 Big jump in Mastodon sign-ups today. 16,287 in the last day. 998 in the past hour, in fact. Which is interesting because I believe we were at 80 per hour on Monday. Also, we're 115,597 away from 10 million accounts. https://mastodon.social/@mastodonusercount/110035678695919078 42 comments
@atomicpoet Was #Elon today 10x more the narcissistic sociopathic fascist jerk than he usually is? @atomicpoet look at the correlation between the signups and toot vol, reckon itโs spam acc related  @atomicpoet Yeah, I saw it, really strange. Any ideas about a proximate cause? @atomicpoet Without a Twitter fail attached, guessing the alt-right reply bros. revving up the electioneering machine. For most people, while politics affects their lives, they can't spend every waking second of their time on being bludgeoned over the head with political campaigning. Or their friends are telling Twitter buds "it's not that damn hard, come on over, I'll walk you through it."  @atomicpoet   Don't want to dampen the ardour but I suspect a bot invasion. If you look at it hour by hour there are suspiciously high numbers in despaired with reversion to the mean (about 150-200 atm) It must be that $2.00 I send in every month.๐ Continual success here. @atomicpoet@mastodon.socialism @atomicpoet So, what's the prize for the lucky 10 millionth account? @atomicpoet universities in Netherlands have opened their own server and announced it on Wednesday, maybe related to that? @atomicpoet Looks like account harvesting has kicked into high gear. 90% of those accounts are for future bot activity. Small servers should lock their doors. @brandon_rickman Thatโs an odd assertion to make considering weโve had higher registration rates just last month. @atomicpoet Account harvesting happens anytime people start to migrate to alternate sites, as when people declared they were leaving Twitter. The alternate sites feel like they have become popular, and they donโt have the tools to spot the fake activity. Been happening for the past 15 years, became more blatant 7-8 years ago. @brandon_rickman Okay, but itโs an odd claim to make that this specific spike is due to account harvesting. @atomicpoet โThis spikeโ started 5 months ago. Whatever happened on March 14 is mere noise. Your choice of y-axis is deceptive in the graph. @atomicpoet I got a prompt on the Musk site that two factor authentication will be removed from my free account, it will be a feature of paid accounts only. Not sure what to even say... @atomicpoet I would add that we are experiencing a global phenomenon of intense privacy restriction and corporate commodification of the digital space. Mastodon is one of the few sport where one can still feel safe. I find these numbers hard to believe. By my count the (possibly) top 62 mastodon instances have just under 5 million users (of those nearly 900,000 are active). Where are the other 5 million hiding? They aren't in the other 11,000 instances I check. @markrprior @donmelton I donโt know what youโre counting, or where youโre counting. No one has any authoritative stats on Mastodon, nor the Fediverse for that matter. @atomicpoet @donmelton   @atomicpoet brace yourselves, the bots are coming. It will be interesting to see how well the #fediverse withstands this new form of popularity.  @atomicpoet this is fake news, 10 Fedillion people, including "fictional" people use it  @atomicpoet I do suspect, now that we are discussing it, that this could be bot related. I run a server with manual approval for signups, and over the past few days I've started to get sign-ups that don't make sense. I've modified the sign-up form so the justification question is different (specific to my community) and the answers I'm getting do not correspond to that question or make any sense in its context.   @atomicpoet I feel somewhat skeptical of this bot. Is there anywhere else reporting similar numbers? It just doesn't make sense to me how we went from 2 digit hourly signups go 4 digits in the same week and it pretty often has failures without reporting any hourly signups @atomicpoet Thanks, for sharing the #goodnews . Iโm campaigning on #twitter for the #Fediverse to anyone whoโll listen ๐ @atomicpoet |
Gregory's Server
@atomicpoet
What happened late Wednesday night?
That's a pretty noticeable jump there.