I've had 20 sign ups to my Mastodon server in the past 48 hours, and 100% of them have been scammers, phishers and SEO spammers.
I make an effort to go in and suspend the accounts, nobody ever protests the suspension.
The fediverse is at a crossroads, the user base is dwindling and the new users are mostly just SEO spam accounts.
@milomb Probably too soon. Looking at https://mastodon.social/nodeinfo/2.0, Mastodon only reports "activeMonth" and "activeHalfyear".
@jerry @GossiTheDog hot damn that is a big swing!
I know everyone has ideas, but do y'all have ideas that are at least based on your large data sets? Alls I got are tea leaves and "yeah, that feels right" as my backbones, lol.
@jerry @GossiTheDog yes, why folks may have left so suddenly.
I honestly missed it myself as I was going thru a big life change at the time. I was here as part of the twitter exodus right, but I just came back a year or less ago to Mastodon, and only recently really really here.
@jerry @GossiTheDog ahh ok, that's somewhat what I thought. I can see that shift flowing slowly until it just all drops out due to critical mass of network of people they care about being available.
For me, the reasons I came here still outweigh the reasons for going on the others. I have named accounts on those I created today also, but primarily to squat the handles in case that's a problem for me later.
I do miss folks being around and being with me in the passions, logic, and reason for being here. It's the loss of that that hits the most. My mind fills the blanks and it is all negative and unsure how to make peace with it. Human nature perhaps makes more sense.
Small web is more attractive anyways, TBH. I want to be in webrings with folks that have dope sites and we're all a clubhouse of odd and diverse friends brought together by a very particular stance unwavering from!
I went from being on here to simply being alone to then being back on here and just getting back to it, getting used to it again.
It's a lot. It's not all doom scrolling. There is flowers and art and smiling people and just real people in life. It's pretty special, too.
I think you nailed it @faultcraft
It's dark times man. Most people don't want to acknowledge that, and the people that keep me here in the Fedi are the ones bearing whiteness to the failing of the light.
I've had about a hundred different versions of this conversation with my coworkers as well. Most people, by a wide margin, are not rational. They don't organize their worldviews and beliefs around abstract systems of knowledge.
Not to say that most people are all (or even mostly) MAGA or Qanon types. Simply saying that in the face of todays hyper-complex systems -social media, the economy, or the systems of knowledge that underpin technology, geopolitics- these people buckle. They just want to raise their kids and pretend its going to work out in the end.
The Fedi isn't offering that. That's OK too. AI aliens videos making fart jokes is good enough to ignore the ICE wolves circiling outside their doors. Most people need pain, personal intimate -and tragic- to contextualize what's happening outside their bubble of 100+- friends & family.
@jerry @faultcraft @GossiTheDog Yeah, this.
Musk influx was unprecedented, but fuelled by a combination of outrage and lack of alternatives. Neither of those were sustainable.
Bluesky gives people the combination of old-Twitter and gamified influencer-algorithm; and direct access to more official accounts (whether celebs or institutions), and bridgy bots give access to a load of Masto accounts too.
"Celeb" accounts I followed here have migrated to BS: Some won't, or stopped, bridging.
@jerry @faultcraft @GossiTheDog Oh, and this may sound weird, but I think moving the "Federated" timeline link from the web interface's side-menu to "Other Servers" tab in the Live Feeds menu might've been an issue too.
Because it's now a bit tucked away and disappears when I'm scrolling, I never really check it anymore and pretty much forget about it.
Makes instances seem far more siloed than they really are.
@mike @[email protected] @[email protected] @GossiTheDog
I think if Mastodon is interested in broader appeal and growth the devs would eventually have to wrestle with finding ethical ways of using algorithms.
Not declaring I'm in favor one way or the other, but Mastodon simply doesn't have the ability to cater to those who expect to potentially reach people on the scale of millions rather than thousands. Those people are the ones who the majority of others follow around from one platform to another.
@fourlastor that def happened for me, I still am afraid of not doing image descriptions and cw stuff right, but at least it is easier. I couldn't even post food and had anxiety about being somehow an asshole by accident.
I did appreciate the people that explained it. I get why some may have that frustration with a flood of people porting over their not accessible and empathy lacking posts... but some mercy.
Think folks felt like it was a personal attack.
I never aim to offend and do care. A lot of folks were very hostile. Oddly, the most militant of them aren't even on here anymore as their values appeared to change with the herd.
Perhaps this is a part of Mastodon and Fediverse in general settling to what it truly is at the end of the day, after all the wild swings, this is normal and realistic.
People that choose to be here, instead of migrating from something else. That's the real deal good stuff.
It's working, Jerry. My experience here has been really good (caveat: I mostly lurk)
As someone who's had accounts on and off for about 7 years, I think that may be confirmation bias
What I noticed instead is that in the early days when you followed someone they mostly followed you back. You posted a funny comment people followed. In no time you were part of a little online community and It was pretty easy to have a decent social experience (if you liked linux and pictures of cats, at any rate)
Now everyone seems to have settled down. Nobody follows you back if you follow them. Nobody chats to strangers. My last couple of accounts I came, posted some links, nothing happened, I got bored, I deleted the account. I am not sure what accounts you saw, but they might have been legit accounts who went through the same experience
@gotofritz @GossiTheDog @jerry "if you liked linux and pictures of cats, at any rate" - that made me laugh ☺️
I think it's a lack of marketing. People don't understand and are stuck in inertia.
