I'm curious to know if the fediverse, or any social network, has a clear idea of its number of active human participants. Number of accounts is maybe useful to some degree as a gauge of interest (i.e, interested enough to make a bot, or check it out once) but 'like it enough to stay & play' seems like a much better thing to know about if it's possible. Maybe it isn't, that feels likely. Presumably there's many abandoned accounts, but I daresay many people also just like to be quiet & spectate.
@paralithode I wouldn't say there are many abandoned accounts. I'd say it's more likely that the vast majority of accounts are abandoned. Almost everyone I told about Mastodon signed up, tooted once, and disappeared
@audiodude mhm, I was thinking of both mastodon & twitter in that case–quite often I see barely used twitter accounts too, e.g the celeb twitter account that begins & ends "my agent said I should make an account, I don't get it though"
@paralithode Diaspora has a few million accounts in total of which about 600000 are active.
@lieselotte what's the definition of 'active' in that case? does everyone on diaspora have to be a human?
@paralithode No. It's users that have logged in within the last month, so bots included 🤥
@lieselotte for myself I would ideally like a more nuanced measurement, that somehow reduced the impact of bots...maybe reacting to others' posts?? but I acknowledge that it might be hard to do! I wonder how many of the twitter 15mil+, or even the weibo 300mil+(!!) are humans contributing to community?
@paralithode for that in guess you'd need each instance to track logins and have some sort of standardised policy for determining what an active user is; and then report that in a way that a bot can grab and consolidate across the fediverse.