Mastodon has hit 2 million active users today!

Mastodon is the most stable social network I have used in a long time. Love it!
- Everyone is okay. I haven't even seen sinophobia yet
  
  1989 Tianneman square protests
  
  It's here unfortunately, but unlike reddit, opposing opinions aren't modded out.
- But that’s just like, your opinion

That's a lot of people that are realizing Silicon Valley is full of shit
- Certainly full of detached CEO's
  
  Who are obsessed with endless growth ideas and introducing subscription models so that you end up with countless of subscriptions.

I'm doing my part!
- I'm doing my part!
  
  Service guarantees citizenship!

Can someone tell me what Mastodon is like please, I have social network fatigue and can't be bothered to try another one? 😅
- Microblogging Fediverse app, Lemmy/kbin is to Reddit as Mastodon is to Twitter
  
  Thanks mate.
- It‘s like Twitter basically, but since it‘s also in the fediverse there is a bit of overlap where Mastodon people can comment on Lemmy/kbin stuff too anyway. Usually they have something like @LostCause and hashtags like #mastodon and so on in their comments, that‘s how I typically spot them.
  So their growth is relevant for us, but you don‘t need to make an account there.
  
  Can we post on their instances too? How?
  
  Thank you, this makes sense. Can I view Mastodon posts from lemmy.world? I can't recall seeing any but maybe it's not obvious.
- Just like twitter except what you see on your feed is reliant on what #’s or people you follow. So you essentially have more control over what you see and you wont get any posts from some rando like twitter does
- Mastodon is hard to get into because at first you only really see what is coming from your own instance. You have to really look around and find the people and topics you want to see in your feed. It's a much more carefully curated set of content than you get from Twitter, which just bombards you with hot takes and garbage all the time.
- It’s like twitter but without the bullshit. I’ve never used twitter so not interested in Mastodon, but I’m glad it’s out there.
- It's really interesting.. i gave it a shot a few days back. You've to follow stuff or hashtags you're interested in for things to show up.. after that take it slow and follow more things.. I've found some really good music playlists, art, programming discussions on there. There's also an explore section which shows trending topics and posts. I can recommend it as the users are mature and in my experience not toxic.
- how did you make it to Fediverse-B without knowing about Fediverse-A?
  
  I know of Mastodon but haven't browsed it. I came to Lemmy first from Reddit.
- It's not like here at all. No shitposts. Only people who use their real name and work for some non profit sharing their highly intelligent news bulletins. I haven't found any memes

Ribbit
- I don't think there's any advertising budget being spent on these fedi platforms, which makes it impressive they've grown so much from media exposure and word of mouth.
  
  We growth with big corps big mistakes
- The fediverse isn't driven by profit, so growth for the sake of growth isn't necessary. Word of mouth will let the fediverse platforms grow naturally and sustainably
  
  It would be a mistake to not realise that they operate in the same virtual space as profit driven corporations though. They should still be professionally run with proper pr and marketing. Whether that is volunteer led, or alternative funding like Wikipedia or charging corporate clients etc.
  Personally, I'd like corporate integration to fund the free part, but with no additional benefit. Just the same access that private users get for free. Otherwise it's a slippery slope.
  Hard to regulate though. How woukd you verify, who would verify? Could be like fair trade products, whereby there is a certifying body. User instances could decide to only federate with corporate instances that are registered with this non profit. They would pay for their access, like Reddit is asking from their apps, except actually reasonable costs. This could be disbursed to large instances with over X amounts of users to fund their computing needs.
- Do they really? I prefer quality over quantity. We don't really need a massive influx of users, just steady growth.
  
  But quantity drives quality. Many big names join platforms specifically for the outreach they provide. That's by far the biggest reason that there's still so many big names on Twitter and co that haven't migrated.
  Especially for the many people who need to make a living and thus need that outreach. The vast, vast majority of viewers will never pay for a picture they see on the internet or a streamer who makes them laugh. For a platform to be financially viable for creative types to make a living, they need a ton of viewers.
  
  I say keep the flow coming, because the good shit eventually floats to the top.
  The more people here, the more attractive it becomes to bigger-names, which will then bring their audience over.
- Advertising requires money. Its a slippery slope that'll lead us down the same path as Reddit again. We're better than that.

Very cool, I am one of the 8800 😸

Mastodon is where the intelligent people are filtered to from Twitter. The idiots end up on Threads.
- No matter how much FaceMeta disgusts me, at least Threads has some semblance of moderation to keep the MAGA fascists under control. I rather have to deal with idiots than with the far-right cesspool that Twitter is turning into.
  Thankfully, we have Mastodon, so I don't have to deal with either. They're both blocked on my PiHole, so I just get a DNS error when I accidentally click on links.
  
  Always a bit of a sobering experience in the rare instance that I end up in Twitter. The fact that some of them are willing to be so blatant about being a PoS is a little concerning to say the least.
  
  Good sugestion
  
  take your meds
- I'd love to use mastadon but I use twitter for sport/politics journalists and none of them are on mastadon.
  
