@njoseph

Linked article (which makes good points about too much centralisation) says:

> Frankly, this distribution is closer to the Dirac delta function than a power law.

This may be a throwaway line and I may be showing excess pedantry, but here goes:

My analysis shows that it actually *is* quite close to a power law, very approximately:
active_users = 30000 * x ** -1.3
where x is the rank of the instance (x=1 is the largest instance)

data from:
https://instances.social/api/1.0/instances/list?min_users=1&count=0 (with my API token, retrieved tonight)

piped through:
``
`tr "," "\n" |
grep active_users |
sed "s/.*://g" |
sed "s/}.*//g" |
sort -nr |
grep -v null > instances.dat
```

log-log plotted with gnuplot, the line of fit is guesstimated by hand because I still haven't figured out how to get #gnuplot to do #loglog #curve #fitting with (in?)appropriate weighting of data