed activity has been fairly stable on average, except for a slight dip in the second half of 2022.
A similar trend is clearly visible in this unique authors chart. The trendline is a 4-week moving average.
Notes:
There are some duplicate sources like smol.pub custom domains where the same posts appear twice.
Comment URLs (Station and Geddit) are included as separate entries, however there aren't many of them.
The coverage may favor more distant past because sometimes aggregators will surface multiple past entries from a feed that haven't previously been discovered (for instance, CAPCOM may do this). Does this account for the dip? Probably not, but one would have to compare the data against a more thoroughly crawled index to see if all entries from all known feeds are actually present.
Author names may vary depending on the source and aggregator. Sometimes the same post has a different author name depending on the feed. The author names are also not a 1:1 mapping to people:
Billsmugs Photography Billsmugs' Gemlog Billsmugs's Gemlog Billsmugs's Photography
This third chart should more closely represent the number of people who have submitted posts. This is counting unique domains with a possible tilde or "/users/" name included. One should note, though, that each week's total is separate from the other weeks. We can also determine the number of unique URL roots per month, to get at some sort of Monthly Active Users estimate:
This means, according to what Cosmos can see (not all gemlogs are actively submitted to aggregators), the Gemlogosphere "MAU" hovers around 150–160.
Finally, let's look at when people (unique URL roots) have made their first and last posts in the database. This should give us some indication of the "churn" of new users starting their gemlogs and old users becoming inactive. The last posts are shown up until January 2023, so those users have not posted anything in the last five months. The start of First Posts is likely exaggerated since everyone was new to Cosmos.
This seems to support the dip in the other charts: the number of new posters has been declining somewhat during 2022 while the last posters is slightly trending upward.
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