@fbinin@mastodon.fbin.in feel free to shoot me an email and we can discuss it! I really enjoy talking and getting to know folks! 😊
@fbinin@mastodon.fbin.in Forgot to give you the email! 😁 firesidefedi@btfree.org or btfree@btfree.org
@FediTips @fbinin @ozoned @firesidefedi @timnitGebru @pluralistic
The interview was great fun.
@NorcalGma2@sfba.social @FediTips@social.growyourown.services
I am so glad you had fun! 😊 I enjoyed it so much. Thank you so much for all of the wonderfulnes you bring here. <3
@FediTips @fbinin @ozoned @firesidefedi @NorcalGma2 Wow, I had no idea that this existed. What a glorious pleasure. Well done to all involved, and thank you! (And a special hello to Summer.)
@baz@mastodon.scot @FediTips@social.growyourown.services
Thank you very much! I greatly appreciate it. I'm @ozoned and created the idea to just talk with folks. My community has helped me improve it tremendously though. And I'm just glad even 1 person finds it interesting. 😊 I started it just to get to know y'all. <3
@FediTips @ozoned @firesidefedi @timnitGebru @pluralistic @NorcalGma2
Perfect. I think I would like to get interviewed hopefully. 🙂
@fbinin@mastodon.fbin.in feel free to shoot me an email and we can discuss it! I really enjoy talking and getting to know folks! 😊
1
I don't know what their exact criteria are but I think they base it on who people nominate? Some of the interviewees are well-known people such as @timnitGebru and @pluralistic and some are developers of Fediverse projects, but most are simply members of the community that others enjoy hearing from.
I particularly enjoyed this episode about a retired dog owner @NorcalGma2 - https://tubefree.org/w/7HgS4JYMNv4xGZLb14v9hP 🙂
@FediTips@social.growyourown.services @fbinin@mastodon.fbin.in
@NorcalGma2@sfba.social is such a lovely person! Bringing positive energy and beauty to the Fediverse. <3
1
@FediTips @ozoned @firesidefedi
How do you get the audience and the people go do this? What is the criteria, approach?
@fbinin@mastodon.fbin.in @FediTips@social.growyourown.services
The criteria is that you're a person that would like to talk. 😊 And get to know others. Share a project, talk about your dog, whatever.
So it's been folks that I've found on the Fediverse, that I found interesting and asked. I've had MANY suggestions of people as well. I have to get back on my list actually. Life's been a bit hectic, but hoping to do more in the future. 😊
Fireside Fedi is a relaxed friendly series of livestream interviews with all kinds of people from around the Fediverse. You can follow the stream account at:
➡️ @ozoned
The stream will post in your timeline when it goes live. You can watch previous streams on the Fireside Fedi VOD archive at:
➡️ https://tubefree.org/c/firesidefedi/videos
You can also follow their text-based general account at:
@FediTips@social.growyourown.services thank you so much for the shout out! 😊
And as usual, thank you so much for all you do! <3
@ozoned Thinking this over. If I want to measure what I'm getting out of the Fediverse, one way to look at is, if I post something, does anyone care? And do I care about what other people are posting?
A good measure of this is how many people actually comment on my posts, and how many posts do I comment on.
You could quantify this as "median written responses per post". Note I'm saying written responses, not boosts. Boosts are not enough effort to count.
The reason I'm saying *median* is that some networks have accounts with huge fanbases, and those followers do respond. That's "engagement" useful for marketers to know about influencers. And we do have a few very-well-followed accounts here. Using median means these outliers won't skew the result that much.
I mean, if I post something, and two people say something back, I'm happy.
@14mission@sfba.social It's a difficult one though. "Boosts" are you actively sharing with your community. That's the primary method of organic growth here I'd imagine. Of course I don't even know that for sure. How do folks primarily find others? Hashtags? Boosts from someone they follow? IDK. 😊
But someone else pointed out that even a low quality comment might not be as helpful for a quantitative analysis. How many +1 posts are there? Are they the same value as our conversation here?
IDK! 😁 I just feel passionate that MAU is the completely wrong metric.
@ozoned One thing that's nice about the Fediverse that's not quantifiable, is that I've actually made some friends here that I've never met in the real world.
In all the years I actually was on FB and looked at the "feed", it was zero.
(There have been a couple--ok maybe just one--from FB groups, but in the feed? nobody).
In the days of email lists, I had friends through those. That was pretty much destroyed by social media, mainly FB (and this is why I will curse meta forever).
Anyway, like I said, this is important, but not directly quantifiable.
@14mission@sfba.social Absolutely. And folks should have the option to stay private. We'll NEVER know the true size of the Fediverse. There will be islands, there will be people that just consume and don't respond to anything. All of that is ok.
But people are looking at just MAU and saying we're shrinking. And if we are, so what. It's not a valid number. It's A number yes.
But that's like saying my car is better than yours because it has 120,000 miles on it and your car is brand new. 😁
@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.
@ozoned I'm not a scientist. But from my work with social media I know that the number of comments alone doesn't show quality. You get a maximum of comments with polarising and provoking posts. Or if people shitstorm you.
To measure the quality of highly interacting social media, one should measure the quality of communication: how constructive/long/interesting people are talking with one another.
And algorithms can falsify the results.
@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.
1
@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.
2
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. 😄
1
@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
25
@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.
4
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.
Now witness the power of this fully operational Fediverse!
https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2025/11/now-witness-the-power-of-this-fully-operational-fediverse/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:
- I have a smaller follower count on BlueSky than I do on Mastodon.
- My posts may appeal more to one demographic than another.
- People may have strict privacy controls which suppress the true volume of visitors.
- There's no way to measure how long someone spends reading my posts.
- RSS and newsletter visitors aren't counted.
- Clicks from apps may not always show a referer.
- Some people may be on multiple services.
- Fediverse users can follow the post directly, so don't need to visit the site to read it.
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.
Final Thoughts
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
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@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.
