Estimating number of IPFS users

Question from Daniell Mesquita: "Estimated Number of IPFS users?"

This is an interesting, but hard to answer question. First, we have to define what we mean by “IPFS users”. Do we mean the number of applications using IPFS in some way? Do we mean the number of developers directly building tools using IPFS? Do we mean the number of end users (aka “consumers”) of those applications, or the sum of all end users that depend on IPFS in some way (ex through dependencies)? Do we mean the number of active nodes in the IPFS network? All of these create very different pictures (and some we can’t really measure given the distributed nature of IPFS).

Some pointers:

  • If you’re interested in applications using IPFS, I recommend looking at https://awesome.ipfs.io/ and https://app.co/ipfs. https://github.com/ipfs/js-ipfs/network/dependents also works for some js dependencies. If any of those apps report their end users, you could sum across those to get a rough sense for total number of ipfs end users.
  • If you’re interested in number of developers, the closest proxy I know of is https://github.com/ipfs/get-gh-contributors which counts the number of developers engaging with ipfs/ on Github. There could be many more, and not all
  • If you’re interested in network size, you can try spinning up a node and walking the DHT to see how many unique peer ids you see in some time window. Obviously, that will be constrained to nodes connected to the public IPFS network (any private/disjoint networks wouldn’t be visible to your scanning node).
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