  There is quite a bunch of journalists on Mastodon though.
  
  Can't you just use a rss reader to see their articles?
  
  Yeh I still use reddit to repost sports twitter

Wow, two million users, congratulations Mastodon!
Threads is at 100 million, so if they federate they will still be completely drowned out.
- I spent some time on Threads to see how it was and it's a fucking cesspool of like-mongering and look at me oneupsmanship bullshit that was so fucking tiring to look at that I deleted the app after 4 days.
  
  Your description of it reminds me of LinkedIn.
- Threads has 100m phantom accounts. A lot of them are bots. Who knows how many of those are real users.
  
  This is true, 100m is probably hyperbole. Still, I believe them to have significantly more than 2m active users.
- Well, it would best to compare apples to apples, there are 8M total Mastodon accounts to 108M Threads accounts.
  For active users if we assume the same active ratio (probably not, but I couldn't find any data for Threads on that from a 1 minute search), then it would be 2 million to 27 million, which is small but it wouldn't "completely" drown out Mastodon.
- And our communities will remain strong. The people growing and caring for a free and open Internet will always be here as the minority to large corporations and lowest common denominators of society.
  I believe it was the official mastodon blog that compared Meta advising xmpp the way they'll abuse the fediverse but we will stand strong.
- I want to know how many people posted or commented, not overall users.
- Threads created a shadow account for every user on Instagram, so, I dunno. I'm guessing most of those are just dummy accounts that will remain forever inactive.
  
  That number obviously doesn't include those, because Instagram has over 2 BILLION users. It's also easy to see how Threads can quickly get to 100M when that means you just have to convince 5% of your users to try your new platform that they don't even have to sign up for.
  Again, that's billion with a B. Instagram is unfathomably huge. They only needed 0.1% of their users to rival all of Mastodon.
- If i remember correctly, Threads just uses your pre-existing Instagram account so 108 million is a veeeery theoretical number. We will see how many users actually move to Threads and whether our instances don't block Threads instances.
  
  You still need to sign up to/log into Threads (via Instagram) to have a Threads account or be active on there though, so what makes it theoretical? If they counted all Instagram accounts as Threads accounts it'd instantly be in the billions surely.
- Is that 100m active users?
  
  No way

let’s gooo 👏🏼 the fediverse is getting bigger!

This is great! But generally can't see Mastadon overtaking any other major social platforms until it introduces an equivalent of For you feed from Twitter. The days of following specific people and hashtags is over, it's tedious and I don't give a shit about 3/4s of the feed.
2017-2020 Twitter was absolutely peak Twitter algorithm wise and thousands of users want that exact experience back, yet nobody will provide it.
- Mastodon adding their version of Tweekdeck was what set me to completely abandon Twitter.
- So true

New achievement unlocked

Been on Mastodon since October 2022.
It's a great platform.

Yay! I still don’t know how to use anything that looks like twitter tho

Where are all those people. When I open it, I see empty feed.
- You gotta follow some people, and also hashtags. Following hashtags made a huge difference populating my feed. There's no algorithm so you get to/have to choose what you want to see.
  I also use the ice cubes app for mastodon, which has a trending option also for when I want to see what's gaining traction outside of my follows.
  
  Also don't be afraid to use filters to block keywords if you need a break from certain topics. It's amazing how calm and actually interesting the feed is if you block all mentions of Twitter and Threads and US politics
  
  I tried, but couldn't find anything interesting.
- You get out what you put in.
- Ok, I'll try.
- My feed doesn't stop. It's more active that my old Twitter feed.
  I just follow lots of active people.
- Follow your friends, check out your instance's federated feed and follow some people there (if you aren't self hosting), follow some tags, and follow a trending bot like @popularposts@masto.ai
  
  There is absolutely no chance that any of my friends or anyone I know is on mastodon. I'll try popular tags.
  
  What are friends

And I still don't know how to use it, as in getting an interesting feed.
- Finding people to follow in Mastodon mostly happens by:
  Search topics using hashtags
  Randomly browsing local feeds of different instances
  Randomly browsing the federated feed
  Randomly browsing local feed
  There are instances for different interests like game development, art, information security, foss etc so there's a lot of places to dig for good content.
- Hashtags are your friend. It also helps if you have some active posters for the tag. I get good content from following #sciencefiction #coffee and #python.
  
  Ok. What’s next? There’s a tweet, there’s an icon that it has 16 comments, but I can’t read those. When I click on that icon I have the ui to write a comment.
- Ha, yeah. That's what's holding me back the most. Somehow it worked with Twitter.
  
  Thats likely due to lack of algorithms with goal to keep you browsing forever. Twitter likely harvests all the data it can get from you when you browse twitter. They can also track your browsing habits using your IP (among many other things) and sites that have embed twitter content like share button or embed tweets.
  
