 Riddle me this. According to @mastodonusercount, 242,324 Mastodon accounts have been registered during the last week. Now some people believe this is due to bot activity. This is possible. But other than a few noticeable porn bots -- which have always been a problem anyway -- where are these bots? If these accounts are humans, where are they? And why are they so quiet? Source: https://mastodon.social/@mastodonusercount/110066113502498065 20 comments
What's just as puzzling is this graph from @mastodon_daily_active_users It subtracted -290,350 Mastodon users during a single day. I don't think that's accurate either. Personally, I'm thinking that the most accurate stats tracker for Mastodon is the-federation.info. But even that has issues that are perplexing. For example, the-federation.info lists mastodon.social as having 993,783 accounts -- all of which are apparently active during the past 6 months. Yeah, I don't buy that. @atomicpoet Ah, but I didn't entirely catch that you were questioning the accuracy of these stats. They also could be wrong. But to give you an good opinion about that I would have to look into the stats and I don't have time for that :( @atomicpoet How many of these trackers publish their methodology? This site seems to be definitely wrong for Friendica as their totals are about half what is apparently visible from the admin console of an actual Friendica instance.  @atomicpoet @atomicpoet @mastodon_daily_active_users If a big instance blocked their scraper/census taker then that would cause this disturbance in the force of millions of voices crying out and suddenly silenced. Switching their shields on - not the Death Star. @atomicpoet So then maybe there is an influx oft people who try out Mastodon and a relative similar amount of people who stop using it? Maybe Twitter people come over, don't like it and move on? @MomoInSpace That's possible. However, Mastodon went from 300K active users in September 2022 to 1.2M active users now. @atomicpoet Then maybe they just don't toot as much? Idk a few of my friends told me that in some social networks they just hang out and read without posting that much. I don't know the statistics of traffic of how many people are responsible for 50% of posts in twitter etc. but I wouldn't be surprised if this number is much smaller than 50%  @atomicpoet @mastodonusercount > If these accounts are humans, where are they? And why are they so quiet? Perhaps because they are ordinary users? Not 'early adopters' any more? Still likely to be more informed and literate than average... but is Mastodon slowly sliding into a kind of normalcy, after the attempt to paint it as a nerd thing and 'too difficult', largely fell flat? Good Question(™) by the way. @atomicpoet @mastodonusercount  @atomicpoet @mastodonusercount I've seen to many weird things in how @mastodonusercount's numbers move to continue to trust them. @fediverseobserver seems to have numbers that make more "sense". And I like being able to dive into the next level stats.  @atomicpoet @mastodonusercount Sleeper accounts. They’ll be idle, or perhaps tooting random, inconsequential GPT generated drivel until they’re needed as part of some sock puppet troll army. If they’ve been embedded for months they’re harder to spot as being bots. |
Gregory's Server
@atomicpoet @mastodonusercount non English accounts? Japan?