1 Million Webmentions

We’re celebrating 1 million webmentions successfully sent in the wild! We’re still narrowing down the exact number and when we crossed the threshold, but we estimate sometime in December 2017 or January 2018. Join us for the party, Wed 1/24 at your local Homebrew Website Club!

Counting isn’t easy, since webmentions are distributed and peer to peer. There’s no single central repository that all webmentions go through. There are a number of large services that handle many webmentions, though. We’re counting as many of those as we can and adding them up, as a lower bound, and then projecting a bit.

As of 2018-01-11, a conservative projected estimate is 1,013,947 total. The absolute lower bound is 989,847. Based on the projected estimate, we’re currently sending ~929 new webmentions per day, which suggests we hit the 1M mark sometime around 2017-12-27.

Here’s everything we’re counting:

Bridgy: 960,778 as of 2018-01-11, adding ~880/day. Includes both silo backfeed and hosted blogs. More data and methodology.
webmention.io: 25,593 as of 2018-01-01, excluding Bridgy. 5570 of those are from OwnYourSwarm.
Telegraph: 2400 as of 2018-01-11, excluding webmention.io and Bridgy Publish.
mention-tech: 176 as of 2018-01-11.
Hosted Known: Unknown; estimate 5-10k. We’ve asked Ben, he says he’ll run the query soon.
webmention.herokuapp.com: Unknown; estimate 5-10k. We’ve asked voxpelli, but no answer yet.
micro.blog: Unknown; estimate 5-10k. Colin Walker alone has received 900. We’ve asked Manton, but his logs aren’t great.
Long tail: Unknown; estimate 10-50k. This includes all purely site-to-site webmentions that didn’t go through any of the services above. I have no real data to inform this projection, which is why the range is so big.