I wonder if we can take the data in that site and see whether or not the fediverse has a "long tail." Or if the mass migration has consolidated folks into a more traditional bell curve across servers.
The long tail is a concept that applies in a number of ways but I'm most familiar with it from the very very early days of SEO. The idea that the thing you're interested in (in this case active users) are spread over so many tiny instances that they seem like a small part of the whole when in fact they make up the majority.
I've been on an oatmeal kick for a while. I just make (good quality) instant oats so all it takes to prepare them is a bowl or mug, and the boiling water I've already got in the kettle for tea.
I don't usually like sweet breakfasts though and most oatmeal mixing suggestions (and ALL refrigerator oat recipes) out there are full of sugar. Lately I've been making a mix in that's 2 parts thai sweet chili sauce and 1 part low sodium soy sauce.
That sort of thing is part of the reason I always want a phone that can side load applications. Not that there aren't end runs around apps from 3rd party app stores, but at the least it would be an arms race. And my next phone will probably be a Fair Phone.
I got a Kbin account but there were a few too many bugs. So I found a Lemmy instance I quite liked and and left the Kbin account to rot. I also have a mastodon account because sometimes I like to have the scroll.
I consumed the last 80ish% of The Martian in one barely interrupted (personally irresponsible) session. It hooked me hard and I couldn't put it down. I've had a fondness for novels written serially ever since.
My HS put networked computers in every classroom a couple years before I graduated (so '95 or '96). They put predictable passwords on all the teacher accounts, and all teacher accounts had write access to network shares. Those of us who figured that out stashed copies of the Doom WAD file (the one file too big to fit on a single 3.5" floppy) all over the network under different names. So even after they figured out we were in and started forcing teachers to change their password, there were still a dozen or more copies spread over the network.
Student access was enough to copy the WAD file locally over the 100mbit ethernet if you knew where to look. And we all carried the rest of the game around on floppy. So any time we got access to the computers we were playing doom. We also passed around floppies with different mod files. The chicken launcher was everyone's favorite.
I keep thinking we need a way to become our own personal IDPs, then we can have both. But if too many people find the current state of the fediverse confusing we're never going to get a critical mass of people to manage their own oauth profiles and scopes.
I love the late TNG / Dominion War era, but less for the designs themselves and more for how many different ship types we see from all over the Alpha and Delta quadrants.
There are servers that do this. You get a whole bunch of mostly terrible content (with not votes to rise good stuff to the top) and no way to interact with the original poster or commenters. It's not great.
It's less of a defense and more of a stick to shove in our spokes. We can get bled to death by simple user inertia, it happens all the time. We can see it happening right here in the Fediverse as we speak, where the majority of active users just think of beehaw as "that weird server where people won't see my replies."
Threads is an aircraft carrier at full speed and we're a rowboat being attached to its side whether we like it or not. If we just cut ourselves loose we will be crushed in their wake.
Facebook is the worst non Nestle company out there, but exactly zero corporations can be classified as sheep. If Google starts sniffing around don't think they'll be any better.
If the fediverse can't survive meta it can't survive. If decentralization's Achilles heel is corporations then decentralization is not viable strategy in the current world and we should give up on it now.
Threads wasn't first, and it's going to be very very far from last. There is no escape from corporate interests in any g7 nation - other than being deemed too small to matter
I'm sure you know this, but for the benefit of folk who don't: Mastodon is about building your own "algorithm" by simply following the sort of stuff that you'd want to see while scrolling. The important thing to remember is you can follow stuff not just people. Search for a hashtag, for example, and you can follow that as if it were a Twitter user. But to really get the most of it you can expand out and follow other ActivityPub things like Lemmy communities, Pixelfed users/albums, Peertube, etc.
To answer your question: I find following things on mastodon is better for consumption than commenting when it comes to Lemmy/Kbin posts. Commenting directly on the post is easy and you see all the primary replies, but finding replies of replies (and further down) gets tedious fast. But I still follow the Lemmy community for my city and a couple meme heavy ones via my Mastodon account.
"Merger" that was really a purchase. New CEO started immediately talking about making our $30mil company a $100mil company within 3 years and we all then knew they were going to work is to death and then sell us as soon as the multiples became unbound from revenue.
2 years later they're in their 3rd CEO and there was just another max exodus. Glad I left early.
I wonder if we can take the data in that site and see whether or not the fediverse has a "long tail." Or if the mass migration has consolidated folks into a more traditional bell curve across servers.
The long tail is a concept that applies in a number of ways but I'm most familiar with it from the very very early days of SEO. The idea that the thing you're interested in (in this case active users) are spread over so many tiny instances that they seem like a small part of the whole when in fact they make up the majority.