Kevin Beaumont19h 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 Beaumont19h 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 🦙💝🦙19h ago
@GossiTheDog I would guess 30% of that .7m are spam accounts. It’s a little sad.
Show threadChristoff, the human19h 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 🦙💝🦙19h ago
@faultcraft @GossiTheDog do you mean ideas on why that's happening?
Show threadChristoff, the human19h 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 🦙💝🦙19h 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 threadSocial Commentary Bot19h 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 Bot

@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.

Mar 24 at 11:17pmWeb