I love ⚝! Wasn’t aware of its existence. It looks more like the full-scale Fediverse logo than ⛦, and also looks a lot friendlier. Big fan.

A star also makes sense in that one of the functions on a lot of federated platforms is to favourite posts, indicated by ☆. So using a star as a symbol for social media makes some degree of intuitive sense, perhaps. In addition to the similarity to the rainbow pentagram, obviously.

Nordmann bosatt i Danmark! 🤝

Speaking of occult meanings, in meteorology, an asterism in a station model indicates moderate snowfall. It all points back to Scandinavia!

I guess there are multiple metaphors possible, but I think it works to think of the fediverse as a constellation of multiple stars, each with their own set of celestial objects spinning around them. The pentagram kinda exaggerates how interconnected the fediverse is - sometimes instances will not be interconnected, by design.

As for my username (as well as my profile picture!), I am Scandinavian and pretty tired of nazis stealing my cultural heritage for their bullshit propaganda, so I figured if I’m gonna be an anonymous antifascist online I might as well reclaim some of my culture in the process.

Sadly that’s not quite enough to remove the association between runes and nazism. ᛟ (family/bloodline) has been completely overtaken by nazis, but I think there’s a risk using any set of runes as a symbol would attract the wrong audiences.

In either case I don’t think any of the symbols would have been well suited. They reflect priorities in Nordic society back then - like bull (ᛏ), moose (ᛉ), and horse (ᛖ). ᚷ can represent a gift, but that too has sadly been appropriated by other people we do not like to associate ourselves with.

I guess ᚹ (joy) and ᚱ (travel) would not be so bad, but they don’t immediately strike me as great symbols for a social media protocol either. Maybe they could be fused with the <> ActivityPub logo to some interesting effect.

I can see how a unicode symbol could be nice - the asterism is just convenient. It’s nice enough, and it fits the metaphor. The pentagram is good for other uses.

I personally prefer ⛧ as the Unicode symbol, but I can kinda see why it hasn’t taken off.

It seems GoToSocial comes with some reservations against being crawled, which is why fedidb had to update their robots.txt. So it might not be included here by design.

Or at least that’s the impression I get from this comment section: https://piefed.social/post/496750

It’ll be interesting to see what’s going on with today’s bump in users. I’m afraid you might be right about the reliability, but then again the GoToSocial instance you linked earlier has now been removed.

I guess there’s also Fediverse Observer: https://fediverse.observer/stats

They put the whole Fediverse at 1.38M active, so a bit lower than Fedidb. Might be more accurate.

Huh. Do you know of a better alternative?

In November last year, Bluesky had more than 3 million daily users in the US alone. According to fedidb, the Fediverse as a whole has 1.5 million monthly users globally.

Here’s a Peertube mirror, timestamped at the shout-out to Mastodon and Peertube:

https://peertube2.cpy.re/w/rq6WfwnQTiHfpoWhURLNBS?start=25m14s