While cleaning a storage room, our staff found this tape containing #UNIX v4 from Bell Labs, circa 1973

Apparently no other complete copies are known to exist: https://gunkies.org/wiki/UNIX_Fourth_Edition

We have arranged to deliver it to the Computer History Museum

#retrocomputing

One thing that's interesting to me in this data is that there is actually *much* more consolidation on a few cloud providers in Europe than there is in the US. This is actually somewhat concerning. 81% of fediverse servers in Germany are at Hertzner, 73% of the servers in France are on OVH. By comparison, the most popular American provider, Digital Ocean, hosts only 14% of servers in the US. I don't know how representative this is of cloud usage overall (eg. Digital Ocean is definitely not the top cloud in the US) but it does certainly suggest much more centralization in Europe as compared to the US.

With bluesky (mostly) going down for a few hours today, I got to wondering about how decentralized the fediverse really is in terms of where its servers are hosted. I grabbed a server list from fedidb, with network information coming from ipinfo.io .

These stats are by the number of *servers* not the number of *users* (maybe I'll run those stats later).

fedidb currently tracks 2,650 servers of various types (Mastodon, pixelfed, lemmy, misskey, peertube, etc)

The fediverse is most vulnerable to disruptions at CloudFlare: 24% of Fediverse servers are behind it. Also note that this means that I don't have real data on where this 24% are located or hosted, since CloudFlare obscures this by design.

Beyond CloudFlare, the fediverse is not too concentrated on any one network. The most popular host, Hertzner, only hosts 14% of fediverse servers, and it falls off fast from there.

Here are the top networks where fediverse servers are hosted:

504 Cloudflare, Inc.

356 Hetzner Online GmbH

130 DigitalOcean, LLC

114 OVH SAS

56 netcup GmbH

55 Amazon.com, Inc.

55 Akamai Connected Cloud

36 Contabo GmbH

33 SAKURA Internet Inc.

32 The Constant Company, LLC

31 Xserver Inc.

28 SCALEWAY S.A.S.

24 Google LLC

23 Oracle Corporation

16 GMO Internet Group, Inc.

14 IONOS SE

14 FranTech Solutions

11 Hostinger International Limited

10 Nubes, LLC

Half of fediverse servers are on networks that host 50 or fewer servers - that's pretty good for resiliency.

There is even more diversity when it comes to BGP prefixes, which is good for resiliency: for example, the cloud providers that have multiple availability zones will generally have them on different prefixes, so this gets closer to giving us a picture of the specific bits of infrastructure the fediverse relies on.

The top BGP prefixes:

55 104.21.48.0/20

50 104.21.16.0/20

48 104.21.64.0/20

41 104.21.32.0/20

41 104.21.0.0/20

38 104.21.80.0/20

32 172.67.128.0/20

31 172.67.144.0/20

28 172.67.208.0/20

28 162.43.0.0/17

27 104.26.0.0/20

26 172.67.192.0/20

26 172.67.176.0/20

23 172.67.160.0/20

19 116.203.0.0/16

17 172.67.64.0/20

17 159.69.0.0/16

16 65.109.0.0/16

14 88.99.0.0/16

14 49.13.0.0/16

13 78.46.0.0/15

13 167.235.0.0/16

13 138.201.0.0/16

11 95.217.0.0/16

11 95.216.0.0/16

11 49.12.0.0/16

11 135.181.0.0/16

10 37.27.0.0/16

10 157.90.0.0/16

75% of fediverse servers are behind BGP prefixes that host 10 or fewer servers, meaning that the fediverse is *very* resilient to large network outages.

Top countries where fediverse servers are hosted:

871 United States

439 Germany

156 France

148 Japan

75 Finland

57 Canada

49 Netherlands

38 United Kingdom

26 Switzerland

26 South Korea

21 Spain

19 Sweden

18 Austria

17 Australia

15 Russia

12 Czech Republic

10 Singapore

10 Italy

And finally, a map of the locations of fediverse servers:

https://ipinfo.io/tools/map/91960023-e8c6-4bee-9b07-721f2c8febab