Re: FreeBSD forums hacked

On Mon, 2026-03-30 at 11:45 -0600, Dale Scott wrote:
> Without doing the math I think it shows a healthy community.

I would advise caution when concluding that a high number of users on a
platform necessarily indicates a correspondingly healthy community.
There are some very telling counterexamples in this regard ;).

I decided to do a random Google search using the letter "x" and
"FreeBSD" as search terms. Google’s AI responded (translated from
German):

"X (formerly Twitter) has by far the largest community of the three
platforms mentioned, followed by xHamster, while the FreeBSD Forums
represent a very small, specialized niche.
 
Here is the comparison based on data from 2026:

X (Twitter): Has several hundred million monthly active users (estimates
for early 2026 are approximately 560–570 million) and billions of page
views.

xHamster: Ranks among the top websites worldwide, with over a billion
visits per month (according to Similarweb for Feb. 2026). It is one of
the most-visited pornographic platforms.

FreeBSD Forums: This is a specialized technical forum for the FreeBSD
operating system. The community is active, but tiny compared to social
networks. There are a few thousand registered users who exchange ideas
in threads. 

Conclusion: X has the largest, most diverse community. xHamster is
extremely large in terms of pure traffic, but thematically very limited.
The FreeBSD Forums are a small, specialized community."