The thing about social networks
The Mastodon instance I’m on stopped working recently. It slowly came back but the next day it happened again. 503 error webpages would appear over and over. I believe there was some caching issue on one of the hosts and it was taking its time allowing all the different instances back online.
I have a backup account on another instance but rarely use it. I was able to merge my followers and bookmarks to this other account as soon as I had the chance. It was nice to be able to see my other account followers but noticed one thing, it wasn’t active. Perhaps everyone else was going through a similar thing as I was but I started noticing a mastodon drop in the past few weeks.
I keep seeing the same people post online every day. When I checked my settings for followers activity, some were active within a week. Not too bad but then I scrolled my list and some had their last post months ago. It made sense that I only saw the same people, around 10, post every day consistently.
I did notice in my feed that certain users were apologizing for not posting their normal amount because they were trying other social networks like Nostr and Bluesky. In recent news, Brazil got banned from X and many were flocking to Bluesky. Threads isn’t as popular with Brazilians as many family members easily connect there from Instagram. The point these individuals made was they wanted a separate network away from family and close friends. Reason why Bluesky which is similar to old Twitter was getting many new users. I’m wondering if it was the same thing for Nostr.
Perhaps Mastodon users are tiring and wanted to check out the other networks. I’m not sure but after my instance went down I lost interest in checking in and staying up to date with my feeds. I didn’t panic thinking about all the posts I was missing. I just assumed that these posts are lost in the cloud and perhaps one day the caching will catch up and fill my instance. But I won’t go back to read them, I don’t have time for that. It is sad to think of all the great posts I’ve missed because they have been lost or just got old. I may just need a break from the old Mastodon elephant and go touch grass before winter arrives. Or try a new social network.