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.

[Gast]

@GossiTheDog to be fair, mastodon raked in huge numbers after the twitter exodus but around 2023 bluesky started to pick up traction and I think twitter but less bad is just more appealing than mastodon unfortunately, I don't know if it'll decline any further but I imagine it'll stabilise around this mark for now.

[Gast]

@agowa338@chaos.social @GossiTheDog@cyberplace.social

that doesn't really explain anything, how would they know the address of every public mastodon server in the world? even those that block mastodon.social? i would hope servers opt in to that kind of information gathering

[Gast]

@mook @GossiTheDog

Shodan.io for example. Last time I checked it took about 8 minutes to scan the entire IPv4 internet.

And shodan is far from the only entity constantly scanning the entire web for such things.

Also another way would be to go off of the federated instances of something big like mastodon.social. Including spidering out from there.

As they say "collected by crawling" that almost certainly means servers neither opted in nor have the ability to opt out.

[Gast]

@GossiTheDog

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...

[Gast]

@agowa338@chaos.social @GossiTheDog@cyberplace.social

well they should be more transparent on that, since we're just speculating here, i'm going to guess that number is from instances that federate with mastodon.social and publicly list their information. But .social has been widely blocked since they started federating with Meta's threads, and for other reasons like being poorly moderated.

[Gast]

@agowa338 @GossiTheDog I dunno, there was an incident where someone "hacked" my account, and I let a facebook account that was 10 years old close rather than send Meta my ID to reclaim it. Started a new one and it only showed me what a crutch it had become to keep up with family

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@GossiTheDog I'll take quality over quantity any day.

[Gast]

@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.

[Gast]

@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.

[Gast]

@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.

[Gast]

@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.

[gargron@mastodon.social]

@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.

[Gast]

@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.

[Gast]

@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.

[Gast]

@GossiTheDog

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.

[Gast]

@milomb Probably too soon. Looking at https://mastodon.social/nodeinfo/2.0, Mastodon only reports "activeMonth" and "activeHalfyear".

@GossiTheDog

[jerry@infosec.exchange]

@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.

[Gast]

@Gargron @GossiTheDog Also, Mastodon has always been a niche platform, and it's now returning to baseline (slightly above, actually) after the Muskpocalypse spike.

It's doing just fine.

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@idlebrain

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.

@GossiTheDog

[Gast]

@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