My current avatar is a photo of me (a very old one), but I'm pretty cautious about posting images of myself that could be used to identify me (one reason I'm sceptical of dating sites).
I started using the net in the late 1990s, mainly as an activist tool, and it's always blown my mind that people have been routinely living their private lives in public since about the mid-noughties. Clearly they haven't seen;
https://weliveinpublicthemovie.com/
(2/2)
"That you shouldn’t post too freely on social media has become — or returned to — conventional wisdom: If you’re posting publicly, your family might see it, your boss might see it, and, every once in a while, a few million strangers might see it as well."
#JohnHerrman, 2025
https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/7-reasons-to-think-social-media-has-peaked.html
It shouldn't surprise anyone that "Danyl Strype" isn't my birth name, and I've always been cautious about sharing info online that would make me too easy to identify.
(1/2)
My current avatar is a photo of me (a very old one), but I'm pretty cautious about posting images of myself that could be used to identify me (one reason I'm sceptical of dating sites).
I started using the net in the late 1990s, mainly as an activist tool, and it's always blown my mind that people have been routinely living their private lives in public since about the mid-noughties. Clearly they haven't seen;
https://weliveinpublicthemovie.com/
(2/2)
"One of Törnberg’s most interesting findings in the ANES data... is that 'most platforms have moved toward Republican users', with Twitter’s swing being the most pronounced, leading to a partisan 'reconfiguraton' with 'Republican users shifting from ideologically homogeneous venues such as TruthSocial into mainstream platforms such as Twitter/X' while 'Democrats have retreated toward emerging, smaller networks such as Bluesky, Mastodon, and Threads'.”
#JohnHerrman, 2025
https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/7-reasons-to-think-social-media-has-peaked.html
Just as likely, people set up Mastodon accounts in a fit of pique, and never really use them.
Implying there is nothing that is trying to engage with them.
Personally, I think the main problem is a poorly understood and mostly unexpressed issue with the way fedi treats domains. Most people will simply think your stuff is broken if the "Mastodon" randomly forgets who they are; when people click on links, they end up on foreign servers (emblazoning "Mastodon" logos) and they forget to check that the domain in the address bar has changed. This even happens when people sign up with apps.
ActivityPub wants to be a new decen Internet-wide protocol that people use directly. But it doesn't want to tick all the technical boxes that make such protocols user-friendly. "Good enough for techies who will hop over the gaps" is evidence that the designers lacked engineering savvy.
But active account numbers in the fediverse, and more importantly overall server numbers, continue to be much higher than pre-2024.
Conversely, a case could be made that there are significant losses being masked by diehard users opening multiple accounts for alternate modes like Lemmy, Pixelfed and Peertube. (IIRC, someone was writing about this being a trend among fedi users.)
