Post · bonfire.cafe

I know lots of folks are talking about Monthly Active Users when it comes to health of the Fediverse.

We use that to compare social medias and even ourselves, a social network, to each other.

I argue we should be focused on user engagement. I know LinkedIn has "impressions", but idk what that means.

So I wonder if there's a good way to generate this. Someone posting is the highest, commenting, subscribing, liking, disliking, and follow on down. I guess that would be a statistical model? But with diminishing returns. One SUPER ACTIVE ANNOYING poster does not a network make, but "media" it does.

I don't have a clue how this would work statistically. But I theorize, that while we're smaller MAU, our user engagement is significantly higher when population size is accounted for.

Is there any data anyone knows of to back this up or disapprove it? I'm pro small.social though, so maybe I'm wrong. Any data scientists in the Fediverse? :-D #data #dataIsBeautiful #fedi #fediverse #science

http://small.social

#dataIsBeautiful #fedi #data #science #fediverse

Johanna, CanCon variety

@johannab@cosocial.ca · 3 hours ago

@ozoned for all that my last couple of years of education have involved some training-wheel level Data Science and Research Methods class work, I’m not sure this is a thing anyone has worked out. I feel like it COULD be done and I can imagine the shape of it, but it would involve rethinking what we consider a metric at a very fundamental level.

With social “media”, the subject of all the metrics we have is NOT the person … it’s the product, the individual units of “content”.

Johanna, CanCon variety

@johannab@cosocial.ca · 3 hours ago

@ozoned An “influencer” is not a person, and not an account. It’s an aggregation of discrete content items, valued by a rolling statistical window of the most recent ratings of those items, as delivered by an audience.

And there’s really a horrid behavioural feedback loop to that, and one I think many of us here wanted to escape.

So we can’t measure things in the same way AT ALL, unless we just want to replicate what we are here to avoid.

Johanna, CanCon variety

@johannab@cosocial.ca · 3 hours ago

@ozoned

I think what we need is a serious systems design researcher, someone who can dig up and understand the fundamentals of network theory and of the architectures we once explored but have abandoned, or are slowly and haphazardly reinventing by bumbling around trying to define what we’re not.

That also has to be someone who understood the world before Canter & Siegel ever happened, because that decision to intrude on everyone’s networking for personal profit set this up.

Johanna, CanCon variety

@johannab@cosocial.ca · 3 hours ago

@ozoned

I don’t know if anyone ever thought to develop data or a systems map for Usenet, but pre-1994 NNTP network statistics is the closest analogy I could imagine to what we have now.

But we would need a methodology to map the open social web considering each person to be their own node, and drawing out the progress of their connections to other nodes in that rolling window.

1+ more replies

ozoned

@ozoned@btfree.social · 3 hours ago

@johannab@cosocial.ca this is already FAR deeper than my knowledge on the field. :-D. Sounds like numerous research papers to be had for anyone willing. Lol. NOT me though. Not my forte. 😄

1 more replies

ozoned

@ozoned@btfree.social · 3 hours ago

@johannab@cosocial.ca exactly! We're measuring ourselves wrong. MAU is a meaningless statistics, when my site will probably only ever get me. But I'm still a piece of the conversation to Mastodon.social though I am NEVER one of their monthly active users.