- algorithm = the general public do not understand what that means or why it's bad.
- bluesky owners - same, they don't see it materially affect their experience, the people who don't move, so inertia means they stay.
Interaction - lots of people are lurkers, and here, if you don't interact, it's boring
I find in these discussions mastodonians often focus on the wrong things - "onboarding" and "The Algorithm" being the two most glaring examples.
There is nothing wrong with having an algorithm. For example I hate seeing pictures of pets and I love music, if there was an algorithm that tweaked the feed automatically in that direction there'd be absolutely nothing wrong.
The problem on most socials is that you go in and get posts by Andrew Tate pushed in your face. The issue is not The Algorithm, the problem is why is Andrew Tate allowed on the platform in the first place and why when his posts are flagged by users they are not removed. It's the moderation (or lack thereof), not The Algorithm
I'd argue mastodon needs _more_ algorithms, not less
Disagree.
1. assumes everyone tags their pictures of cats (they don't). And that everyone uses the tags '#cats' (they don't, some use '#catsOfMastodon' etc). And that everyone uses the same spelling (#neighbor vs #neighbour) and that everyone tags in English (do I really have to create filter for #cats #cat #gatto #gatti #katze #chatte ...)
Who's got the time for that?
2. Becuse of the above, yes, it's really better to have a machine suggest what I want to see (as long as they don't _impose_ that as the only option). They have access to synonims, trends, alternative spelling, false friends, etc in a way I simply haven't got the time or the inclination for
Personally I prefer having too many posts related to something I liked once (which eventually will stop) than having too many posts related to something (fucking cats) which I disliked every. flipping. day. but cannot stop
@GossiTheDog Its clear there isn’t enough incentive for mass
Public to join the Fediverse. The messaging is to confusing, the onboarding is strange to people. Influencers are big part of modern social media and there is little incentive for them to be here.
I’ll also say I don’t believe the majority of servers have the resources to take on mass amounts of people if they were to come.
Mastodon / Fediverse is a niche place. To be honest there is nothing wrong with that. So long as people have the means to keep things running there will always be a fediverse.
@64bithero @GossiTheDog On a related note, I recently started a blog for my hobby miniature projects.
It seemed like a few others had blogs, so I started making a list. The first few were new starts just like me but as I kept looking I started to find more and more hobby blogs that have been regularly posting for nearly twenty years. The latest discovery was this month, and I added another eight or so blogs to my list.
When the rest of the world moved on to Facebook, Twitter and wherever else they never left. They just kept plugging away, their community may have dwindled, but it never died.
Niche survives just fine, and can be plenty sufficient for the people there.
In my opinion, the complexity is compounded by the absolutely abysmal mobile experience. Put succinctly - the software sucks - and it scares all the normies away.
And then there is the Mastodon peeps. God bless 'em. There are a lot of good people here, but a lot of terrible ones as well.
All this is going to suppress usage.
I don’t use an app. I’ve become completely negative installing any app on my mobile devices.
Right now, I’m on a tablet and I’m using the web interface
@GhostOnTheHalfShell @GossiTheDog
I also use Phanpy web app on all my devices. It’s pretty good, but not excellent.
That means 2 things: first of all, a web app confuses people and won’t be widely adopted and it also means that excellence escapes Mastodon software.
@Lazarou @GhostOnTheHalfShell @GossiTheDog
A browser is still an app.
@Lazarou @GhostOnTheHalfShell @GossiTheDog
All of this just proves my point: normies wouldn’t understand this conversation, you guys are not normies, this is not a normy conversation and it wouldn’t be welcoming to a normy.
None of this is criticism in any way. But it explains why the Fediverse is shrinking. People don’t care about privacy and security. They want convenience and beautiful software. And the Fediverse has not delivered on that dimension.
I think this is mainly because a lot of users are quitting social media entirely. This is not isolated to just mastodon from what I can tell.
Like I lost contact to a lot of online acquaintances so far because they deleted ALL of their social media and went entirely offline.
Well and how many of those are companies or AI generated garbage accounts.
Either by users that just generate AI videos and upload them or directly because of someone setting up hundreds of accounts and filling all of them with AI garbage or stolen content.
That's stated within the screenshot: "Data collected by crawling all accessible Mastodon servers on Mar 23, 2026"
Shodan.io for example. Last time I checked it took about 8 minutes to scan the entire IPv4 internet.
And shodan is far from the only entity constantly scanning the entire web for such things.
Also another way would be to go off of the federated instances of something big like mastodon.social. Including spidering out from there.
As they say "collected by crawling" that almost certainly means servers neither opted in nor have the ability to opt out.
Based on my own experience and after talking to a larger circle of friends and acquaintances, this is my belief as well.
The prevailing sentiment is: With the world going to shit, why am I spending hours online when I could spend it with loved ones?
The user base is dwindling?
@GossiTheDog I have seen this trend on our small-medium population instance, too. Mostly since November(ish) of last year.
90% bots, 10% amazing humans.
I always smile when I finally get to accept a new (actual human) user to the instance, though.
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