Would people be interested in having an instance census sometime?

It might be cool to get some graphs to see what our growing community looks like. We could also make it an annual/biannual thing and see how things change over time.

We do something similar for our UBC community, and it can be pretty cool to see the results. For example, here is 2018 (we ran one in 2021 as well but haven’t added the results of the wiki yet). Running a big official one infrequently seemed to increase participation and get better data. It also allowed us to include more questions without it feeling overwhelming.

If this sounds like a cool idea, what kind of questions should we include? Similarly, what is a good and privacy respecting platform to run it on?

Some potential ideas:

Demographics

  • Age range (in 10 year intervals)
  • Gender
  • Province & Territory
  • Urban vs. Rural
  • Ethnicity
  • Occupation / Career / Field of work

Instance Usage

  • How long you spend on Lemmy
  • What platform you use (multi-select)
  • Other Fediverse services used
  • Feedback on the instance or what you want to have added
Shadow,
@Shadow@lemmy.ca avatar

Maybe this could be a good end of year thing?

otter,

That sounds good! Maybe I can draft up some questions then post here for feedback?

I’m still unsure about what platform to use. We’ve used Google Forms for r/UBC in the past, but there might be a better option that I don’t know about. Do you have any preferences?

Shadow,
@Shadow@lemmy.ca avatar

Sounds good to me. Yeah I’d probably do google forms too.

smorks,
@smorks@lemmy.ca avatar

i think this is a great idea! i like the questions, as long as there’s options for people who want to answer some but not all.

otter,

That’s a good point :)

When might be a good time to run it? We usually did it at the start of December during exam season because students were procrastinating on Reddit.

yardy_sardley,

I’d be interested to see the results of something like this, as long as it’s guaranteed to anonymize the data.

DerisionConsulting,

If you do plan on doing this, make sure you define any terms. With a question like Urban v. Rural, people might have significantly different definitions of both words. Even things like “city” have different definitions depending on what province you are in.

BC: 5,000+
Alberta: 10,000+
Saskatchewan: 5,000+
Manitoba: 7,500+

jjagaimo,

I live in the US, so perhaps generalizing the location a bit more would help

otter,

Fair point, we have users from other parts of the world

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