@users @freemo So QOTO has 13.5+k accounts. Some 100+ come every week.
I hang around here since about a month and I wonder where are all these people(?) Local timeline is fairly slow for the amount of users. Even if just 10% of all the accounts were somewhat chatty people (~1500?), we should see way more chatter all around. What is then going on here?
Also, I am curious what are those numbers of users dropping every now and then in the plot? Are these some automatic deletes? I am just curious.
Finally, I also wonder about all this chatter about banning/suspending (whatever terminology is technically correct) qoto.org. According to local timeline, these are pretty innocuous toots. So what are those thousands of accounts which do not post publicly doing?
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> I hang around here since about a month and I wonder where are all these people(?) Local timeline is fairly slow for the amount of users. Even if just 10% of all the accounts were somewhat chatty people (~1500?), we should see way more chatter all around. What is then going on here?
A combination of factors there, some signup for accounts and never speak (perhaps they just want to look around), others post unlisted, others are spam accounts that wind up being suspended.
A more useful number is to look at the active users (people who are posting or commenting in some form). I believe its around 1.5K or something like that. I think that number is anyone who posted or was active in the last month.
> Also, I am curious what are those numbers of users dropping every now and then in the plot? Are these some automatic deletes? I am just curious.
Spammers. Recently one of our mods has went on a crusade to remove all old accounts going back a few years that were spammers that got through the cracks. Mostly accounts that were created, never posts, and have spam and links in their descriptions. Over the course of a few weeks, mostly in bursts, he has removed many hundred such accounts. Thats why you see big dips in certain places.
We also remove spammers more regularly as we catch them, more often the accounts that post spam rather than just have it as a description. so you will see smaller dips take place periodically as we go through new users and try to find any spammers that are more recent.
> Finally, I also wonder about all this chatter about banning/suspending (whatever terminology is technically correct) qoto.org. According to local timeline, these are pretty innocuous toots. So what are those thousands of accounts which do not post publicly doing?
This sort of chatter is normal and common for almost any instance, though QOTO we tend to address it head on and share such incidents so our user base tends to be more aware of it is all.
Generally this comes from a very small group of instances that have a very long list of instances they block and pretty much block everyone and everything. Most of it isnt a block suggested because of QOTO content but actually because we allow our users to view an uncensored version of the fediverse. There is a movement amongst this small minority of servers to effectively block any server that doesnt themselves block (and censor its content from our users) bad servers. But this pattern cascades out so if you federate with a server that federates with a server that federates with a server that is a bad apple they will demand you get blocked by proxy. A sort of "punishment" for not censoring I guess. The end result of that is they basically demand you as a server censor 90% of the fediverse lest be blocked by them.
Overall its such a small number of servers, and their demands so excessive, that no one tends to really care much about them at this point. Despite this I still make it a point to comment on such threads and share them when I see them so our community is aware of it.
@freemo
Thanks a lot for your explanations. Just out of curiosity, do you generate somewhere a plot of active users too?
Regarding the suspensions, yes I noticed on those conversations that it's sometimes very ideological. Yet, they sometimes speak about users harassing others, i just wondered how often does that happen.
Technically speaking I wonder about instance merveilles.town. This seems to be a community of makers there. They list qoto.org as suspended, which they explain means that any interaction with users from qoto is impossible. Yet I see toots from such users and I am able to check those people's timelines. So is the suspension somehow unidirectional? If I for instance send a message to such an account, will it arrive?
Also I am curious, why specifically this suspension happened?
I am just trying to make sense of this space.
> Regarding the suspensions, yes I noticed on those conversations that it’s sometimes very ideological. Yet, they sometimes speak about users harassing others, i just wondered how often does that happen.
Do you have an example of someone complaining of harassment? We tend to take that very seriously and I can only think of maybe half a dozen such incidents. In all cases though it was resolved, its pretty rare.
One of our rules to help protect others from harassment that we are very strict on is the whole "no ban evasion" rule. If a user mutes you or blocks you and we find out you intentionally open an account somewhere (QOTO or anywhere else) to avoid it and harass someone then we are not going to let you stay on QOTO. So there shouldnt really be any outstanding instances of harassment unless a moderator was simply never told about it.
> Technically speaking I wonder about instance merveilles.town. This seems to be a community of makers there. They list qoto.org as suspended, which they explain means that any interaction with users from qoto is impossible. Yet I see toots from such users and I am able to check those people’s timelines. So is the suspension somehow unidirectional? If I for instance send a message to such an account, will it arrive?
Are you sure it is a suspension and not a silence? The way you describe it it sounds more like they silenced QOTO which is unidirectional and still allows users from that instance to follow QOTO users, they just wont see their content until they do.
> Also I am curious, why specifically this suspension happened?
This is the first im hearing about that particular instance suspending us. I try to reach out to any instance that does and ask them what issues they have and see if its something I can resolve. So I usually remember instances where that is a problem. I will try to reach out them.
To me it says a lot about an instance if they suspended us and I never even heard there was a problem. If an instance suspends another without reaching out to the moderators to try to get a concern resolved or even creating a single report on an incident somewhere, well not sure how they expect us to be aware of problems. Says a lot of an instance will just skip right to suspending another without at least reporting first.
@freemo @users Thanks a lot for your response, I really appreciate. Am learning all the time...
As for merveilles.town, I read about qoto.org suspended from the side of merveilles.town at their about page: https://merveilles.town/about/more They really block a lot. Why I am curious is that I understand when some very political, or gender minority community protects itself, but it does not seem to be the case here, so I wonder what was the reason.
I have no particular problem or interest in this specific case. I am only crawling Fediverse and reading public conversations and instances' timelines and I am trying to grok the dynamics of this space. Sometimes the issues are technical and I can read the docs, sometimes (like in this case) it's more about humans, so I need to ask. I am just a curious soul exploring.
Since I've never seen a single report from them I cant say.
Based on their block list it is most likely because we dont censor our users access to fediverse content (you as a user can view al users on the fediverse and we wont censor that, though we do have rules about what you can post).It looks lie they are one of those servers I mentioned already that will block any server that doesnt employ the list of censorship targets they demand, which is likely everyone else on that block list. That is the list a lot of these "block everyone who doesnt block what we block" tends to have, though some more and some less and qoto is only rarely on it,
@FailForward @freemo @users
I wouldn't know but would be an interested as well.