15:01

The guardian titles Mastodon gained 70,000 users after Musk’s Twitter takeover. Now, this headline summarizes everything in one sentence, that’s wrong with social media, when it comes to numbers.

• 70k may sound a lot in absolute numbers, but is actually just a drop in the ocean compaired to Twitter’s 450 million daily users.
• Did those 70k users actually move from Twitter to Mastodon, burning bridges in the process, or are they now on both platforms?
• Who are those 70k users? Are they people that do follow or are they people that have followers? Are they posters or lurkers?

In other words: how does the loss of these 70k users harm Twitter and benefit Mastodon? Counting users, ratings, likes, stars, whatever is a completely pointless metric to measure relevance, but it is all, social media is about.