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#QOTO is seeing a pretty big spike in new user signups this last week. Anyone know whats going on and what is causing the exodus this time? Is this all because all the social media decided to ban trump maybe? It is the only event of consequence I know of.
@freemo I contributed to that spike. I'm a new member and that's my new toot (hi! 😀 ). I believe it has to do with ban on Trump and Parler. Personally I have been gradually leaving other social media for a long time now. There is no particular reason why I registered here at today (instead of yesterday or a week from now) but I guess the ban of the potus contributed a little.
@biomedmax Makes sense. Seems that is the going consensus. I am the local admin here, feel free to reach out to chat anytime and hope you enjoy yourself here.
@freemo @biomedmax I'd go out on a limb and propose that a part of the uptick might be a result of various New Year's resolutions of people, which just delayed till the first working week after the holidays 😉 .
Seriously, I signed up last week and it was a completely random act. Except for LinkedIn, I never had absolutely any social media account before (so no migration here - if we don't count stuff like stackoverflow as a social network). From this experience I learned one thing: joining Mastodon is an extremely confusing experience even for a technically skilled individual.
Given the complexity of joining this community, I would say that if there shall be any uptick in registrations, it would be perhaps on `mastdon.social` which is the easiest to discover. Otherwise the whole concept of 1) "find your community" and then 2) "participate everywhere" (as vaguely advertised on `joinmastodon.org`) has a potential to blow up skulls of non-technical people.
Just consider how does it look like from a layman's perspective (say an average bloke used to use Twitter/Parler/FB/... user): what does opening an account on an obscure website called `QOTO.org` (what the heck is that even?!) have to do with using a Twitter-like platform called Mastodon which one should do via some obscure a clumsy app like Tusky?
I.e., all this is not for an average person out there. Attention span of an average human being these days is like 5 minutes at best. Joining Mastodon network and knowing what you are doing along the way needs at least 15 minutes, in reality perhaps an hour or so.
That is possible but the timing seems a bit too on the nose. There was no sign of an increase just following new years. the first sign of increase started 4 days ago but the increase was not linear with numbers increasing by a weak-exponential curve since then.
So I have concluded it is due to recent social media censorship and banning. The first indication of increase was the day Trump was banned from twitter which is also when republicans, or at least trump supporters started to get banned, and in the day or two that followed these bannings increased along with more social media joining in.
It seems almost certain that must be the cause unless there was a similar provocative event with the exact same timeline.
