TL:DR – Just some notes on the attrition that has taken place over the last few months since the first big exodus from Twitter to Mastodon.
I signed up for my first Mastodon account in August 2016, although mastodon.social reports that I joined in November 2019. Whatever. I didn’t do anything with it until the April of 2022 when rumours about Leon Umsk taking over Twitter were rife. They seemed to fade away until the November of that year at which point I took another look and became properly active as lots of people abandoned the musky place in favour of the tusky place.
I pulled in quite a lot of followers and followed a lot of people, primarily those I’d been following in the musky bird place. Four months later, a lot of the people who jumped across in November seem to have got bored. I’ve just taken a look at activity of the people I started following and have unfollowed a lot of the 900 or so that have been inactive for at least a month.
Of the near 600 people I am now following, 400 of them have been active within the last week. The remainder were active at some point in March. The ones that hadn’t been active after February are off my list. It feels like spring cleaning and perhaps a bit pointless, but it’s done. I also took the opportunity to unfollow the handful of people who hadn’t followed back. I feel it’s important that connections are mutual, although I’m not always as expedient at the followbacks as I should be, I must confess. Next thing on the agenda is to work through my followers (almost 1200 at the time of writing) and follow back the ones that I’ve yet to catch up with, promise…
If you would like to join me on Mastodon, I’m @[email protected] but if you click this link it will take you straight there via a sciencebase.com shortened URL. I wrote about how to use your own domain as a link shortener.