What configuration do #Mastodon accounts use? Yesterday, I shared a small sample size from a German NGOs. Tonight, I conducted a local analysis by obtaining all the Mastodon accounts known by #Wikidata and analysing them. This analysis covers a total of 6,039 accounts. From organisations to people. The only filter is that they have been active in the last year.
79% have discoverability on an active account (4,765/6,039).
- 34% are indexable (2,026/6,039).
- 35% have at least one verified link (2,139/6,039).
- 32% have at least one attached tweet.

These numbers are similar to those of the other lists. In my humble opinion, @MastodonEngineering has a configuration 'problem' for accounts interested in maximising their reach. Perhaps it is a UX problem because users are accustomed to this being the default, or maybe it's because more configuration features have been added and are all off by default. The "easiest" solution would probably be a toggle in the Mastodon settings labelled "I want to maximise my reach", which would activate features and provide prompts indicating that accounts with a description, verified fields or attached toots are more likely to be followed.

In the meantime, I have added this to the German-only Mastodon List tool, and I have built a German web tool for checking your account: https://mastodon-account-checker.playground.54gradsoftware.de/.
(If Anyone is really interested in This tool being multilingual, I'm always happy to take PRs.

Limitations: I used multiple Mastodon servers to get the result faster. This could affect the number. I'm also fairly sure that the verified link is not 100% accurate, as I sometimes get false negatives with my script.

I was inspired by this #2024 post by @stefan : https://stefanbohacek.com/blog/verification-in-the-fediverse/.

If anyone is interested in the 29 MB JSON file containing all the data, please contact me.