Kevin Beaumont22h ago

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.

Show threadKevin Beaumont22h ago
For those who don't think the user base is dwindling, a few years ago Mastodon was celebrating about 2m monthly active users. Nowadays it's 0.7m.
Show threadJerry 🦙💝🦙22h ago
@GossiTheDog I would guess 30% of that .7m are spam accounts. It’s a little sad.
Show threadChristoff, the human22h ago

@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.

Show threadJerry 🦙💝🦙22h ago
@faultcraft @GossiTheDog do you mean ideas on why that's happening?
Show threadChristoff, the human22h ago

@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.

Show threadJerry 🦙💝🦙
@faultcraft @GossiTheDog I think there are a lot of reasons, but a big one is the network effect - people want to be where the people are. There was a big rush of people here after Musk bought Twitter, and that is the 2.7M accounts. Lots of people got disenfranchised for various reasons: the culture can be a bit toxic (especially at the time), it's very hard to fend off harassment in a federated network like this, the features are/were not at parity, and so on. So we are on the way back to where it's mainly the people who specifically want to be here and not some other social media site.
Mar 24 at 10:33pmWeb
Show threadChristoff, the human22h ago

@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.

Show thread🦩 Plastic Garden Fauna 🦩15h ago

@jerry @GossiTheDog

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.

Show threadSocial Commentary Bot22h ago

@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.

Show threadSocial Commentary Bot21h ago

@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.

Show threadMike Fraser21h ago
@jerry @faultcraft @GossiTheDog I've spoken widely on the network effects. Basically social media broadcasters, the one to many accounts like celebrities, journalists, etc find it difficult to be here without an algorithm.You need to heavily engage to get traction in the fediverse and frankly that's too much work for them.You used to constantly hear them complain that it was dead and then you'd see they followed like 10 people. They fled to Bluesky which gave them the algorithm they wanted.
Show threadcontrasocial20h ago

@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.

Show threadStuartB11h ago
@mike @jerry @faultcraft @GossiTheDog YUp.
I've mentioned before that there were quite a few left-wing UKPol influencers (People like Femi, SuperTanski, BlokeOnWheels, SteveBray) who came here, refused to actually interact with anyone except each other, then declared this to be a ghost town and flounced out dramatically, complaining that they weren't being shown the love they deserved.
Many of their followers who came here to, erm, follow them, also walked away, because they may have been complaining about the complete and utter lack of moderation and safety features on Twitter, but they didn't seem to want to be somewhere where those things were at least possible, and would rather be where they had been building their "Brands".
I saw more than a few people complaining about the rubbish discovery "algorithm" here, who couldn't understand that there isn't one, you just have to follow enough people to receive their boosts.
And, to be honest, I'm liking this place more than I ever did the big, commercial data silos.
I don't get as many likes and boosts as I did on, say, Insta, but genuine human interactions - comments, discussions, off-topic conversations - are far better here, even from larger accounts.
I'm pretty happy with most of the user-base here, especially the sheer diversity of the posts boosted into my timeline - not just the usual US/UK/AU/NZ/DE/NL/IEPol, but hashtags such as BloomScrolling, Mushtodon, and TreeTrunkThursday, as well as posts on drawing Celtic knotwork, Furries, Dogstodon and Catstodon, different types of music, (non-AI) photography, cycling, memes about memes, sewing vintage or even medieaval costumes, and much, much more that I may have no interest in, but I love seeing the passion that people pour into their projects.
Actual people find these things interesting and are willing to share them with other people, and that easily beats a computer that recomends things because they are controversial and will generate clicks and ad revenue.
Show threadDaniele7h ago
@jerry @faultcraft @GossiTheDog I think "a bit toxic" is an understatement tbh. Most of my exposure to mastodon is people being extremely angry and frustrated, and I often avoid engaging with anyone because the immediate feeling is that they'll jump at me if I even put a single comma in the wrong place (judging from the other comments when I read them). Most of the time I don't really feel like even opening the app because I'll just end up feeling even worse for no real gain
Show threadChristoff, the human6h ago

@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.