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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@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)
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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 thoroughly enjoying it, though that's as a user, not an administrator. As a user however, I find the character limit on Bluesky too limiting. I don't post a ton, but when I do I don't want to have to string multiple posts together just to get a point across. This comment, for example, is over 100 characters too long for a Bluesky post.
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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 wonder what makes your particular instance a target...
We're seeing about two new user requests a week at our perhaps stodgily named and sleepy instance. They are all real as far as I can tell. -
@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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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 i know there were a few people complaining of racist abuse who left for places like upscrolled. not saying that accounts for the drop but would've contributed. will be interesting to see what happens if and when bluesky starts to enshittify.
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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 “the Fediverse is just like Usenet and email” they say as though those ended well
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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 it reminds me of the end of g+. Just vast swathes of spam outside of the communities I was in
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@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.
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.
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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.
@stefan @GossiTheDog I've found it very interesting as a phenomenon, both anecdotally and statistically, that people clearly prefer to be pandered to, lied to, and are completely fine with their data stolen. I don't mean this as in they are ignorant, you can literally lay out facts in front of people and they will still choose the ad-ridden hellscape of mainstream social media, simply because of it being a Skinner box.
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@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.
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@GossiTheDog Its clear there isn’t enough incentive for mass
Public to join the Fediverse. The messaging is to confusing, the onboarding is strange to people. Influencers are big part of modern social media and there is little incentive for them to be here.I’ll also say I don’t believe the majority of servers have the resources to take on mass amounts of people if they were to come.
Mastodon / Fediverse is a niche place. To be honest there is nothing wrong with that. So long as people have the means to keep things running there will always be a fediverse.
@64bithero @GossiTheDog On a related note, I recently started a blog for my hobby miniature projects.
It seemed like a few others had blogs, so I started making a list. The first few were new starts just like me but as I kept looking I started to find more and more hobby blogs that have been regularly posting for nearly twenty years. The latest discovery was this month, and I added another eight or so blogs to my list.
When the rest of the world moved on to Facebook, Twitter and wherever else they never left. They just kept plugging away, their community may have dwindled, but it never died.
Niche survives just fine, and can be plenty sufficient for the people there.
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@jerry I think it might be more.. I've been keeping a close eye on accounts here lately and sadly almost all of them sign up, post some links in their profile, and then disappear. I don't allow brand accounts but they keep coming, it's all from India and Vietnam - SEO farms basically.
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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 am a relatively new user. I consider Mastodon / Fediverse the only social network worth my time. And only one usable tbh. So it is quality over volume I guess. I got a lot of knowledge / informations from other Masto users this past year or so. And if it dies one day for whatever reason I just won't use social media at all
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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.
Based on my own experience and after talking to a larger circle of friends and acquaintances, this is my belief as well.
The prevailing sentiment is: With the world going to shit, why am I spending hours online when I could spend it with loved ones?
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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 Now that bsky changed hands, some of them might come back. I kind of expect election watchers to stay on extwitter though.
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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
@gotofritz @GossiTheDog @jerry "if you liked linux and pictures of cats, at any rate" - that made me laugh
️I think it's a lack of marketing. People don't understand and are stuck in inertia.
- algorithm = the general public do not understand what that means or why it's bad.
- bluesky owners - same, they don't see it materially affect their experience, the people who don't move, so inertia means they stay.Interaction - lots of people are lurkers, and here, if you don't interact, it's boring
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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 @faultcraft @GossiTheDog YUp.
I've mentioned before that there were quite a few left-wing UKPol influencers (People like Femi, SuperTanski, BlokeOnWheels, SteveBray) who came here, refused to actually interact with anyone except each other, then declared this to be a ghost town and flounced out dramatically, complaining that they weren't being shown the love they deserved.
Many of their followers who came here to, erm, follow them, also walked away, because they may have been complaining about the complete and utter lack of moderation and safety features on Twitter, but they didn't seem to want to be somewhere where those things were at least possible, and would rather be where they had been building their "Brands".
I saw more than a few people complaining about the rubbish discovery "algorithm" here, who couldn't understand that there isn't one, you just have to follow enough people to receive their boosts.
And, to be honest, I'm liking this place more than I ever did the big, commercial data silos.
I don't get as many likes and boosts as I did on, say, Insta, but genuine human interactions - comments, discussions, off-topic conversations - are far better here, even from larger accounts.
I'm pretty happy with most of the user-base here, especially the sheer diversity of the posts boosted into my timeline - not just the usual US/UK/AU/NZ/DE/NL/IEPol, but hashtags such as BloomScrolling, Mushtodon, and TreeTrunkThursday, as well as posts on drawing Celtic knotwork, Furries, Dogstodon and Catstodon, different types of music, (non-AI) photography, cycling, memes about memes, sewing vintage or even medieaval costumes, and much, much more that I may have no interest in, but I love seeing the passion that people pour into their projects.
Actual people find these things interesting and are willing to share them with other people, and that easily beats a computer that recomends things because they are controversial and will generate clicks and ad revenue. -
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