Federated ID seems interesting but impractical. Take your home instance ID and use it to auth to another server, nice to have if the home base is down but if the home is down then how does the remote host validate the user in a realtime sense? Storing tokens or creating a local version of the account would be possible but if the user was banned from the home base then you have to trust replication to clear it from the remotes or have a short enough token expiration to know they need to revalidate against the home base after X time.

A ways out of my expertise, I work more on the lower layers of connectivity so maybe I’m overthinking it. What could be helpful would some sort of local app setup that would create an instance with an easy executable. Creating spontaneous servers has playing with fire potential and doesn’t address domain creation or port allocations, but with the certbot/acme systems out there it seems like it wouldn’t be too far out of the realm of reality. Musings of a mad scientist…

I’ll have to check that out if nothing else but for the name. Friend of mine and I have had a running gag for 20+ years around ‘firefish’.

I guess that depends on if the federated users receive content via a push or poll method, and I’m not sure how that’s done in Lemmy. If the subscribing user is just requesting content from the home base and pushing their comments/posts up to it then even the home server wouldn’t nessesarily know the user count, just the number of instances polling it. From what I’ve seen trying to clean out communities ( ran a subscriber bot too long and blew up my DB to obnoxious levels ) though is if the home server thinks there is anyone subscribed though it will still look to push content to the remote end, so based on that I would think the home server should have an accurate-ish count of the total users.

https://fediverse.observer/

Not super consistent but it does place all kinds of services on a map.

*When you reccomend the site that the OP came from to as a solution to a followup post… 🫤 stil it works. Also found out today that when you put the site through cloudflare it takes it off the map which is kind of a +/-