Number of active users does not match the value provided by the instance API

[seanthegeek]

The active users number provided by instances.social goes not match the users.active_month value provided by the /api/v2/instance endpoint.

For example instances.social currently reports that infosec.exchange has 18266 active users, but https://infosec.exchange/api/v2/instance reports a users.active_month value of 31944.

How is the number provided by instances.social calculated?

[seanthegeek]

After a lot of digging in the code, I discovered the the active_users field returned by the instances.social is actually logins per week obtained from a Mastodon API v1 call.

instances/helpers/APIUtils.js

Line 115 in cb823fb

active_users: instance.activity_prevw ? instance.activity_prevw.logins || null : null,

instances/worker.js

Line 105 in bb642f7

url: `https://${instance.name}/api/v1/instance/activity`,

instances/worker.js

Line 128 in bb642f7

logins: parseInt(activity[1].logins),

https://infosec.exchange/api/v1/instance/activity

Please consider renaming the misleading field name and/or using the 1active_users` count provided by the Mastodon API v2.

[TheKinrar]

I'll add the new monthly active users field to the returned object, but I can't rename an existing API field. It might be misleading now but when it was added it was the only active users stat available on Mastodon.
When I start working on a v2 of the instances.social API, I'll rename the field.

[zacharee]

Would it be possible to add a new field in the v1 API to filter by Mastodon's users.active_month value? Something like min_monthly_users.