[sillysaurusx]

Is it really "millions of active users"? (I don't doubt it's possible, but the incentives are very much aligned with "let's count this bot activity as a real user." It doesn't even need to be malicious -- I fell into that trap myself.)

EDIT: Odd, I'd like to report a bug in that site. https://imgur.com/EsGyvnT It doesn't seem to load. Or rather, I saw it briefly flash the statistics, once, before it went back to loading. The 0.3 seconds I saw the stats looked impressive though. :)

The only thing in dev console is a warning that seems unrelated: "<ApolloProvider>.provide() is deprecated. Use the 'apolloProvider' option instead with the provider object directly."

Ah, the root cause is that the graphql fetch takes ~32sec: https://imgur.com/q769ozR So, never mind! Just a bit slow.

---

Anyway, it claims 400,000 active users in the last month. What counts as an active Mastodon user? It also claims 400 million Mastodon posts (total?) which I suppose are tweets.

Interesting... Twitter has about ~17M tweets per day, iirc. If this growth is legit – a big if – then Mastodon may be gaining more momentum than it seemed.

Actually, twitter gets 431M tweets/day: https://twitter.com/jasonbaumgartne/status/13320033501922713...

Hmm. I wonder how much exponential growth would be required for Mastodon to catch up to twitter...

[posguy]

Does it matter whether the aggregate Mastodon user count ever catches up to Twitter? Is Twitter today actually better for its users than the Twitter of yesteryear that only had ~17 million tweets per day?

I have met many people on the fediverse, and at least two friends of mine have moved thousands of miles due to relationships and opportunities that likely would not have occured if the fediverse (Mastodon, Pleroma, etc) and its variety of platforms and userbase did not congregate in this manner.

One friend even bummed a plane ride on a tiny general aviation plane by serendipitous happenstance through the fediverse to make the multi-state move out of an abusive living situation.

Unbounded growth is not always good, and many fediverse instances have limited or closed new account registrations to ensure their community doesn't become the next Voat, FreeSpeechExtremist (which I was banned from for fairly benign speech) or /r/TheDonald.

[sillysaurusx]

I agree in spirit, but a community that isn’t growing is probably dead.

[rusk]

Growth Hacking is a thing. Whether that counts as real growth or not I don’t know. But metrics can become suspect when they become a target.

There are quite a number of people using Mastodon and it is quite nice but it does feel a bit echoey all the same. At the same time there is a lot of garbage on twitter that you really couldn’t call “active users” and keep a straight face. As usual e truth is usually somewhere in the middle ...

[im3w1l]

In my experience bots are not that common, but it's very common for the same person to have multiple accounts.