The last week of April 2022
A lot happened on the Fediverse in the last week of April in 2022. It started on Monday with an acquisition offer by a billionaire to buy Twitter. Twitters board of directors accepted the offer and people started joining Mastodon.
Some of them found their way to our beautifully coloured server, mastodon.green.
On Monday we had 779 users. It rose steadily until the server became slow and when user 998 signed up the whole thing crashed. I was looking at the numbers around that time as it’s quite a milestone to pass 1000 users.
It was definitely time to upgrade the server, so I did that.
At the time of writing this blog post we have more than 2000 users (2022-05-01 17:19)
The numbers are big from the perspective of our tiny Mastodon server. Clearly it was a peak of signups, but when one look carefully at the new users graph it’s flattening out at a much higher level than what we had the week before. The following image is from today 17:19.
Other servers had similar peaks, and the famous server run by the main developers had tens of thousands of users signing up. That server was already under heavy load. A server that had very similar graphs as ours was Fosstodon.org. They wrote a blog post about it https://hub.fosstodon.org/elon-twitter-post-mortem/
The following image is from Friday afternoon. To show what happened the last two days.
In other news the European Union entered the Fediverse on their own Mastodon server. I’m not sure if it’s a small or big step for them, but in my opinion it’s a big step forward for decentralized social media and the Fediverse. They seem to use #EUvoice as their name and tag.
A celebrity signed up, probably not the first one, or the last one. (Luckily not on our server, it would crash again). It was Jan Böhmermann from Germany.
Look at this image below. When I search for him. Mastodon displays four identical images and names on different domains. The profile that looks verified, isn’t verified, because anyone can add an emoji in their name field, and that emoji can be a fake verification mark. It’s not good – at all. Some people know about this, but there is no way tens of thousands of new users will know about it. As far as I know, the real person is on .social https://mastodon.social/@janboehm
Mastodon has another way to self verify your profile, but you must have your own website and be able to add your own rel=”me” link to it.
It’s looks good when you know what you’re looking for. In my profile you can see that albinsocial.com is highlighted. As an example for this blog post I temporarily added a normal link.
As a way to fund mastodon.green I’m planning to offer club memberships which will include a highlighted link to a page. It could look like this club.dentep.org/@user.
To begin with it could be the link only, but it would be possible to extend that in the future to a sort of member page. Where a member can choose to add an introduction, some hashtags with their interests, their city etc. That way it could be possible to browse around and find people to connects with. For example by looking at club members with tags #Paris #Jogging #Singing. So you could look at all members that likes #jogging if you want to follow such people.