From: the Unseenet statistics crawler
Newsgroups: unseenet
Date: -

Subject: The network, counted.¶

Once a day a crawler connects to the listed nodes over Tor, as an ordinary reader, and counts what is there: nodes, groups, posts and chats, and the keys that wrote them. It counts how many, never who. Readers cannot be counted at all - that is the point of Unseenet.

What is Unseenet? What is counted, and what is not

Pre-alpha. Test nodes may be reset, and much of the traffic is the project testing itself.

Messages per day¶

Everything the nodes carried, by the day in its Date header. Hover or tap a bar for the day's numbers.

By kind¶

On the nodes now

Keys¶

A key is what you are in Unseenet. One person can have several, so this is the number of keys that wrote something in the open - posts, chats, comments and feed entries - not the number of people.

Keys that wrote something, per day

Groups¶

By hierarchy

By type

By view

Gateways and bridges¶

Messages brought in from other networks by gateways (UN-RFC 0023). They are counted apart from Unseenet's own traffic, so one busy gateway does not look like a busy network. A gateway signs with its own key, so the people behind the imported messages are not counted as keys.

Nodes¶

Only the total is shown. A history of when each node was reachable would help anyone trying to find where an onion service runs, by matching its ups and downs with power cuts or network outages.

What is counted, and what is not¶

Counted. What any reader of the network can see in the headers every node shows: how many articles there are, their Date, their kind (Message-Kind, UN-RFC 0028), whether they are encrypted, whether a gateway brought them in, and how many different Author-Keys wrote in the open. Group settings come from the groups' signed manifests.

Not counted. Readers - a node cannot tell readers apart, and does not record what anyone reads. Who wrote what - the page shows numbers only, and the crawler keeps no list of keys or articles between runs. The kind of a message in a closed group or a private message, which is encrypted; those are counted only as "closed" and "private". Nodes that are not on the known-node list.

How a day's number is kept. Nodes keep articles for a limited time (90 days by default). Each crawl counts again every day it can still see, and a day's number never goes down, so it does not shrink as old articles expire. The only memory the crawler has is the published file, data/stats.json.

The crawler and this page are open source: unseenet/unseenet-stats.