Instances that disagree with being found in search engines are not shown. Instance admins can configure their robots.txt by adding lemmy-search. All other instances can theoretically be found. I think their priority depends on the laws of SEO (Search Engine Optimization). This probably means that a post on myownlemmy1337 that is federated with lemmy.world, will be found as a post on lemmy.world.

So, if Lemmy was very famouse, I guess it’s possible to get pages over pages with the same result from different instances. However search engines usually have a way to exclude “similar” results.

For voyager it may be possible, they do not want to be found, I don’t know about this though. You could add site:vger.app to your search prompt for testing this.

It seems like the other two tools only report about 49k MAU, any idea why?

True, I was looking from the perspective of lemmy. But I think that’s fair, as the fediverse is not as federated as it pretends to be. For Lemmy it’s about 1,000 servers. I guess many of them are singles person instances, but that comes from my subjective feeling and can be bullshit ;)

I don’t know about the “tens of thousands of servers” in the Fediverse. For now, it’s pretty easy to keep an overview. I also do not think the number of servers will scale linearly with the user base. Most people may choose a server randomly, but after a while in the Fediverse you will find your instance. Take feddit.org as an example - they have a charitable organization behind then, the “Fediverse foundation”. People like that instance because of the terms it operates under, and they do their thing. Server admins are not necessarily random people, and I don’t think coordination happens via hash tags.

MevOps Engineer

Integrated Mevelopment Environment. You should have known this