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 threadKlaus Frank23h ago

@GossiTheDog

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.

Show threadvery normal person23h ago
@agowa338 @GossiTheDog

How do they get those statistics, does every single mastodon instance automatically report user states? can this be disabled?

Also there are many more options besides mastodon, akkoma and sharkey are quite popular
Show threadKlaus Frank22h ago

@mook @GossiTheDog

That's stated within the screenshot: "Data collected by crawling all accessible Mastodon servers on Mar 23, 2026"

Show threadvery normal person22h ago
@agowa338 @GossiTheDog

that doesn't really explain anything, how would they know the address of every public mastodon server in the world? even those that block mastodon.social? i would hope servers opt in to that kind of information gathering
Show threadKlaus Frank

@mook @GossiTheDog

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.

Mar 24 at 11:55pmWeb
Show threadvery normal person22h ago
@agowa338 @GossiTheDog

well they should be more transparent on that, since we're just speculating here, i'm going to guess that number is from instances that federate with mastodon.social and publicly list their information. But .social has been widely blocked since they started federating with Meta's threads, and for other reasons like being poorly moderated.