2025 Summary and Statistics
-
2025 is the first year in a long time that, finally, I'm no longer embarrassed by the overall state of neglect.
From a hardware perspective, a brand-new complete machine dedicated exclusively to Hardlimit has been acquired for the first time. It's a Ryzen 9 9900X with 64GB of RAM. It has been a fundamental piece in some of the most significant changes being attempted and has greatly improved the service quality of the Peertube instance.
Two other machines were planned: a NAS (somewhat urgently) and a frontend server. Unfortunately, the current state of the hardware market (without going into details or criticism) is embarrassing, so I've decided to wait and see what happens.
In 2026, I want to continue the momentum I picked back up in the last quarter of 2025, which involves continuing to put good work into all the self-developed pages. And with a bit of luck, if the landscape changes, I'll resume the renewal and expansion of our machine lineup.
Regarding statistics, in general, they have been completely wrecked this year due to incredibly aggressive bots coming mainly from China. It hasn't been possible to filter this traffic because the attacks have been greatly refined, using a wide variety of networks and IPs and spoofing the user agent to pass off as legitimate traffic.
And now, let's go through each site:
Forum
Although it may not seem like it, the forum has been priority number zero from the very beginning. But the lack of ideas to relaunch it has meant nothing has been done beyond just keeping it running. The era of social networks and mobile chats made forums in general lose a lot of their steam. In the AI era, that future is even more in question. But AI, while being a threat, also represents an incredible opportunity for several reasons, but here I will only focus on one: in 2025, the translation process into English has begun. The goal is clear: to open up to a larger, potentially global audience. The translations have generally been of very high quality, and the success of this initiative (and others) will strongly condition future mid-term funding (GPU and more RAM).
If we disregard the months from July 2025 onwards, we see that the number of visits has remained more or less constant compared to 2024. If we remove spikes that could be attributed to bad bots in both 2024 and 2025, we're left with a range of 11,000-20,000 monthly unique visits in 2024 vs 17,000-26,000 in 2025, which represents a 30% to 50% increase. This increase (making too many assumptions), has by no means translated into a similar increase in engagement.
Videos
The Peertube instance continues to grow at a very good pace. It is the most active site, with the highest engagement, and where a community is consolidating in parallel with the forum. In 2025, several channels have emerged with quite interesting content and a strong following. It remains the site that consumes the most resources (by far), and last year a new feature exclusive to the Hardlimit instance was launched: transcription translation. At this moment, all videos with subtitles from the past year have been translated, and the process now focuses on current videos since all remaining resources are being directed toward translating the forum.
In 2025, we went from being the tenth global instance by number of videos to eighth place. And without changes, we remain the number one instance in both Spain and all Spanish-speaking countries.
The growth in the Peertube instance is more than outstanding, and no bots have been detected here at the level of other pages. The range of unique visitors is 29k-70k compared to 15k-27k in 2024, which is a 100-200% increase. In this case, this activity does translate into engagement.
Testing Ground
2025 has been a year of deep internal changes. These changes have allowed new features to be added more comfortably, and as a result, improvements have been made to data presentation and several relevant enhancements have been added, such as the new hardware tables. With this, 2026 should bring significant external changes as well as a new program that might eventually be marked as version 2.0.0.
Bad bot activity has also been detected here, although less aggressive than with the forum. I find it difficult to separate the wheat from the chaff, but one thing is clear: the December changes had a negative impact. Compared to 2024 (3,000-14,000 monthly unique visits), the increase is exactly one order of magnitude.
If we focus on the number of validations, we've gone from 510 in 2024 to 940 in 2025 (a huge leap!). Once again, I want to thank everyone who submits your machines, because without you, this would be useless.
Frontpage
The frontpage, which is the only thing kept alive by the administration in recent years, was the most neglected page in 2025. It continued to receive news updates like in previous years, but received no improvements. Despite having the lowest priority, it is expected that during 2026 it will receive a good cleanup and facelift, without ruling out that it will continue to display all the latest hardware and software news.
Disregarding July onwards, we're looking at 2,800-3,800 monthly unique visits. That's more or less at the same level as 2024.
Social
The Mastodon page has increased its user count by an incredible 50%, meaning there are now 3 users. As I've said in other years, this isn't so dramatic given the federated nature of the social network, and although I'd like to boost the influx of new users, there are more pressing matters at the moment.
Here we see fairly constant activity of 3,000-7,000 monthly visits. The levels (excluding the November and December spike) are similar to 2024.
Museum
The Museum, which is one of my favorite pages, has also been redone internally. Additionally, new emulations have been added that include a wide variety of Windows 95 and MSDOS versions. v86 has also been updated, and on my part, I've started tinkering with its code to run some experiments. In the library, the magazines have received a major overhaul thanks to a new internal structure and a new viewer that loads pages almost instantly. The future will focus on the Drives/Files browser, which is a small project I've been turning over in my mind for a long time and that motivates me greatly.
Eliminating anomalies, the range is 5,500-9,800, meaning visits have multiplied by 7 compared to 2024, a suspiciously large increase considering the niche this page targets.
And that brings this year's summary to a close. I'm glad to say that in 2025 I was able to execute much of what I had pending up to now, and I hope 2026 continues like this.
Thanks to everyone who keeps sticking around, and long live Hardlimit!
Toda la actualidad en la portada de Hardlimit
Mis cacharros -
On Mastodon, it's just @Yorus, you, and me. I don't know if there are any other registered users, but they aren't very active...
-
@pos_yo You're right. Actually, I don't count myself, and the third person (not counting me) is someone who joined a little over a month ago, motivated by electronics and retrocomputing. They're active in the sense that they log in every day, but don't participate. Hopefully they'll eventually get into it.
Toda la actualidad en la portada de Hardlimit
Mis cacharros -
Let's see if he posts a thread, even just one, and we'll keep at it
Hello! It looks like you're interested in this conversation, but you don't have an account yet.
Getting fed up of having to scroll through the same posts each visit? When you register for an account, you'll always come back to exactly where you were before, and choose to be notified of new replies (either via email, or push notification). You'll also be able to save bookmarks and upvote posts to show your appreciation to other community members.
With your input, this post could be even better 💗
Register Login