What a terrible graph. That “huge” spike is a mere 0.5% increase. That might as well be noise.
Don’t believe any graph whose y-axis starts at any value but 0 people.
Don’t believe any graph whose y-axis starts at any value but 0 people.
This one is pretty bad but that is definitely not the right lesson to take from it. The one thing it does show us is that approximately 20k extra new users suddenly showed up compared to the trend, and that would be much more difficult to see if the relevant axis did start at zero. The bigger problem is that it shows too short a time span. It’s not clear how unusual this event was, or if it happens every week.
The other weird thing is that bottom-right axis does start at zero for some reason. I’m guessing it might somehow be trying to indicate “toots” specifically made by those new users? But that’s not how it’s labelled and it seems unlikely they could have that data.
Indeed the right sides of the graph start at 0. The left side does not.
Note that 2000/h (10^3) aren’t all that significant when there’s already 14000000 (10^7) users present.
There’s nothing wrong with graphs whose y axies don’t start at zero. They can be used to misdirect people, but if you’re capable of actually seeing the numbers in the axes and doing a little bit of thought, they tell you exactly what one that starts at zero does.
Plus, the opaque spike is shown on the secondary y axis, which does start at 0. It’s the translucent layer that’s mapped to the primary axis.
I can’t remember the last time I saw a graph starting at a non-zero value where it showed anything other than noise whereas they almost always skew my initial impression of the data. If there’s no point in doing it but a major downside, I see no point in having them for any reason other than to mislead people.
This is a bad take in this case. This graph is of total population, not if signups. It effectively is zeroed.
Sure it’s a very small increase relative to the total but relative to recent history this is very significant.
Edit: the bigger issue from a data interpretation perspective is the date range sampled is small.
Plus the second graph shows the average number of instances went down compared to yesterday, which was itself down further from the day before.
This “wave” is looking mighty sus.
Yeah, a couple days of temporary spike does not a wave make.
Mastodon (and the Fediverse) tends to see “scalloped” growth: big increases, followed by gradual declines. Every time Musk does something dumb, you see days or weeks of increased signups. Then the new users fall off, and they become inactive. Usually, it stabilizes a little higher than the last wave.
The waves come in, and the tide rises. The weather passes over, but the climate stays stable (or increases).
If Twitter collapses, then the tsunami arrives. :P
Elon Musk is doing as much for the fediverse as Nutomic himself
Please Reddit, do it
Yeah I’m tired of having to look up something, only to find that I have to stop Google from trying to log back into my banned Reddit account.
It’s amazing I’ve been on Lemmy for months now and I’ve yet to be banned from anything on it, it’s almost like not having normies modding out of a desire to solely Power Trip is good for business
See, capitalism is good!
When it’s imploding on itself, that is.
Enshittification has collapse as its fourth phase, but we tend to forget that.
Capitalism seems Eternal and unbreakable, but they said the same thing about the divine right of kings.
Haha that comment reminded me of a scene from a recent Simpsons episode “The Serfsons”
See how the heads of rich people get the tallest pikes with the best view?
It’s so unfair.
I told you to lay off feudalism.
It’s the only system we know.
We have no choice about it, and therefore it’s the best.
Firefish is a way better experience than Mastodon, of course shares content; https://joinfirefish.org/
Thanks for posting this. It’s hard not to become the “but muh firefish” guy every time a thread like this pops up.
Solves nearly every complaint I’ve seen about the Mastodon interface, has features I haven’t even seen folks ask for (I like the “antennas” feature a lot), federated with Mastodon, and will guide you through importing everyone you follow or who follows you - literally migrating your Mastodon account over in just a couple clicks.
I’m not anti-Mastodon whatsoever, but for the folks who find it klunky, Firefish is the answer for sure.
I like the “antennas” feature a lot
For the uninitiated, Firefish’s antennae are saved searches, where you can specify lists of keywords and users and come back to them over and over again. It’s similar to Mastodon’s hashtag follow feature, only more flexible. Though, IIRC, it doesn’t add the search results to your home feed; it keeps them separate, and undiluted.
From an administrator’s point of view, Firefish’s Recommended timeline is super cool, and is similar to Akkoma’s ‘bubble’ feature. It lets you specify a list of other federated servers to display posts from, creating a kind of “super-local” timeline. It’s the kind of thing I’d love to see in Lemmy and kbin.
It looks pretty cool, but I can’t help but feel that a really catchy name for a service is important. I wish it weren’t true as it is such an insignificant aspect of an entire platform.
Either way I’m going to sign up and check it out.
Firefish is definitely a bit of an unfortunate rebranding. Though ‘Calckey’ wasn’t exactly setting the world on fire, as a name, either. But at the end of the day, we really need to learn to recontextualize fediverse plataforms as software that runs a service, not the service itself. They’re website engines that power social websites, not a social brand in and of themselves, kind of like how WordPress is a quasi-static website suite that is used for a huge number of blogs and quais-static websites.
No one shares something from, say, the TechCrunch website, or Time website, and goes “Hey, Iook what I found on WordPress!”
Firefish is nice but I’m yet to find a stable instance and also for some unfathomable reason you can’t follow hashtags. And the federation doesn’t really work properly, which is kinda important when 90% of the Fediverse is on Mastodon.
https://plasmatrap.com/ seems stable.
You can follow hashtags with antennas.
Federation should work just fine as far as I know.
You can follow hashtags with antennas.
Yeah well that’s great but I don’t want it in my antennae, I want them in my “timeline”. I don’t want to have to page over to antenna and select one every time I load/reload the service.
