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 threadDaniele
@jerry @faultcraft @GossiTheDog I think "a bit toxic" is an understatement tbh. Most of my exposure to mastodon is people being extremely angry and frustrated, and I often avoid engaging with anyone because the immediate feeling is that they'll jump at me if I even put a single comma in the wrong place (judging from the other comments when I read them). Most of the time I don't really feel like even opening the app because I'll just end up feeling even worse for no real gain
1:56pmWeb
Show threadChristoff, the human3h ago

@fourlastor that def happened for me, I still am afraid of not doing image descriptions and cw stuff right, but at least it is easier. I couldn't even post food and had anxiety about being somehow an asshole by accident.

I did appreciate the people that explained it. I get why some may have that frustration with a flood of people porting over their not accessible and empathy lacking posts... but some mercy.

Think folks felt like it was a personal attack.

I never aim to offend and do care. A lot of folks were very hostile. Oddly, the most militant of them aren't even on here anymore as their values appeared to change with the herd.

Perhaps this is a part of Mastodon and Fediverse in general settling to what it truly is at the end of the day, after all the wild swings, this is normal and realistic.

People that choose to be here, instead of migrating from something else. That's the real deal good stuff.