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.

[jerry@infosec.exchange]

@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.

[jerry@infosec.exchange]

@GossiTheDog I definitely see a lot of that. Since we moderate signups here, I would estimate it's about 50/50 between legit people and spammers/scammers signing up. But we are overall losing more people that we are gaining.

[Gast]

@jerry @GossiTheDog dammit! I'm just really really starting to love mastodon, and the bots have arrived to spoil it.

[jerry@infosec.exchange]

@tinmouth @GossiTheDog I am doing my damndest to keep them away.

[Gast]

@GossiTheDog Yea, Mastodon requires a lot of effort. And lot of people want to be just spoon fed by the algorithm, instead of doing the work of following manually thousands of people.

[Gast]

@jerry doing a pretty good job from my perspective. I don’t really see any.

[Gast]

@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.

[Gast]

@GossiTheDog it's sad, but as a new fedi user, I sort of get why people jump off quickly. It's much slower paced than normal social sites, there's no in your face algorithm flooding you with highly relevant content from the start.

I've had lots of luck that I chose a great instance to create my account on, and by first following some people on there I was able to slowly find people who have similar interests or are generally just cool.

For Twitter refugees, it might look similar, but there's a much larger initial time investment required until it also feels similar.

[faultcraft@infosec.exchange]

@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.

[Gast]

@agowa338 @GossiTheDog interesting. And maybe not the worst decision.

[Gast]

@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.

[gossithedog@cyberplace.social]

@agowa338 I don't think that's the case, Threads has hundreds of millions of active users for example - TikTok etc pulling record numbers too.

[Gast]

@jerry

It's working, Jerry. My experience here has been really good (caveat: I mostly lurk)

[Gast]

@GossiTheDog

Well and how many of those are companies or AI generated garbage accounts.

Either by users that just generate AI videos and upload them or directly because of someone setting up hundreds of accounts and filling all of them with AI garbage or stolen content.

[Gast]

@GossiTheDog @jerry

As someone who's had accounts on and off for about 7 years, I think that may be confirmation bias

What I noticed instead is that in the early days when you followed someone they mostly followed you back. You posted a funny comment people followed. In no time you were part of a little online community and It was pretty easy to have a decent social experience (if you liked linux and pictures of cats, at any rate)

Now everyone seems to have settled down. Nobody follows you back if you follow them. Nobody chats to strangers. My last couple of accounts I came, posted some links, nothing happened, I got bored, I deleted the account. I am not sure what accounts you saw, but they might have been legit accounts who went through the same experience

[Gast]

@GossiTheDog

While unfortunate that we will likely not gain a large body of people, I would say that there is also value in a small well educated base who are connected.

Protecting ourselves from bad sources of information is only going to become more important. Smaller group of people, less value in targeting us for misinformation.

I took a long break, but I'm back. Mostly because I swapped phones and had to reinstall and log back in and just didn't for a while

[heliograph@mastodon.au]

@GossiTheDog this is sad

[Gast]

@jerry @faultcraft @GossiTheDog I've spoken widely on the network effects. Basically social media broadcasters, the one to many accounts like celebrities, journalists, etc find it difficult to be here without an algorithm.You need to heavily engage to get traction in the fediverse and frankly that's too much work for them.You used to constantly hear them complain that it was dead and then you'd see they followed like 10 people. They fled to Bluesky which gave them the algorithm they wanted.

[heliograph@mastodon.au]

@BlueBee agreed! also the governments I care about are on here so I still think our connections are worthwhile https://data.stefanbohacek.com/projects/fediverse-accounts
@GossiTheDog

[Gast]

@GossiTheDog doesn't matter. Our investors won't pull our funding.