Jerry 🦙💝🦙Mar 24
@GossiTheDog I would guess 30% of that .7m are spam accounts. It’s a little sad.
Show threadChristoff, the humanMar 24

@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 🦙💝🦙Mar 24
@faultcraft @GossiTheDog do you mean ideas on why that's happening?
Show threadChristoff, the humanMar 24

@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 🦙💝🦙Mar 24
@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 threadChristoff, the humanMar 24

@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 🦩

@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.

Mar 25 at 5:30amWeb