Where the Fediverse Lives Screensaver
The Where the Fediverse Lives screensaver shows the largest servers on the open social web, from FediDB and key-less. Registered accounts are not active people, so the post count sits beside each one — a server with a million accounts and few posts is an address book, not a community. It's free, runs in your browser, and ESC exits.
Live preview
Press ESC to leave fullscreen. Settings are saved in your browser only.
How the Where the Fediverse Lives screensaver works
The saver reads the source described above and draws it on a canvas — no account, no tracking.
The largest servers on the open social web, from FediDB and key-less. Registered accounts are not active people, so the post count sits beside each one — a server with a million accounts and few posts is an address book, not a community.
It refreshes on a schedule, so what you see stays current.
Colours and any options can be changed in settings; nothing is stored beyond your own browser.
Counting the fediverse
The fediverse is a set of independently run social servers that talk to each other using shared protocols, chiefly ActivityPub, which became a W3C Recommendation on 23 January 2018. Mastodon is the best-known software, but the same network includes servers running other platforms. Anyone can host a server, and accounts on different servers can follow one another.
FediDB publishes network statistics for the fediverse and ranks servers by size. Servers on distributed social networks can describe themselves through NodeInfo, a standard way to expose metadata about a server, intended to give insight into these networks' user bases and help people choose software and servers. Totals of this kind are reported by the servers themselves, so they are only as reliable as their source.
Registered accounts are not the same as people. An account may be abandoned, a bot, or a second profile, and a large sign-up total can sit beside a very small number of actual posts, which is why the saver shows posts alongside accounts. Large servers also tend to be general-purpose, while many healthy communities are small and specialised, so size alone says little about quality.
A worked example
The largest servers on the open social web, from FediDB and key-less. Registered accounts are not active people, so the post count sits beside each one — a server with a million accounts and few posts is an address book, not a community.
Settings & tips
- Accent and Background recolour the display.
- Every value on screen comes from the live source — nothing is simulated.
- Press ESC to leave fullscreen.
Frequently asked questions
- Is this real data?
- Yes — it comes from the source named on this page and is refreshed on a schedule.
- Is a key needed?
- No. This source is fully key-less.
- Is it free?
- Yes, and it runs entirely in your browser.
- Where do the counts come from?
- From FediDB's statistics for each server. Servers can describe themselves via standards such as NodeInfo, so the numbers are not independently counted.
- Does the biggest server mean the most active community?
- Not necessarily. Total accounts include inactive and automated ones, so check the post count beside it before reading anything into the size.