[dredmorbius]

Wikipedia gives 677,000 as the size of the Diaspora community

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diaspora_(social_network) citing The Federation: https://the-federation.info

That's ... on the order of Usenet ~1990 or so, per personal conversations with Gene Spafford a few years back. Where "OTO" could be 500k - 5m users. Much of Usenet was far smaller.

Microsoft did some studies on Usenet nodes and behavioural patterns in the early 2000s, and got some usage numbers out of that, though I'd have to dig to find them again.

[bandrami]

I may have those too; I was at a company that bid to host microsoft.public around that time and their views on Usenet were very enlightening. I'll see if I can dig them up.

(Funniest part of the requirements spec: it had to "appear to be" hosted on a Windows server...)

[dredmorbius]

That is ... amusing.

As I recall, there was some degree of contention over whether or not Unix (a/k/a not infrequently Linux), or servers from a certain Redmond, WA, based company were superior and/or at all capable of general Internet hosting, at the time.

Hotmail comes to mind as well. FreeBSD.

[debdrup]

Hotmail and Windows Update used to be hosted on FreeBSD, yes.