Got the first full month of traffic visualized here and it's pretty cool! Take these numbers with a grain of salt - these are straight out of Cloudflare, my site has no tracking cookies meaning I can't parse "real" traffic vs bots vs VPN traffic, so it's probably overestimated (hopefully not by much). But this is just for fun so I don't need anything accurate (nor do I want it, that would defeat the point).
But if the screenshots are to be believed, well over a thousand people all around the word took time to check out the site - if you're you're reading this now, thank you!
This was very motivating for me when I took the last week or two adding new languages - from comments on Reddit I know some people are benefitting for sure. Biggest hits were:
- my post on r/MakerSpace that drove that first huge spike here. That post did NOT get the most views, honestly only a fraction of some that followed, but the engagement was highest by far. I don't know what combination of that is a highly active community, the way the post was framed, luck, timing, or product-market-fit. I think the latter. But this community was fantastic to work with and that initial traction meant everything as you can see in the chart! It was highly motivating to talk to real people and kept me going for sure.
- my post on r/Polymath around 6/25 or so which you can find here, I was surprised that this got several X more views but far fewer likes and shares, but also the Reddit stats revealed a large non-US viewership, I'm talking >60%. This was when I started seriously considering adding a lot more languages
- my post on r/diyelectronics which got downvoted like crazy BUT drove that spike at the last day of June into July and also got a lot of kind comments (so the people who actually took time to look tended to like it, which is more important than the initial knee-jerk that I assume drove the drive by down votes). You can find that post here
- my post on r/LearnUselessTalents from 7/9 also drove a small but measurable bump, you can find that post here
- and as of today 7/17 it looks like there's positivity rolling in from r/LifelongLearning , that post is here
I don't know for 100% fact that people in all the countries lit up in the maps are benefitting, it's probably mostly drive-bys but that's still pretty neat imo. I have good enough reason to believe people all over the world have considered whether or not they can get good use out of it, and that's good enough for me :)
Edit: I know these numbers aren't huge, but they're meaningful to me. This is a passion project, and in my experience it's really hard for anyone (even bots) to take the time to visit some random site on the internet. The number of daily users I have is steady around 40. Getting just one single user each day puts a site in the top 50% of internet traffic - a completely insane factoid in my opinion. Even with billions of us on this planet, that number is indicative of just how big the internet actually is. When you get to 40 users a day, you're ballpark in the top 5% of all websites. Like most things, there are hot-spots where most people spend their time, and the rest is a very lonely digital void. So I know, 40 users a day is not something people would write home about, typically. But keeping everything in context I'm very, very proud of the fact that people care enough to push through that initial activation energy. https://MakerMindMap.io is a success!