 Mastodon reached 10 million users. The mainstream media is saying nothing. Not a peep from The Guardian, Washington Post, Engadget, etc. Which is funny: because back in January, they were sure to cover Mastodon’s “plummeting monthly active users”. It’s almost as though Mastodon has defied the ongoing media narrative 🤔 75 comments
@atomicpoet do you think it’s malicious in some way? Like, they’re actively working towards our failure? @atomicpoet I think there’s a fear in corporate media circles of the untethered or uncontrollable nature of mastodon. It’s collective and community. It’s untameable. @atomicpoet @Jdefoe I agree about narrative & am reminded by how the powers that be wanted #Crypto to fail from the start — too disruptive & threatening … Keep going, #Mastodon / #Fediverse … even if the #revolution is not televised ! @atomicpoet don't expect much from mainstream media laughingly referred to as journalism. @atomicpoet@mastodon.social Could be that having 10M accounts is one thing...but the MAU is something completely different (from joinmastodon.org): @atomicpoet (mainstream) press media is 💩
On this opinion only (and may be on some rocket science stuff?), we are forced to agree with EM... 😅  @atomicpoet I'm glad to hear it. I'm all in on this continuing as a successful and thriving community and continuing to grow. It's nice to see a good model that provides a viable alternative to corporate ownership win out. @atomicpoet Mastodon is on the brink of becoming undeniable. MSM will soon follow afterwards. Same as its always been. Why was the reporting of “plummeting” MAUs dodgy? Since October, Mastodon’s accounts have doubled in size. The moment an account is registered, it is “active”. Yes, even if it never posts, likes, or engages whatsoever. As well, not every instance is represented on joinmastodon.org. There’s many reasons for this. Some organizations are closed to registrations, for example. For those quoting joinmastodon.org stats regarding MAUs: It only counts 10,000 servers. Yet according to the-federation.info, there are 24,000 active Fediverse instances. If we assume 70% of the Fediverse is Mastodon, there should be 16,800 Mastodon servers. That means joinmastodon.org might not be counting 6.8K servers. How many people do you think use those 6.8K servers?  @atomicpoet On the other hand, even we as fediverse enthusiasts have only a vague idea how many people are here, let alone MAUs. Kinda hard for general journalists to cover this. @stooovie @atomicpoet  @atomicpoet dwindling MAUs are reported in all stats (including the-federation and Fediverse observer). The actual numbers may be debatable, but I doubt you could make the argument against the qualitative assessment. Even if the stats are missing 10K instances with an avg of 100 users each, 100% active, it just means that instead of 2.5M active accounts out 10M you have 3.5M active accounts out of 11M —not that much of a difference, and with a generous overestimate. @atomicpoet much of the recent growth has been reported by mastodon.social (see @tchambers per-instance decomposition). If people just registering count as active, and the MAUs reported by these instances is going down, it means more accounts are going inactive than new ones are being created. This is compounded by an increase in spam accounts, that get blocked more or less quickly, abd probably instance migration (does the old account still count as existing?) @atomicpoet @tchambers finally, by just anecdotally, traffic in my timeline has not been changing significantly in the last month or so, and downwards if at all. This is course means nothing, as it might just be that traffic is increasing in corners of the Fediverse I'm not even remotely indirectly connected to, but it's in sharp contrast with previous waves.  @oblomov @atomicpoet @tchambers yea, impressionistically I’ve noticed a drop in the volume of my timeline, without any reduction or change in the people I follow.  @atomicpoet by my estimation, AT LEAST four.  @atomicpoet @atomicpoet It’s kind of funny how convinced they all are that Mastodon’s growth is a fluke. I mean, surely it can’t be true that people might choose a network that doesn’t exploit and manipulate us?! @lmgenealogy The media is in love with a narrative that Big Social can’t be stopped, and we’re all doomed to live in an oppressive dystopia. @atomicpoet True, because that narrative serves an agenda that benefits the media’s corporate overlords.  @atomicpoet At least one publication reached out to me to verify the number. Unfortunately I cannot verify the count from the @mastodonusercount bot; fetching total user numbers from all currently existing Mastodon servers using my own algorithm brings me to only 6.5M in comparison. @Gargron @mastodonusercount Does your algorithm count instances that no longer exist? @Gargron @mastodonusercount That’s definitely another consideration. For example, Switter is dead and that had over 100K accounts (last I checked). @Gargron @mastodonusercount But that brings your count of 1.3M MAUs into starker focus because if your algorithm is only seeing 6.5M “live” accounts, that’s pretty good retention. @Gargron @mastodonusercount @atomicpoet @mastodonusercount I likewise suspect that is the reason for the difference, but of course it's hard to confirm.  @Gargron @atomicpoet @mastodonusercount Is it possible that accounts moving from server to server could be counted as duplicates? Am I right that a "Moved" account is actually a new account, with some data migrated and the old account redirecting to new?  @unattributed @Gargron @atomicpoet @mastodonusercount Yes, instance discovery needs to be through some form of spidering, perhaps users' following and follower lists.
