Notices by Chris Trottier (atomicpoet@mastodon.social), page 8

9 million Mastodon accounts is extremely likely this month.

According to my math, an average of 1,115 new accounts per hour over the next 10 days would be needed to reach this milestone.

During the last hour, 1,780 new Mastodon accounts were made.

It was just a couple of weeks ago that the 8 millionth Mastodon account was made.

And already, we have 8,713,949 accounts.

This is incredibly fast growth.

Mastodon doesn't actually represent the actual size of the Fediverse.

There's ~20,000 nodes on the Fediverse. Mastodon instances are about 12,000 nodes.

That means 8,000 nodes are NOT running Mastodon.

This means that it's entirely possible for the Fediverse to already exceed 10 million accounts.

It's also entirely feasible that by Dec 2023, there will be 20 million Mastodon accounts.

Consider this: you'd need 1,344 new account registrations per hour to achieve this milestone.

For the past 3 months, we've exceeded this average.

One further food for thought: once Tumblr and Flickr join the Fediverse, the full network effect of the Fediverse will surpass Twitter.

Tumblr: 472 million accounts
Flickr: 65 million accounts

And wait -- the potential network effect gets spicier!

Are you sitting down? Here goes!

44% of all websites that exist right now run on WordPress.

Right now, connecting a WordPress site to the Fediverse is just a matter of installing this plug-in.

If just a fraction of WordPress sites connect to ActivityPub, then the network effect of the Fediverse will eclipse Big Social.

https://wordpress.org/plugins/activitypub/

No, Mark Zuckerberg is not "better" than Elon Musk -- he's worse.

Elon Musk mildly inconveniences all of you by acting like a colossal manbaby.

However, Mark Zuckerberg deliberately acquired and funded mind-reading tech so he could monetize your private thoughts.

https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/2019/8/5/20750259/facebook-ai-mind-reading-brain-computer-interface

Meta continues to make AI tech that "reads" your brain waves.

This is trumpeted as a big step forward in helping nonverbal people communicate. And I don't want to denigrate this obvious need.

But knowing everything we know about Facebook, why would we trust them as custodians of this tech? https://www.newscientist.com/article/2335961-meta-ai-can-tell-which-words-you-hear-by-reading-your-brainwaves/

Meta actually demoed this mind-reading tech, which they planned on integrating with their smart glasses.

Now with all the terrible privacy abuses and surveillance capitalism that Mark Zuckerberg has built into Meta, this is downright evil. https://www.cnbc.com/2021/03/18/facebook-shows-off-mind-reading-technology.html

Whenever someone indicates that Mark Zuckerberg is in any way trustworthy, I come back to this famous conversation he had while he was a student at Harvard.

TL;DR: "They 'trust me'. Dumb fucks."

This is a big development.

Twitter has just removed the ability to see how a tweet is posted.

What this also means is that it's harder to know which app is being used to post to Twitter.

Another spike incoming!

Looks like today's spike is the largest in a long time -- and this is why we're all experiencing lots of slowness and performance issues.

Even my small instances are being affected.

Looks like this could be a sustained spike.

5,000+ new accounts are being registered hourly

If trends remain as they are, we may break 9 million Mastodon accounts this week.

Continuing too monitor sign-ups, we not only see that 5,000+ hourly sign-ups persist, but also that it is *entirely* feasible that Mastodon could break 350,000 account sign-ups this week.

If that happens, we may break 9 million accounts this week -- and we'll definitely break that within the month.

Because people are confused about what Mastodon is in relation to the Fediverse:

1. Fediverse: collection of protocols, software, and instances that make up a federated collection of de-centralized social media

2. Mastodon: software that allows you to connect and interact with the Fediverse

3. Instances: individual websites and servers that run software—sometimes Mastodon, sometimes not, that connects to the Fediverse

Confusingly, some instances call themselves "Mastodon".

Automattic is one of the most important companies on the Internet.

They make Tumblr, WooCommerce, Akismet, LongReads, WordPress—among others.

WordPress alone powers ~44% of the world's websites.

More interesting: despite being such a large, dominant company, few people hate Automattic.

Why is this? 🧵

For those out of the loop:

Twitter's closing its offices as employees quit in droves. It actually might now exist next month.

There's now yet another #TwitterMigration as people create new account on Mastodon. https://www.cbc.ca/news/business/twitter-offices-closed-1.6655881

Here's how Twitter is trending right at this moment.

This is for real. People are finally done with Twitter.

If you want to know how big the current #TwitterMigration is to Mastodon, look at this current chart.

I have never seen anything this massive.