Active User Growth
!news@beehaw.org, World News, 29 => 52, 3578 posts (23 this week)
Subscriber Growth
!gardengrooves@walledgarden.xyz, Garden Grooves, 89 => 113, 940 posts (412 this week)
!thighdeology@ani.social, Church of Thighentology, 304 => 339, 241 posts (35 this week)
!electricvehicles@slrpnk.net, Electric Vehicles, 293 => 323, 556 posts (62 this week)
Ah, right - I see now thanks (it didn’t occur to me to click ‘show nsfw’).
As for the ‘oejwfiojwwqpofioqwfiowqiofkwqeifjwefwef’ - I remember them as being spam. It was maybe a year or so ago now, but a LW user tried creating communities with every name imaginable as way to squat on them. They got to about 2000 before they were stopped, and in retaliation they created about 4000 of the ‘wefwef’ ones (I guess that the deletion of them from LW didn’t make it somewhere, and so something out there still thinks they exist).
from a quick look it doesn’t seem like the crawler uses any federation, it seems to just iterate over the community list api for each tracked instance, it probably doesn’t have logic to remove entries that no longer exist, considering that they’re still in there.