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Comment by nabla9 | Hacker News Reader

There are some tight groups, but number of active users is very low and getting lower, number of serves is also decreasing.

I did some random sampling and it looks like large number of active users are talking to void and may not have realized it. They post regularly, have 100s of followers but no active followers.

The most popular servers like mastodon.social are cesspools of snark, anger and grandstanding. Oh, and the moderation is random/nonexistent depending on the day.

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Here is the thing. None of that matters to me. The only thing that matters is the people I follow.

But we are not talking about you. Mastodon is not culturally or technologically meaningful. It had 2.5 million users few years ago, now there are 700,000 users and numbers go down.

There are over 324 comments about this leadership change, which at the time of counting was more than 23 of the other stories I see on the frontpage, so I'm not sure by which metric you say it's not culturally relevant.

How can a communications network with 700,000 users not be culturally meaningful? Are they all just re-tooting the same Willy Wonka meme and possessed of the memory of a goldfish? Or do they all live in the same suburb of Lagos and not use any other social media?

I don't really care for inactive users, I do post, and people reply to me, and i follow a bunch of people that post. I follow a bunch of hashtags so discover posts outside of my immediate circle. No ads, almost no trolls, no bots, haven't seen spam in a while, it's a great experience as a daily user.

The way you paint it feels akin to the people going back rural or even to the middle of the forest, but in the digital scape which has the possibility of being seen just following a (sometimes quite esoteric) URI.

The beauty of OG Twitter was that talking to void is all that was needed. People pumped in tons of interesting contents and it worked(I'd argue it still does work, for lots of IT relevant topics).

The "problem" is that the European WWW didn't like the content that works(and I'd argue same applies to Twitter of now). If you don't like the content that works, you get little to no real content or users.

> I did some random sampling and it looks like large number of active users are talking to void and may not have realized it. They post regularly, have 100s of followers but no active followers.

This is true on Twitter/X or any social network like it.

I walked away a long time ago when I realized how fragmented and prone to drama it was.

Well, it's just fragmented. It's hard to find people that I used to follow on Twitter. It's hard to find posts on topics I'm interested in, outside of my instance.

sounds exactly like blogging 20 years ago

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