Kevin Beaumont1d 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 Beaumont1d 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 🦙💝🦙1d ago
@GossiTheDog I would guess 30% of that .7m are spam accounts. It’s a little sad.
Show threadChristoff, the human1d 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 🦙💝🦙1d ago
@faultcraft @GossiTheDog do you mean ideas on why that's happening?
Show threadChristoff, the human1d 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 🦙💝🦙1d ago
@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.
Show threadMike Fraser
@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.
Mar 24 at 11:08pmWeb
Show threadcontrasocial22h 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 threadStuartB12h 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.