 @Gargron @atomicpoet @mastodonusercount @atomicpoet This place isn't a manipulative product, like the other sites. No incentive for them to acknowledge it.   I think the mainstream feels stuck between Twitter and the fediverse. They don't want Musk to be between them and their audience, but they also don't want a system with no algorithms helping them or advertising they can buy. They want to exploit their legacy advantages for as long as possible. @atomicpoet Mos Def ft. DJ Shadow @atomicpoet Eventually we will see some company or news organization make their own instance. Their employees or journalists will use it for their work accounts, and they will enforce their own rules. Then we will see the media sing praises of the Fediverse/Mastodon.  @msgbi @atomicpoet @charles_ex Correct, but active users are ~1.5million (back from 2.5). Mastodons usability is still not optimized for conversation and therefore 2nd choice for most users. More for talking _to_ not talking _about_. As long as Mastodon doesn´t change this, only Musk will throw users in. @atomicpoet @msgbi @charles_ex Issue is that Mastodon is more like blogging, throwing in thoughts - and no response. Framed as a feature - because no response also means no flaming. Which is true but as well bollocks or lets say just the reason why it can´t compete. @aloa5 @msgbi @charles_ex Mastodon is about the work you put into it. If you’re active and talk to people, you’ll probably have higher engagement than on Twitter.  @atomicpoet @aloa5 @msgbi @charles_ex Must disagree about getting no responses. I am literally a random person of no note whatsoever and I have lots of engaging conversations and people seem to like and boost my stuff. Also to follow me which I am quite overwhelmed by. It's nice, but honestly I'm not that interesting or special. @aloa5 @atomicpoet @charles_ex show me ten posts I would likely reply to @aloa5 @charles_ex @Ginger149 maybe I used Twitter like Mastodon reaction plumbing over years. More confrontational more out than in others. Algorithm or just way more other people. Long thread weend really don't mind seeing every post but them annoyed more attention than in blog .. @aloa5 @atomicpoet @charles_ex stuff I don't like but don't know if fixable. Just fork tusky and add another timeline with your local LLM box ;)  @atomicpoet As far as I know, although they are still sharing their news on Twitter, none of them are officially doing it on Mastodon. Many Mastodon feeds are created by user-made bots that extract content from Twitter. They simply wanted something to fill their paper space, but none of them actually want to use Mastodon. They are resistant to change and prefer to stick with Twitter. To them, Mastodon is just one of many news sources that they will trash within 12 hours.  @atomicpoet "At Mastodon, we believe that there doesn't have to be a middleman between you and your audience and that journalists and government institutions especially should not have to rely on a private platform to reach the public," the social media platform had said. @atomicpoet Not those outlets in particular, but everyone else sure is: https://www.itworldcanada.com/article/mastodon-passes-the-10-million-account-milestone/533720 https://www.dtnext.in/technology/2023/03/21/mastodon-hits-over-10mn-registered-users Do you know why the new user numbers suddenly increased from a couple of hundred to over a thousand per hour over the past few days? I'm always quite worried that bot farms might be be ramping up infiltration of Mastodon Definitely Could it also be due to organisations like WordPress announcing support for Mastodon? @atomicpoet I've noticed the exact same when it comes to US-owned instant messaging clients. The media is sure to mention WhatsApp and Signal everywhere but hardly any mentions of Telegram. And if they do mention Telegram you can bet they will emphasize the word "Russian" even tho' it isn't. The founder is... and doesn't live there anymore. They will also emphasize "not end-to-end encrypted" but fail to mention that it has CLOUD SYNC and it's still secure. People use Discord without E2EE... @atomicpoet I think it's far worse not to have cloudsync or usernames (to hide your phone number in group chats) than the lack of E2EE as a default. #Telegram DOES offer E2EE with Secret Chats but the media is foaming about it not being the default. It's by design! The vast majority wants the feature set like all your photos, files etc. listed all the way back till 2016. And filesize limits that are modern like 1--2GB files if you want to send a HD clip without compression. The media hates TG  Still there is a lot of mentions about Telegram compared to community owned or standardized solutions. Telegram has the best client app I've ever seen, period. But the service is not so good. @atomicpoet Hard to compete for space or time on the news media given the political shenanigans flooding the media at the moment. @atomicpoet if the tree falls in the woods with no one around to hear it? Lol if the readers are gone and they say the readers are gone , who hears it? Why say it? Baha toot toot It is also an indication #CorporateMedia is run by pathologically vain people that cannot and will not be made to look wrong. Keep up the good fight ✊🏼 :mstdneh: :cangoose: |
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@atomicpoet imo ignorance of our existence from ppl who don’t care about us is a feature, rather than a bug.