So we do get new users, a few per day, apparently. (That one time that a whole hub with 170 users decided to turn on Diaspora Statistics and therefore full nodeinfo doesn't count.)
But even if these stats come from Hubzilla itself, I'm wondering how "users" are defined. Channels, and clones count as users? Channels, taking clones into consideration? Accounts? Deducing from which channels belong to which accounts how much is controlled by one user?
So we do get new users, a few per day, apparently.
That would probably be me, if you are referring to the latest bump in statistics.
I have installed several new hubs, both for myself and clients. And more are to come.
The latest innovation will be websites with built-in decentralized social media and custom themes, run by Hubzilla. No need for separate domains. Hubzilla runs it all.
So expect some new sites that, on first glance, don't look like Hubzilla, but are still Hubzilla under the hood.
And does a channel with three clones count as four users or as one user?
I have not tested it conclusively, but it appears that clones are counted separately. So if you have two clones on two domains, each domain would report one of those clones. One channel would appear as two channels in the statistics. 100 posts would appear as 200 posts in the statistics.
However, I am not sure if the clones are considered active without logging into that domain. It looks like active users might be calculated based on logging into your account, not synced posts. So a channel on a domain could have new posts, but still be reported as being inactive since you have not logged into that server in awhile.
At least that is my guess based on how FediDB behaves. I may be wrong.
@Scott M. Stolz So essentially, Hubzilla stats everywhere do not reflect reality at all because it's always treated like an ActivityPub-only, non-nomadic project, because the same technology and techniques are being used to count users on Hubzilla hubs as everywhere else in the Fediverse.
If, for example, you've got three channels, two of them have three clones, one has two clones, and you do regularly log into the accounts with clones on them, it counts as eleven users and not one. You probably even stay eleven users when you turn ActivityPub off on one channel because the stats sites go for nodeinfo.
Speaking of which, on the other hand, if a node has Diaspora Statistics off, it also has nodeinfo off, and its channels don't add to the overall "user" count at all.
I don't even think there's anything you can do about it. /siteinfo/json only counts the channels, so apparently so does nodeinfo. A stats site would have to dig deep into the database of a Hubzilla hub, which it isn't authorised to do, to find more realistic stats. And instead of just counting numbers, it would have to check a) which channels are on which account and b) where they are cloned and then count the extra channels on the accounts with the clones on them to that one user. That'd be a huge privacy breach because stats sites would have to keep their own user registries.
This will become an issue again when Forte takes off which, too, will report way too high user numbers.
I could be wrong about how it counts it, but considering that I have most of the official Hubzilla.org channels cloned on hubzilla.network, I did observe that the post counts kept going up but showed no active users since I had not logged in hubzilla.network in a while. I logged in, and suddenly those accounts were active again.
But I did also notice a discrepancy. Clones don't always sync perfectly or completely, so sometimes two clones will have very different post counts.
Speaking of which, on the other hand, if a node has Diaspora Statistics off, it also has nodeinfo off, and its channels don't add to the overall "user" count at all.
In some ways, it may balance out, since a majority of private instances won't turn on the statistics.