Discussion
@ozoned also we need to measure the value of the fact that checking in doesn’t devolve into endless scrolling - I like that it only takes a few minutes of my day to connect, see a few new things and be on my way
@phwolfe940@denton.social OH YES! This place is absolutely not built to be addicting. It's built to be community first and I'd go so far as to say every project I've personally used, do as much as possible to break those bad habits.
@NatureMC@mastodon.online ABSOLUTELY agree with all of this. I guess my underlying argument is the old yard stick of MAU, has zero relevance to us. And though I see folks having the best intentions, there are those that attempt to measure in MAU and indicate the Fediverse is dieing. I think that's absolutely incorrect. We're spreading out. Yes, some people left. But I know I run my own now, when in the past I was on a Mastodon instance.
@ozoned and given the general left-libertarian freeforall attitude of “how dare you read what I post on public timelines without my personal affirmative consent to view!!!!” that ppl keep fallling into, holy crap I would not want to see the ethics review board of a university deal with that.
@johannab@cosocial.ca excellent points. :-). I can definitely see numerous folks upset at the thought. And I can't blame anyone. Considering the abuses people are attempting to extract themselves from.
I think what we need is a serious systems design researcher, someone who can dig up and understand the fundamentals of network theory and of the architectures we once explored but have abandoned, or are slowly and haphazardly reinventing by bumbling around trying to define what we’re not.
That also has to be someone who understood the world before Canter & Siegel ever happened, because that decision to intrude on everyone’s networking for personal profit set this up.
@johannab@cosocial.ca this is already FAR deeper than my knowledge on the field. :-D. Sounds like numerous research papers to be had for anyone willing. Lol. NOT me though. Not my forte. 😄
@ozoned for all that my last couple of years of education have involved some training-wheel level Data Science and Research Methods class work, I’m not sure this is a thing anyone has worked out. I feel like it COULD be done and I can imagine the shape of it, but it would involve rethinking what we consider a metric at a very fundamental level.
With social “media”, the subject of all the metrics we have is NOT the person … it’s the product, the individual units of “content”.
@johannab@cosocial.ca exactly! We're measuring ourselves wrong. MAU is a meaningless statistics, when my site will probably only ever get me. But I'm still a piece of the conversation to Mastodon.social though I am NEVER one of their monthly active users.
I know lots of folks are talking about Monthly Active Users when it comes to health of the Fediverse.
We use that to compare social medias and even ourselves, a social network, to each other.
I argue we should be focused on user engagement. I know LinkedIn has "impressions", but idk what that means.
So I wonder if there's a good way to generate this. Someone posting is the highest, commenting, subscribing, liking, disliking, and follow on down. I guess that would be a statistical model? But with diminishing returns. One SUPER ACTIVE ANNOYING poster does not a network make, but "media" it does.
I don't have a clue how this would work statistically. But I theorize, that while we're smaller MAU, our user engagement is significantly higher when population size is accounted for.
Is there any data anyone knows of to back this up or disapprove it? I'm pro small.social though, so maybe I'm wrong. Any data scientists in the Fediverse? :-D #data #dataIsBeautiful #fedi #fediverse #science
@dnpdame@mastodon.social graduates with her Doctorate of Nurse Practitioner TOMORROW!
I'm so proud of you! I love you so much and want to yell it proudly to the world that you worked so hard to get here. And I've loved being with you on this journey. Thank you for allowing me to share in your life.
Just saw this over on #Piefed
This release also includes translation updates:
- Irish by @aindriu
- Spanish by Juan M Sevilla
It also benefits from feedback from (in no particular order):
- @juliemoynat
- @reuterbal
- @badnetmask
- @ozoned
- @lufertec
My thanks to everyone who contributed to this release, and apologies to anyone I missed.
@pachli@mastodon.social thank YOU so much! 😊 Hopefully it helps @badnetmask@hachyderm.io and helps smooth out any issues between bonfire and others in the future.
