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.
It does start at zero. 2000 people per hour
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.
Is a quarter percent increase in users in one day meaningful? I have no idea.
Well. It is and it isn’t. It’s per hour. So per day (24^1) that’s 48000 (48*10^3) and per year it’s 17532000 (1.7*10^7). That adds up pretty fast, a 100% increase in the full year.
Plus, hey, new friends!
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.
Both right axes start at zero. They’re the important part of the graph.
If you talk about a new wave of users, then the number of users is also important, really important
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.
It clearly shows a major update in signups
The point is on the “hourly increase”, which starts at 0.
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
Reread the caption. That second graph tracks active instances
Elon Musk is doing as much for the fediverse as Nutomic himself
Please Reddit, do it
Actually praying for the corporate/political astroturf campaigns to work this time. Just this once
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.
Forget, intentionally ignore for short term profit, same difference.
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.
I hope it ends in the same way 🇫🇷
A wise woman once said…
“Keep your party in the USA, Viva la France!” - Joanne D’Arc
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.
I like the fediverse theme of naming their platforms animals
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!”
Can confirm. I find Firefish (formerly Calckey) a much nicer, much more refined, and much more expressive piece of kit.
I’ve liked Akkoma, too. And there’s something really comforting about Friendica, with its “Facebook as it should have been” interface.
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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.
I don’t want to. I just want to have them in my home feed.
Fair enough. I’m glad there’s something out there that meets your need, then.
I’ll have to check that out if nothing else but for the name. Friend of mine and I have had a running gag for 20+ years around ‘firefish’.
Honestly the Twitter thing has been great for shifting the internet zeitgeist in a decidedly fuck-billionaires direction. The material suffering was obviously already here in abundance, but now the shittiness has come to the home of the people who are comfortable enough to keep posting through the growing poverty around them, and they rightfully hate it.
There has got to he some other narrative going on here. Is there a super profitable way for him to declare x bankrupt or something?
I find it really difficult to believe there is any benefit to him buying and killing Twitter for billions of dollars. It would have to be extremely contrived and possibly a really well kept conspiracy.
The benefit is controlling the public narrative. Think about it, how many news media companies get business from Twitter? And now he has the power to suppress their reach or to even kick them off the platform altogether.
I agree that is a really valuable position to be in, but you would still need to maintain your reputation or else they could all leave. The website itself is mostly insignificant and its popularity has everything to do with its reputation and userbase.
We know there’s no benefit to him here because a court forced him to go through with the purchase after he tried to back out. He did not want this mess.
Yeah at first it appears it was a major screw up but the screw ups keep coming so i wonder.
Even before Twitter was purchased it was in a really delicate balancing act of profitability. Any misstep that seemed slightly too much had advertisers and users leaving and the opposite meant Twitter couldn’t make a profit. Perhaps anyone purchasing Twitter would tip that scale with anything they tried, but Elon here instead of walking back his decisions when they don’t work keeps doubling down.
Twitter doesn’t generate profits:
Twitter has been operating at a massive loss for years, failing to book an annual profit since 2019 (Mauer, 2022). For eight out of the last ten years, the company has posted a loss.
If anyone wants to nitpick over the 2/10 years when they reported profitability, consider the real value of getting in the black twice in company history in an environment where you’re gearing up for a an IPO. The long-term trend is clearly that this is not a viable business model.
Which is why I find it really hard to believe it’s not intentional even if I don’t understand the end game.
Delicately balanced is one thing. Making repeated decisions that my technophobe father could see are stupid is another.
I flipped from “wow he’s really mismanaging this” to “wow he’s trying to kill it” about 2 months ago, and have become nothing but more convinced since then.
No, I just think he’s very bad at reining in an extremely impulsive and volatile personality which leads to him making rash decisions. Also he is always wanting to make sweeping changes rather than gradual ones which may have worked with Tesla and Space but doesn’t suit Twitter.
And lastly, I don’t think he really cares that much either way - as others have said, he had to be forced to buy Twitter remember. He’s got this albatross around his neck which is losing him money every day. He probably resents it a bit, has probably nearly hit the truth that the only way you could make a social media company profitable is to make everyone pay - except for the fact that almost everyone then leaves.
I think he’s too much of a wild card for anyone to involve in their cunning plan. I mean regardless of politics would you recruit him for your masterplan?
All your points are reasonable, but I don’t think the masterplan requires anyone but him. He’s gone mask off as far as being ok with or even promoting hate speech of various flavors, and twitter was increasingly hostile to those sorts of folks until he took over. Unbanning Trump was damn near the first thing he did.
He strikes me absolutely as childish enough and rich enough that (incorporating also your “he doesn’t really want it” point) buying it, doing everything he can to run it into the ground, then folding or divesting it (who would want it now?) when he thinks he’s destroyed it as deeply as he can.
I’m almost entirely with you on this.
But the only thing causing mind on my doubt is how excessively impulsive and not-in-control-of-himself Enlo often seems. That’s the only thing that makes “this is just a serious of very stupid decisions made in the heat of the moment” even somewhat plausible.
Yeah, it’s very typical human to double down when things start to go wrong. It’s this kind of stubborn bloody minded mindset and a lot of luck that saved Tesla when it was balancing on a knife’s edge and same with SpaceX, he kept pushing his crazy ideas but they worked out in the last second. However, Twitter is a different beast entirely, it’s not going to be saved by manufacturing, it’s about something Elon Musk does poorly with: people.
I think people just don’t want to believe that the wealthy and powerful can be that stupid. But why not? Elon Musk was born into a wealthy family and then got super, super lucky during the .com boom. He can absolutely make stupid decisions.
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thankfully, he’s foreign-born so that last bit can’t actually happen (without tossing parts of the constitution out the window, anyway).
and call for his presidential run.
He fails on the “born in the US” hurdle, doesnt he? :p
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Being incompetent isnt a legal hurdle.
Lol good point!
Then he will be like “I need $100billion to develop this everything-app that will be made compulsory by the state” or something. And the government wil just give it to him.
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Elon didn’t say he would charge all the X/Twitter users. The media just made that up.
Good for Mastodon, though.
Elon didn’t say he would charge all the X/Twitter users.
What do you mean by that? He didn’t say he was definitely going to do so right now, but he proposed it with quite some degree of seriousness. I don’t intend to watch the whole video with Netanyahu to make sure what he said exactly, but all the articles I’ve seen are too detailed and explicit for it to be just an aside that the media blew out of proportion.
Seems like that’s what he said to me, a “monthly payment to use the platform”…am I reading it wrong?
Elon Musk says X, formerly known as Twitter, is considering having its users pay a “small monthly payment” to use the social media platform.
Musk did not elaborate on how much payment would be to use X, but said it would be a “small amount of money.”
Source: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/elon-musk-x-twitter-monthly-payment/
You’re telling me an industry that profits off viewership might occasionally put wrong information in a headline to get more attention?
But is it good or bad?!
X is not charging everyone.
They plan too, musk confirmed
It was from an interview with the PM of Israel, where Elon stated they will introduce “lower tier pricing” for premium. There is no mention of charging everyone to use X.
At 34:40
https://twitter.com/netanyahu/status/1703806204894498966?t=hoV3axpQWwWNmwQ8yPu65Q&s=19