  Just look for the things that you are interested in. That's how i accumulated many of my followed accounts over time as well as subscribed subreddits over time.
  You can also look for users under the same name on Mastodon and (hopefully) find them.
  Please note that if you find an account you also followed on twitter and it ends with @bird.makeup, it's a bot mirroring tweets on Mastodon without mirroring your answers on Mastodon back to Twitter.
  
  I also didn't understand how to do this in Twitter. Tried twice, didn't succeed. At least, now I don't miss it.

A great win for decentralization and censorship resistant networks!

I would humbly submit calkey as an alternative. It's the best interface I've seen out of anything on the fediverse.
- cool.

Everything is going according to the plan!
- 'There is broad consensus among experts that the early 2020s shifts in social media populations were what has come to be called asshole-driven.'
  Scraping Assholes-A History of Social Media from 2006-2056
  R. McDonald (2069), published by McDonald's Textbook Division, Schaumburg, IL, USA
  
  McDonald’s diversifying into higher education publishing is a scary, and not as far-fetched as it should be, reality.
  
  Chad citation... the future looks bright, time traveler!

Joined yesterday, Elon boi going down a right wing rabbithole and the zucc-verse is not very appetizing.

What are the best Mastadon servers Linus/Tech related?
- Linus is at https://social.kernel.org/torvalds
  
  And the other Linus?
- Granted I'm kind of new to mastodon, but I've found fosstodon to be great this far.
- Linus is on @linus@social.kernel.org

Just saw that on fedidb, Hooray! Hehe

I joined recently! I gotta admit, I'm not sure what to do exactly....I've never been very good at social media. But I got one!
- https://press.coop/directory helps for following news feeds 👍
  
  Can I subscribe to that on Mastodon?
  No one I’m really interested in following is on there yet so my feed there is essentially empty.
- Good tips here:
  https://fedi.tips/how-do-i-find-accounts-to-follow-on-mastodon-and-the-fediverse-how-do-i-find-my-friends/
  
  Thanks!! This has some really good stuff. I think following hashtags will help. I never really used Twitter so this is all kinda new

What's the occasion?
- Wednesday!

WHITE WHALE HOLY GRAIL 🎵

Is it recommended to create an account specifically for Mastodon or just use your Lemmy-account? Will it fuck up my feeds/subs in some way if I only use one account for both? (I'm new to the whole fediverse thing)
- I think you would need a separate account for Mastodon since you need to login through a server
  
  Not really, but a new Mastodon account will help you have a better experience. I am following some mastodon accounts from my Lemmy
- I'd have a separate Maston and Lemmy. Because they present differently. And are different systems for the most part.

Highly irrelevant song to celebrate Mastodon's milestone!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7AF9GVjS_bs
- Here is an alternative Piped link(s): https://piped.video/watch?v=7AF9GVjS_bs
  Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
  I'm open-source, check me out at GitHub.

What's the reason for mastodon to gain so many new users now suddenly? Didn't Elon Musk start wrecking it quite a while ago?
- To be honest - Lemmy migration made me an active Mastodon user.
  I joined Mastodon right after Musk took over Twitter. I was never big on Twitter but wanted to try mastodon.
  But never became active. Because I was not a tweeter. I was also not a tooter.
  The Reddit exodus was a wake up call for me and I committed to become a user and supporter in fediverse. So the migration to Lemmy/Kbin activated me as a Mastodon active users.
- A lot of people left due to it not being morally sound for them to support Musk and his actions.
  But now there are paywalled features that are ruining the functional experience of Twitter. You can’t look at the site for more than half an hour before getting restricted on a free account
  Plus Mastodon has had time to polish instances, apps and gain a userbase so it is a little easier to transition
- I mean, each time he's messed it up more, another group of people migrates off twitter over to alternatives. I also think more people in general are becoming aware of the fediverse in general thanks to what's going on w/ reddit, but that's speculation on my part.
  
  Seriously, it feels like established social medias are trying to kill themselves lol
- The Twitter panic and lock down. You can't read tweets without being logged in

Stay away from advertising money , if you need money to keep a server up then start a gofundme or a patreon or something ... make it community based so that your instance stays community based .

Neat!!!

How do we check this?
- On Official site of mastodon
- There's a few tools for it but this one's my favorite https://mastodon.fediverse.observer/dailystats
  
  There's also this one: https://fedidb.org/

And that's ACTIVE USERS

Great news. I really wish I could get on with it.

Heckin' yeah!

First time I hear about this but I can see already milions of rulles to accept before creating account so I'll pass.
- It depends a lot on the instance you're trying to register on, they usually have a good dose of rules but it's not all of them
- So here's my question: what content are you looking for that is forbidden in most circles?
  Furthermore, the state of bad actors on Reddit speaks to the failure of loose enforcement and a lack of cohesive rule base across the entire website.
  So what rules are impeding you to access what you want?
  
  No racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, xenophobia, casteism, harassment, dogpiling, doxxing, no false or misleading information
  So anything can fall under those terms theese days. Sorry dude, this is not free speech. This is another facebook, twitter or instagram.