How can you measure the popularity of a social network site? Perhaps by counting the number of active accounts, or the quality of the discourse, or even how many people reply to your witty memes.
Me? I prefer to look at how many people visit my blog from each site. It is an imperfect measure - and a vain one - but lets me know where I should be spending my time. No point posting on a network which is just bots talking to each other, right?
Earlier this year I built a stats-counter for my blog. Every time someone clicks from a website which links to my blog, it records that visit in a database. I get to see which blog posts are doing numbers, and where those numbers came from.
Until fairly recently, the Mastodon social network didn't send referer details. I thought that reduced the visibility of the network and lobbied for it to change. As various Mastodon servers upgrade, and admins opt-in, it is becoming more apparent just how much traffic originates from the Fediverse.
Over the last few weeks, here's how many people have clicked from BlueSky and Mastodon to one of my blog posts.
| Total | Source |
|---|---|
| 1,607 | |
| 752 |
At first glance, it doesn't look good for our elephantine friends, does it? The butterfly sends over twice the traffic. Game over!
But, of course, while Mastodon.social is the biggest instance - it is far from the only one. What happens if we slide down the long tail? Here's all the Mastodon-ish instances which sent me over 10 clicks.
| Total | Source |
|---|---|
| 193 | |
| 120 | |
| 106 | |
| 62 | |
| 59 | |
| 55 | |
| 49 | |
| 48 | |
| 33 | |
| 27 | |
| 26 | |
| 24 | |
| 19 | |
| 18 | |
| 17 | |
| 17 | |
| 16 | |
| 16 | |
| 14 | |
| 14 | |
| 12 | |
| 11 | |
| 11 | |
| 51 |
Ah! Add them all up and you get a grand total of 1,773 visitors from Mastodon-powered sites. That's more than BlueSky.
Now, there are some obvious caveats to the data:
And yet… no matter how you slice it, Fediverse servers are sending as much traffic as BlueSky!
I think this is brilliant. Web services should be able to scale from small to big - and each ActivityPub-powered site helps power the open Internet.
Just for completeness, this is how Reddit, Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, and Lemmy do over the same period:
If you add up all the Lemmy instances, they send about as much traffic as Facebook and LinkedIn combined. That's not a huge surprise - those platforms hate anyone clicking away to the wider web.
Twitter is basically the Dead Internet. I'm no longer on there, but I do occasionally search it to see who is sharing my posts. The popular posts I write get shared a lot - sometimes by accounts with huge followers - yet there are no comments or retweets and barely and clicks.
I don't do Instagram or Threads, and that might be reflected in their low numbers. But I'm not active on YouTube either - yet people there occasionally link back to me.
Firstly, my stats only represent my site. Your site might be very different.
Secondly, I've ignored search engine traffic, big blogs, newsletters, and other sources.
Thirdly, and most importantly, this isn't a competition! The desire for a "winner-takes-all" service is dangerous and disturbing. An ecosystem is at its most vibrant when there are multiple participants each thriving in their own niche.
I want a thousand sites, running a hundred different software stacks, some of which only serve a dozen people, or even a lone participant.
Diversity is strength.
#ActivityPub #BlueSky #fediverse #mastodon #statistics@blog@shkspr.mobi Such a great read. Thank you for the thoroughness. I loved this. We need a new way to measure the #smallSocial effect.
Right now people saw we fail because they only look at one platform. #BigTech had to invent "monthly active users" to help people understand their "value".
They're trying to measure us the same, but we're nowhere near the same.
We're an evolution and no one will ever truly know how many of us there are.
So I beg folks, don't look at one or two or three instances and say that because some arbitrary number goes down that we're losing or dieing.
No no no. We're growing and learning and finding ways that Big Tech NEVER wanted to exist.
Just because they use a yard stick doesn't mean we need to be constrained by that.
EVERYONE please keep up the incredible work.
