Catching up with some of the news coming out of the Atmosphere conference.

[vvv@mastodontech.de]

@stefan especially interesting: the daily follows have declined from 8 million a year ago to under 2 million now (a 75% drop). Even with declining user numbers there still could be a lot of user circulation (old ones leaving, new ones signing up), but then the follows would be more stable on higher levels.
Now it looks like they have a declining longtime user base without getting many new ones.

[monkeyben@mastodon.sdf.org]

@stefan

And more cats! Don't forget the cats!

[openrisk@mastodon.social]

@stefan @alienghic anecdotally Instagram and TikTok seem now the main "mainstream" platforms. When somebody is scrolling on a mobile in public it's invariably one of these. I have no personal experience with either, and no objective numbers, so... . But both Bluesky and the fediverse are very political for the "average" person.

[aaronmccollum@fosstodon.org]

@stefan This is a cool site. Looking more closely at the daily metrics over the past year, it seems like it's flattening out. This makes sense, because I think a year+ ago, it was newer and people were still making the move over and trying it out. The growth they had at the start was never going to remain. To echo somewhat the points made in a few other comments here, that's probably a good thing.

[botvolution@mastodon.sdf.org]

@stefan
starter packs is a terrible terrible idea. it leads to follow/follower lists in their tens of thousands to zero purpose.

[stefan@stefanbohacek.online]

@botvolution Well they'll be pretty restricted, from what I've read, e.g. you'll only be able to add people to them who you follow, they'll be limited in size, you'll be notified when you get added, with an option to remove yourself, and you can opt out from being added altogether.

You'll probably be able to filter out posts that mention or link to them, I'd imagine. (Eg. filter out posts that contain a portion of the URL, if it includes something like "/collection/").

Seems like you can avoid this feature altogether as if it didn't exist at all.

[stefan@stefanbohacek.online]

@aaronmccollum Yes, the chart itself is nothing unusual.

To me, the interesting part is, a year ago they closed a $100 million funding round, which they just recently disclosed. And their numbers have been dropping the whole year.

Can you imagine what we could do with $100 million dollars?

[stefan@stefanbohacek.online]

@vvv Yes, and that's a year since they closed a $100 million funding round, which they just recently disclosed.

Bluesky announces $100M Series B after CEO transition | TechCrunch

The additional funds have been used to scale Bluesky's team, while the company continues to develop Bluesky's app and the underlying ATProto that powers it.

TechCrunch (techcrunch.com)

Doesn't seem like the money did much to help them.

[aaronmccollum@fosstodon.org]

@stefan We could buy a few dump trucks full of pizza.

[stefan@stefanbohacek.online]

@aaronmccollum We have got to figure out how to get VCs interested in this place. There has to be a way.

[botvolution@mastodon.sdf.org]

@stefan
I remain deeply unconvinced of either their utility or any supposed safeguards.

I can't imagine the usual denizens of dotsocial carefully monitoring their notifs for this sort of activity.

We'll see, I suppose.

[jaredwhite@indieweb.social]

@stefan @aaronmccollum Nooooooooo

[aaronmccollum@fosstodon.org]

@stefan With an influx of cash comes a curse. They'll want that money back and more in some form or fashion.

But I will sell out for pizza.

[stefan@stefanbohacek.online]

@botvolution Well I think many of the people who'd want to opt out already did, since this is going to be tied to the existing "Feature profile and posts in discovery algorithms" setting.
https://blog.joinmastodon.org/2025/10/our-ideas-about-packs/

I think it's going to be much of a non-event when they're rolled out, like with quotes. Those have been out for a while, and I don't think they have become a problem?

[stefan@stefanbohacek.online]

@aaronmccollum Yeah, plus you can donate some of the food, so it would be all for a good cause.

[botvolution@mastodon.sdf.org]

@stefan
I think, in general, I have a more cynical and pessimistic world view! So I incline towards the negative, whereas you are rather the opposite I think!

It's hard for me to judge about newer features of Mastodon, because I'm on an instance that is many versions behind (in fact, currently an unsupported version).

My antipathy to starter packs & the whole "public lists" thing is rooted in seeing how it has played out at Bluesky. It is true, tbf, that the userbases are rather different.

[stefan@stefanbohacek.online]

@botvolution Ah, I might be missing some context. I have only started occasionally checking out Bluesky recently, to get a better sense of the site and its community, but I'm definitely not very "tapped into it".

But yes, I do tend to be optimistic about features being rolled out. Even the new redesign, Mastodon's team has received some pushback, and they're actually listening.

It's just nice that here the developers and server admins are only accountable to their communities.

We may not agree with all of their decisions, but I guess this is why I tend to trust the people here. I know they don't typically have a hidden agenda, and can be influenced to change their mind.

[zenmorph@indieweb.social]

@stefan AI generated content. The litter of the digital world.

[stefan@stefanbohacek.online]

@zenmorph Well in this case it's just going to be used to create custom feeds. But I don't think more AI features are too far behind. We'll see!

[rycochet@furs.social]

@stefan Hey, they're totally giving the users what they want, it's just that all those users are the crypto/AI bros on the dev team who spend most of their time gushing about vibe coding and picking fights with anyone who calls them out.