We're listed on ircstats.org (under our old name of Oragono) as having 84 deployments on the public Internet last year: <https://www.ircstats.org/servers/oragono>
From pseudonymous support requests I've received in our IRC channel and on GitHub, I know of more deployments that are either private (requiring authentication to connect) or on the darknet (we have specific support for running as a Tor onion service). So I think that's our niche right now: small communities who want full autonomy in moderation and control of their data. I've taken a lot of inspiration from Darius Kazemi's runyourown.social: <https://runyourown.social/>
From pseudonymous support requests I've received in our IRC channel and on GitHub, I know of more deployments that are either private (requiring authentication to connect) or on the darknet (we have specific support for running as a Tor onion service). So I think that's our niche right now: small communities who want full autonomy in moderation and control of their data. I've taken a lot of inspiration from Darius Kazemi's runyourown.social: <https://runyourown.social/>