I'll fight for this the #restOfMyLife. How about all of you? #RomL #smallSocial #smallWeb #fedi #Fediverse
Has anyone tried #Bonfire
@hello@thefedi.town yes. I'm running it right now. I'm also trying out #Emissary on a test instance.
Janus & Justice: The Open WebRTC Revolution - Lorenzo Miniero - E88
Special thank you to @lminiero@fosstodon.org
🚀 #VOD tubefree.org/w/2Em9KMPuwuxhQ...
Never miss an episode!
🔎 #Follow @ozoned@tubefree.org
📡 #RSS tubefree.org/feeds/videos.xml?videoChannelId=5934
🎧 #Podcast tubefree.org/feeds/podcast/videos.xml?videoChannelId=5934 #FiresideFedi #FiresideChat #Podcast #VideoPodcast #Fediverse #Fedi #ActivityPub #DecentralizedSocial #OpenSocialWeb #Community #VodCast
@daj@gofer.social sorry about that. Seems to be done transcoding now. I think? Let me know. 😄
I've heard more than once that I put out a lot of shows. I do.
So just asking folks, which do you prefer?
More episodes to choose from.
Less shows, but you get th opportunity to enjoy each one.
Works On My Machine LIVE! Episode 3 is posted!
Thank you to @lefractal@mstdn.social !
💻️ tubefree.org/w/1cxp8wR4x66BK...
📨 @ozoned@worksonmymachine.live #selfHosted #tech #fediverse #smallWeb #smolWeb #owncast #livestream #stream #fedi #softwareDevelopment #foss #openSource
Good day all! Upcoming episode of Fireside Fedi!
Special Guest: @samir@m.fedica.com
Entrepreneur and engineer. Father to 3 amazing kids. CEO founder FedicaHQ, Cofounder of @rentcompass, Builder of popular mobile apps, Traveler, pentalingual. Also building tools for Mastodon
So don't miss it!
It will happen on 07/05/26 at 16:00 US Eastern Time ( UTC-4 )
🔥 FIRESIDE FEDI — FOLLOW ALL THREE! 🔥
📺 Live: @ozoned@stream.firesidefedi.live (#livestream)
🎬 VOD: @ozoned@tubefree.org (#Peertube #VOD)
🔔 Alerts: @when@freestreamers.btfree.org (new shows!)
Don't miss out — follow all three! #firesidefedi #fediverse #fedi #interview #freesoftware #opensource #userfreedom #freedom #resistance
Great. Anticipate another round in a week or two.
Trump Tells Congress Iran War Has Been "Terminated" - Joe.My.God.
https://www.joemygod.com/2026/05/trump-tells-congress-iran-war-has-been-terminated/
@JonChevreau@mstdn.ca @servelan@newsie.social yeah but has it been obliterated? The next level after that is super duper over. Then it'll be on and end in a week. Then it'll be pinky promise swearsies really over. Then we'll do a ground war.
We've heard this shit for literally months now. They don't live in reality. Impeach these child rapsit fucks.
Thank you so much again to @j12t@j12t.social @anca@mastodon.xyz for a wonderful Fediforum.
I'm putting this in writing. As I said at FediForum, I appreciate y'all so much that if I ever have another child I promise we'll name them after y'all.
JohAnca.
I expect they'll one day marry John Mastodon and bring about the golden age of the internet.
#fediForum #fediforum2026 #john Mastodon #JohAnca
RE: https://mastodon.social/@reiver/116494697560528377
I need a hoodie or sticker with:
"I'm on the Sexy Social Web"
🙂
@reiver@mastodon.social fedicon special edition hoodie.
Can you list out what you discovered were the missing features from the point of view of (I think you said) Twitch streamers.
@reiver@mastodon.social bots. Subscriptions/payments. Announcements. Twitch integrations for games and applications that people use such as Marbles. Clips. Sharing emotes through Twitch.
@logan@social.logal.dev might be able to give more as he's been working on a lot of this. He's created Owlbot to address things such as bots, clips, etc.
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