Mastodon.social's continued growth as a percentage of the Fedi is (IMHO) worrying, I did a thread about this: https://social.chinwag.org/@FediThing/115492120189076969
M.s is currently 28.7% of all active Fedi accounts and rising. For whatever it's worth, if m.s reaches these network percentages I'm going to take following actions:
40% - Stop recommending mastodon.social accounts on @FediFollows & https://fedi.directory
45% - Limit mastodon.social
50% - Defederate mastodon.social
Thoughts? Do these sound okay?
@homegrown @FediFollows I've used the #fediverse since 2017, had accounts on many different instances. A month ago i created my current account on #MastodonSocial because i was transferring over 1K music posts from #Bluesky where i had done a music discovery project earlier in 2025 but wanted to leave there and not lose all that work.
I chose Mastodon.social because it was a TON of work and i needed to know i was choosing an instance that could handle that many posts and wasn't going away.
@homegrown @FediFollows It took me 6 days to post over 1K posts to create this:
https://mastodon.social/@transicorn/115428184719312347
So feel free to limit, defederate or whatever from it, but i personally feel i made the right choice in choosing it to share this #music with info for people on the #fedi.
I don't have to worry about it shutting down and that's ultimately what matters to me with this profile/project.
It is interesting that you are confident you don't have to worry about it shutting down. It'll be interesting also to see how that plays out. I'm not making any prediction nor suggesting a preference, just saying.. Nothing is for sure. Time will tell.
If not shutdown, another scenario is it gets bought out, or just somehow becomes de-facto financially controlled by some entity that causes a severe de-federation. Then you won't be sharing your music with #fedi, you'll be sharing it with mastodon.social.
@keith @homegrown Here's the reality of the situation:
Mastodon.Social is the flagship instance that many new users will be coming to whether or not anyone is happy about that. I agree with the OP about diversity of the network being better if more smaller instances pop up, but people need to use them.
At present fedidb shows this to be a dying or stagnant network at best. Most went to Bluesky, most won't come back.
@transicorn @keith @homegrown Well, Bluesky stats also show it to be a dying or stagnant network at best (decline in active users for most of this year) and the probability of dying for Bluesky is predicated on its lack of growth unlike Mastodon which has not made a pact with the venture capitalists.
@transicorn I was talking about active users which is the much more useful stat than all time registered accounts.
You can see graphs of that here among other places for Bluesky: https://bskycharts.edavis.dev/edavis.dev/bskycharts.edavis.dev/bsky_users_total.html
The downward trend is clear. Bluesky has fallen from the peak of 15.1 million monthly active users to just 5.35 within the last 12 months.
6 Million Active Users on #Bluesky Right Now...
Less Than 1 Million On The Entirety Of ALL ActivityPub Instances
@transicorn the point is that Bluesky is declining just as well. The added problem for Bluesky is that continued funding via venture capital requires growth which they do not have at all. Both 5 million and 1 million are nothing compared to the likes of Threads or X which have a MAU in the hundreds of millions.
That said, all AP instances probably are at least and maybe significantly above a million, just difficult to pin it down exactly due to the distributed nature.
I bridge my account to #Bluesky because more people are there and #Mastodon is losing active users.
I'm not worried about being able to connect with others, but perhaps those here living in this bubble might want to consider what defederating on a network that is losing active users does to the health of the network and future of it for anyone wanting to come here.
@transicorn While I'd certainly like to see more users I can understand not everyone cares that much and has other priorities. The thing is that the fediverse has been around and likely will continue to be for a long time at this point. Not everyone cares to chase the numbers that much and whether they grow or not isn't so much a question of life and death here unlike for something like Bluesky.
@ikuturso
Yes! THIS point: "Not everyone cares to chase the numbers".
It remains to be seen if a decentralised federated "social" network can accommodate both number chasers and.. um what could one call the others... Maybe put it in terms of quantity vs quality?
Numbers, likes, follows, boosts, re-whatever, i am still not convinced there is much value in it, apart from the value as the addictive behaviour modifiers they were designed to be.
Not even for artists, musicians or others looking for "exposure". I come from a time when we wrote, drew, printed and photocopied flyers and handed them out in bars. I recorded many demos and saw many bands and musicians come and go. I saw many extremely talented writers and players go unnoticed.
It is not better now with "social" media and likes, follows. I believe it is worse. Jaron Lanier, for what it is worth, wrote a lot about this.
