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by CrystalLangUser 2950 days ago
Mastodon.social has over 150k users, and there are other large non-Japanese instances. [1] After the SESTA / FOSTA bills, switter.at also became a huge instance for sex workers.

The instance banning thing is a huge problem and it’s not really being talked about much. The only thing you can do really is sign up on an instance like niu.moe that doesn’t filter besides illegal content.

[1]: https://instances.social/list/advanced#lang=&allowed=&prohib...
2 comments
ocdtrekkie 2950 days ago
The challenge is: Many of the servers which block other servers will block servers solely because they don't also block servers. "Free speech zones" are considered servers that should be blocked by the most social justice inclined servers. So it's fairly difficult to find a server that can, indeed, talk with everyone in the fediverse.

I don't think that's inherently a problem, decentralization allows people to segment themselves off, and that is okay.

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zaarn 2950 days ago
I've found that such servers are usually not worth federating with, though I usually silence these instances instead of full blocking them.

These instances are rare, the bigger problem as administrator is to find and media-block the instances that post NSFW or content illegal in your jurisdiction (switter, most japanese instances...)

Also bot spam if it occurs and the admin on the other end doesn't care...

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wila 2950 days ago
> Mastodon.social has over 150k users

What would be more interesting as a number is active users.

For example, I've got an account at mastodon.social, but last time I used it is over a month ago and before that there had been several months of inactivity.

When I last looked at my friend list and follower list on mastodon it seemed like most people treated mastodon like that.

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nightpool 2950 days ago
mastodon.social has around 10,000 weekly active users (https://mastodon.social/api/v1/instance/activity). Switter is about 2x that. Other instances are bigger or smaller. Pawoo (The largest Japanese instance) has 30,000 but the French & English-speaking fediverse tends to be a little more spread out among smaller servers, so these numbers aren't exactly directly comparable.
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