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.

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.

@GossiTheDog

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.

@rob @GossiTheDog

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.