Good Follows
One of the rough areas of Mastodon is discovering whom to follow. For me, it is mainly by finding references in other posts I am already following. I assume that as Mastodon matures, the process will become easier, but for now, it is a somewhat tedious, organic process. Here are the accounts I am following so far:
ThomHartmann@ThomHartmann@mstdn.social
MichelangeloSignorile@msignorile@mstdn.social
BrandiBuchman@Brandi_Buchman@mstdn.social
PaulKrugman@pkrugman@mastodon.online
MarkSumner@Devilstower@mstdn.social
TheIntercept@theintercept@journa.host
TheConversation U.S.@TheConversationUS@newsie.social
KurtEichenwald @kurteichenwald@mastodon.cloud
EmilyHopkins@emilyhopkins@newsie.social
CharlesOrnstein@charlesornstein@newsie.social
JeffTiedrich@jefftiedrich@mastodon.social
RexChapman@rexchapman@sfba.social
KathyGriffin@kathygriffin@mstdn.social
ProPublica@ProPublica@newsie.social
MeidasTouch@MeidasTouch@mstdn.social
If you have found other good follows, please post them in the comments.
Instance growth
I started doing some casual tracking of growth on various instances. As of Dec 30, here are the instances with over 30K accounts, excluding those that allow spam and don’t require warnings for porn:
| Accounts | Statuses | |
| mastodon.social | 920823 | 47082571 |
| mstdn.jp | 303688 | 63217731 |
| mas.to | 148113 | 2769573 |
| mastodon.lol | 76515 | 1358074 |
| universeodon.com | 68825 | 750570 |
| mastodonapp.uk | 67753 | 831559 |
| techhub.social | 67687 | 249670 |
| masto.ai | 64167 | 551150 |
| mastodon.uno | 63505 | 786354 |
| c.im | 61765 | 881823 |
| fosstodon.org | 52403 | 1577055 |
| mstdn.party | 47885 | 653740 |
| sfba.social | 36758 | 485962 |
| ohai.social | 36557 | 344583 |
| home.social | 36123 | 348101 |
| troet.cafe | 35842 | 1425104 |
| mastodon.nl | 34029 | 445879 |
| m.cmx.im | 35152 | 3366902 |
| mindly.social | 33592 | 398738 |
| mstdn.ca | 32183 | 451858 |
The number of accounts on these servers is up 5% in less than one week, and that is despite 2 of the biggest ones (mastodon.social and mastodon.lol) not accepting any new accounts. Today there are 7,052,649 accounts on Mastodon “fediverse” instances.
Limitations
Mark Elias mentioned these shortcomings with Mastodon today:
The two great limiting factors of Mastodon are:
1. Difficulty in finding and cultivating networks. It is just much harder to find people you want to follow and interact with here.
2. The inability to comment and reblog a post. I understand the arguments pro and con, but the reality remains that this omission will limit Mastodon's growth. It is why Twitter gave in after years of us copying, pasting and putting RT before the original post.
This will grate on some old-school Mastians, but the Fediverse (mostly Mastodon) is still lacking a certain sharing energy. And the blame for that is the decision to not support quoted posts. It was made years ago, based on what was then mostly an anything goes version of Twitter. Small improvements in moderation changed much of that. And moderation is supposed to be the stock-in-trade here.
And what about Truth Social?
It is located at truthsocial.com. That site uses the Mastodon open-source code, although initially Trump and Nunes lied about that. The “fediverse“ is aware of that instance. That is indicated at instances.social/…
But note that Truthsocial.com has no connections with the fediverse, which is surely as it should be, so ay truthsocial.com accounts are not included in the Mastodon total. But that also means the account statistics are not displayed. At one point, it is claimed there were over 2 million accounts with a waiting list so the total of accounts is surely well above 2 million. But without any connections to the rest of society, it is unlikely very many of those accounts are active. One notes that the DWAC stock, which is at the heart of this particular Trump grift, continues to drift lower, trading today under $15, making it unlikely that Truth Social will ever be purchased for any significant price.