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.
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...
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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.
@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. -
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 @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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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'll take quality over quantity any day.
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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.
