Medium’s Mastodon Server is Dead
I’m a nerd and I regularly fall into rabbit holes.
It’s what I do.
I obsess over nerdy things…
The latest of these obsessions is this account here on Medium, especially this account in relation to Medium’s involvement into the Fediverse (aka Mastodon for most of you).
You see, ever since Elon Musk took over Twitter I was hoping some of the serious players on the market would give the idea of the fedivers a serious push. Medium sounded like that’s what they wanted to do.
I never subscribed to the idea to make money through content. I’m just creating texts, photography and podcasts for *gasp* fun and see what I can learn in the process.
So I came here with the mission to finally give this medium thing a try but mainly to satisfy my curiosity. This is supposed to be a social network after all.
Until now I was merely an occasional reader but I guess Medium had shown me their paywall one too many times and so I thought “Heck, let’s do this and see if it is fun!”
Writing is fun. Always has been.
Coding a little to grab data and check some assumptions is fun too.
(That’s another thing I like doing)
Because, you see, for the 11 days I’m here, the me.dm Mastodon server was quiet like no other fediverse instance I’m on (and I’m on a few). Isn’t that crazy? Shouldn’t the crowd of amazing Medium writers be a huge draw? And so I was wondering…
- is it because I’m reading at the wrong time?
- is it because there are too few people?
- is it because medium users are just not here for the interaction?
The little script I wrote served one purpose: collect activity data on me.dm while I was sleeping. Because it is easy to do I also pulled the public profile directory to see the overall activity levels in comparison.
Here are a few data points:
If you take a look at me.dm/about then you see that this server has 2800 accounts.
However, of those 2800 “active” users… only 1535 configured their accounts as discoverable.
Hm. ok.
From these 1535 accounts…
- … 40% (619) never postet a thing.
- … 75% (1158) posted less than 10 messages.
- … 318 never bothered following anyone.
- … only 294 posted in the last 30 days anything at all.
With this data point in mind I looked at the local timeline. This is the place where all regular interactions become visible. You would see new posts as well as replies to others unless the author had changed the visibility.
Community generally shows in interactions. My theory was that Medium’s Mastodon server is quite poor on interaction and that people use it mainly to promote their content and little else.
Well, I was right.
Looking at the activity during past night it became quite clear that I’m not seeing a time zone effect.
It really is quiet.
On average this server sees 10 messages per hour and had a peak of 20 (4 of which were written by myself btw). That is nothing. I mean… this is 2800 allegedly “active” users… on Medium, which is… a community of — wait for it — WRITERS!
“Ok”, I hear you say, “this is because these users are *not* the writers. It is readers who pay for access!”.
Yeah, I thought that too.
However, the thing is: 76% of these messages exist purely to point to articles. They are not readers, those are posts of writers who like to promote their writing, often posts published on Medium (duh!).
I saw over this time 68 active users, they posted 129 messages, all shouting into the void…
