Comment on After a year of operation, Switzerland's government closes its Mastodon instance

• cabbage@piefed.social ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago

  FediDB reports that the Mastodon user count is on the decline the last year, from more than. 1.2 million to 820k thousand. The number seems to maybe stabilize a little, but it appears as a slow decline when studying the last year.

  Then again, this is following from a huge bump of new users with the twitter exodus. It's natural that not all will stick around, so a decline in active user now is not so surprising. It does indicate a lack of ability to move the momentum, but it's an open source project with very limited funding, not a venture capital startup. It's not here for explosive growth.

  Furthermore, the number of Mastodon users is not a perfect measure. If it's matched by a huge number of users on gotosocial, it wouldn't really matter. The Swiss should maybe have waited for Threads to federate both ways before deciding to leave on account of limited interactions.

  Anyway, they're not entirely wrong to say Mastodon is on the decline. But they're not entirely right either.

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  • mke@programming.dev ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago

    Just for the record, I know little about gotosocial, but I’ve looked into Misskey a fair bit and I think it’s irrelevant here.

    FediDB data on active users seems off (a low ~12k MAU), but even if the real number is much greater, most are on the flagship instance (misskey.io) which has multiple CSAM censures on fediseer.

    Put another way, it’s almost counterproductive to include Misskey in these topics because simply federating with its biggest instance could be a liability for most 1st world western instances.

    I doubt the Swiss government would get much out of Misskey.

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    • cabbage@piefed.social ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago

      I just mentioned them because they're microblog sites, so in theory they do the exact same thing as Mastodon. The number of Mastodon users doesn't matter; the number of people on Fediverse platforms compatible with Mastodon matters.

      So Lemmy users are not very helpful, but Mbin users maybe more so. Or Friendica.

      The point is just that the number of Mastodon users is, in theory, irrelevant, as you don't just communicate with Mastodon users. Maybe misskey was a bad example, I don't know anything about it.

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