@mathlover general adoption of decentralized software without a specific catalyst in the last week or two seems almost certainly unrelated. If that were the case the surge would have happened over the time span of a single week.

@freemo Fair point. It's probably just a reaction to the Twitter bans.

@allison Makes sense. I knew they all banned trump, had no idea they were mass purging users as well. I wonder what their criteria for purging them happens to be, most of the people winding up here have been well behaved so far as far as I've seen.

I also wonder how many people who are coming here are people who have been actually banned from other social media vs people who just see the increase in censorship and are bailing ship on the principal of it.

@freemo @allison anyone who looks vaguely republican.
they've been banning anons with barely any posts, they banned one of the babbit's relatives who had only 4 tweets, people with barely any followers..

@icedquinn

Oh wow if that is really the case that is scary and disgusting. I am no fan of republicans or democrats, but I would never ban someone simply for sharing those political ideas.

@allison

@freemo @allison like they literally had zero fucking idea of the landscape they were on. AWS? fucking seriously?

@freemo @icedquinn @allison I'm not being hyperbolic here, there's a lot of information warfare going on right now. You might be sure you have recent backups and prepare for more surges.

@Demosthenes

We backup regularly and automatically and keep multiple instances of our backups in different geographic locations and with different providers.

@icedquinn @allison

@swiley Thank you, that is very reassuring to hear. I feel the same way. Hope you have a wonderful time here. I am the administrator of this instance and feel free to reach out to chat anytime.

@swiley @freemo yes blocking a whole instance due to 1 person is to me rather extreme, the power is there but should be used with discretion.

@joe Maybe, but if parlor users were have as obnoxious as Gab users (I dont really know as I never went to Parlor) I would think there would be a lot more rudeness going around and I am not seeing a whole lot of that right now.

@freemo @joe gab caught runoff from trumpites getting banned the earlier waves. parlEr has been pushed more by content creators IIRC.

but they did not know their enemy and so they were consumed.

@icedquinn @freemo When someone first told me about Parler I knew it wasn't going to last, but I didn't realize how quickly it would go down

People still behave naively despite getting burnt again and again

@joe @freemo they are not students of history and they were not cynical. two traits which make for worthy opponents.

@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.

@FailForward

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.

@biomedmax