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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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 this is sad
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@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 @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.
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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
@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 -
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 doesn't matter. Our investors won't pull our funding.
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@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.
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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 propose we set up a small network of fediverse servers that only federate with eachother & allow the spammers free access to them. Like a petri dish or perhaps a fish tank. We can watch them battle eachother for entertainment.
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@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.
@jerry @faultcraft @GossiTheDog Oh, and this may sound weird, but I think moving the "Federated" timeline link from the web interface's side-menu to "Other Servers" tab in the Live Feeds menu might've been an issue too.
Because it's now a bit tucked away and disappears when I'm scrolling, I never really check it anymore and pretty much forget about it.
Makes instances seem far more siloed than they really are.
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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@cyberplace.social not sure if the user base is 'dwindling' it's more plateaued
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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.
I tried bluesky and this one. I have stayed here because I can control what I want to see a lot more. I don’t need a stream full of anxiety, catastrophe and news, I like a little bit of connection on an otherwise quite lonely planet and the pacing here is friendly. Maybe because of all the work the mods put in in which case I’m grateful.
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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 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.
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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.
@agowa338@chaos.social @GossiTheDog@cyberplace.social
How do they get those statistics, does every single mastodon instance automatically report user states? can this be disabled?
Also there are many more options besides mastodon, akkoma and sharkey are quite popular -
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.
But it looks like it jumped to 2 million pretty rapidly at the end of 2022.
The question to me would be was that real? Because if that wasn't then Mastodon is up from about 500,000.
https://joinmastodon.org/reports/Mastodon%20Annual%20Report%202022.pdf
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But it looks like it jumped to 2 million pretty rapidly at the end of 2022.
The question to me would be was that real? Because if that wasn't then Mastodon is up from about 500,000.
https://joinmastodon.org/reports/Mastodon%20Annual%20Report%202022.pdf
Note that this was a very quick search and I didn't look at the other annual reports for their numbers. I just looked at a chart that showed the 2 million monthly users dropping pretty rapidly then another spike, then dropping overtime to the 700 something thousand
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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 user base is dwindlingThe quality over quantity
> new users are mostly just SEO spam accounts
Plus #aislop agentic accounts. Neither should be named _users_. Both categories are _threats_. To the quality, then to the user base. Protein users longing for jelly-wrestling already went back to Xmud. I wouldn't name it "dwindling", just an environment correction.
I personally would have been happy having back the 1989 usenet's merry band of top brains here.
(Some I have @spaf
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In my opinion, the complexity is compounded by the absolutely abysmal mobile experience. Put succinctly - the software sucks - and it scares all the normies away.
And then there is the Mastodon peeps. God bless 'em. There are a lot of good people here, but a lot of terrible ones as well.
All this is going to suppress usage.
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
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@agowa338@chaos.social @GossiTheDog@cyberplace.social
How do they get those statistics, does every single mastodon instance automatically report user states? can this be disabled?
Also there are many more options besides mastodon, akkoma and sharkey are quite popular -
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, 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.
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That's stated within the screenshot: "Data collected by crawling all accessible Mastodon servers on Mar 23, 2026"
@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 -
@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 gatheringShodan.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.
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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.
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...
