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.
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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.
@GossiTheDog I restrict sign ups to people who go through my SSO server which I also self-host. Registration is disabled since all accounts are centrally managed. That means my instance is extremely small, but I'm honestly unsure if I want to open it up or what at this point.
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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.
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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 Not to be *entirely* glib but what proportion of those users were spammers not being caught first (and thank you for doing that) / the Nicole Army? I wouldn’t be surprised if there was some migration back to corpos because as small servers shutter it can feel anxiety-provoking and also people found out who their most boring friends use, but I feel like I see slightly less spam than I used to.
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@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.
@mike @jerry@infosec.exchange @faultcraft@infosec.exchange @GossiTheDog
I think if Mastodon is interested in broader appeal and growth the devs would eventually have to wrestle with finding ethical ways of using algorithms.
Not declaring I'm in favor one way or the other, but Mastodon simply doesn't have the ability to cater to those who expect to potentially reach people on the scale of millions rather than thousands. Those people are the ones who the majority of others follow around from one platform to another.
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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 The 2M was a short spike partially caused by a software bug counting accounts before the e-mail was confirmed alongside massive media coverage. Should not be used as a benchmark. It was 250K prior to that.
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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 To be fair, the larger fediverse recently crossed the 1 million mark again: https://fedidb.com/stats
Yes, arguably, it might be slipping again, but look at Bluesky, they're not doing that much better.
https://bluefacts.app/bluesky-user-growth
Only five times as many MAU as the fediverse.
Worth also pointing out that, as you probably have seen, Bluesky closed a $100 million funding round last year, all while experiencing a gradual decline in the number of active users.
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@GossiTheDog To be fair, the larger fediverse recently crossed the 1 million mark again: https://fedidb.com/stats
Yes, arguably, it might be slipping again, but look at Bluesky, they're not doing that much better.
https://bluefacts.app/bluesky-user-growth
Only five times as many MAU as the fediverse.
Worth also pointing out that, as you probably have seen, Bluesky closed a $100 million funding round last year, all while experiencing a gradual decline in the number of active users.
@GossiTheDog One additional note. The actual number of active fediverse users is likely higher due to how decentralized the fediverse is (not all servers may be known), and the fact that some servers actually actively block FediDB, so their stats are not included either.
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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.
I get more meaningful engagement here than at Bsky with 5x the followers.
Quality over quantity - the whole Twitter-esque “world’s town square” dream was actually a nightmare.
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@GossiTheDog
Any change in the picture on shorter intervals since the bsky investment news came out? Or is it too soon to see?@milomb Probably too soon. Looking at https://mastodon.social/nodeinfo/2.0, Mastodon only reports "activeMonth" and "activeHalfyear".
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First off, I love the concept of Mastodon. @jerry also does a truly great job with infosec.exchange! Sadly, while some of these critiques off of Reddit have changed, many of them are still true (or an element of truth) today...
@kodamachameleon number 3 is interesting. It is true that it’s the slowest and the most resource intensive. But it’s also the one the scales the best. I had 50,000 people running on a single mastodon instance that was scaled across a bunch of hardware. That’s not possible on pleroma, misskey, etc. I wish it were, btw.
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@GossiTheDog The 2M was a short spike partially caused by a software bug counting accounts before the e-mail was confirmed alongside massive media coverage. Should not be used as a benchmark. It was 250K prior to that.
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@GossiTheDog sometimes I feel like the mastodon HOA do the network a great disservice.
I'm all for proper use of CWs and alt text, but the apps should make this easier to understand and discover for new users.
Having the HOA harassing the newbs for minor offences is a great way to bounce folks to the commercial networks.
Getting grief from the HOA for the “crime” of *checks notes* signing up on the default instance really makes people want to give the place a fair shot too… /s
For better or worse I am stubborn though, and stuck around long enough to find “my people” here anyway.
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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.
@GossiTheDog I've been spending a fairly large amount of my time thinking about how to make a social media aita that's only humans, and that's a hard problem
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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 Sad to see, but I am not super surprised.
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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 That's sad. Billionaire control of all forms of media is stronger than ever, and Mastodon is a great alternative.
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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 @rob @GossiTheDog same, and I don't trust apps either.
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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.
@GossiTheDog I’ve also seen it happen
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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.
@GossiTheDog I'll take <1M accounts of folx who want to be here over 100+M accounts of bots and Nazis any day.
Though I really with more folx here reported and suspended the intimate image abuse accounts.
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@GossiTheDog The 2M was a short spike partially caused by a software bug counting accounts before the e-mail was confirmed alongside massive media coverage. Should not be used as a benchmark. It was 250K prior to that.
@Gargron @GossiTheDog So, no, don’t think there’s been much of a change at all in Mastodon regular users recently. I’ve watched this for a long time and I’ve been surprised at how stable it’s been.
I’ve also included stats from Bluesky, nobody there publishes a MAU number, so I use Daily Likers as a proxy. It’s basically same order of magnitude as Masto (really makes you wonder why you would put $100M into that). (1/2)
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@Gargron @GossiTheDog So, no, don’t think there’s been much of a change at all in Mastodon regular users recently. I’ve watched this for a long time and I’ve been surprised at how stable it’s been.
I’ve also included stats from Bluesky, nobody there publishes a MAU number, so I use Daily Likers as a proxy. It’s basically same order of magnitude as Masto (really makes you wonder why you would put $100M into that). (1/2)
There continues to be endless self-flagellation about the ills of the platform which is frankly eye-rolling because none of it matters. Network effect dominates everything; Twitter has platformed Nazism and literal CSAM generation in the last year and their usage numbers have hardly budged. (2/2)
