The traces of the Great Indian Mastodon Influx of 2019 (GIMI'19) are interesting to look through. In trying to find #Indian folks to follow here, I time and again come across people who came to Mastodon around Nov 2019 (when the Twitter political censorship issues surfaced), stayed around for a month or so, and then left (presumably back to where they came from, having made a symbolic gesture against the censorship).
But even that one month has left an impression here, lots of interesting links to follow, clever #desi jokes, good discussions, it feels like an archaeological discovery of an interesting and intellectual civilization - though of course this was barely a year ago.
It would be loads better if they'd stuck around - I feel a twinge of sadness every time I think "wow this is a cool account to follow", and then see the last post was somewhere in November 2019 - but I'm glad that the GIMI'19 happened at all. It left behind a good bulk of interesting content, and when I do find a live account that someone still uses, it feels like finding buried treasure!
@digital_carver A challenge in the Fediverse is still discoverability. It's a bit harder to find people.
@f3ew I sort of like that though, I get to slowly but organically discover people through interesting content they post that gets boosted, rather than from what's "trending" or from people gaming whatever the discoverability system looks for. This is like the old 90's/00's Internet, and it feels good to not be a target of an "intelligent" algorithm for once.
