•  Atemu   ( @Atemu@lemmy.ml ) 
    80•1 year ago

    What a terrible graph. That “huge” spike is a mere 0.5% increase. That might as well be noise.

    Don’t believe any graph whose y-axis starts at any value but 0 people.

    •  jsdz   ( @jsdz@lemmy.ml ) 
      28•1 year ago

      Don’t believe any graph whose y-axis starts at any value but 0 people.

      This one is pretty bad but that is definitely not the right lesson to take from it. The one thing it does show us is that approximately 20k extra new users suddenly showed up compared to the trend, and that would be much more difficult to see if the relevant axis did start at zero. The bigger problem is that it shows too short a time span. It’s not clear how unusual this event was, or if it happens every week.

      The other weird thing is that bottom-right axis does start at zero for some reason. I’m guessing it might somehow be trying to indicate “toots” specifically made by those new users? But that’s not how it’s labelled and it seems unlikely they could have that data.

    •  Kichae   ( @Kichae@kbin.social ) 
      10•1 year ago

      There’s nothing wrong with graphs whose y axies don’t start at zero. They can be used to misdirect people, but if you’re capable of actually seeing the numbers in the axes and doing a little bit of thought, they tell you exactly what one that starts at zero does.

      Plus, the opaque spike is shown on the secondary y axis, which does start at 0. It’s the translucent layer that’s mapped to the primary axis.

      •  Atemu   ( @Atemu@lemmy.ml ) 
        1•1 year ago

        I can’t remember the last time I saw a graph starting at a non-zero value where it showed anything other than noise whereas they almost always skew my initial impression of the data. If there’s no point in doing it but a major downside, I see no point in having them for any reason other than to mislead people.

    •  Dark Arc   ( @Dark_Arc@social.packetloss.gg ) English
      5•1 year ago

      This is a bad take in this case. This graph is of total population, not if signups. It effectively is zeroed.

      Sure it’s a very small increase relative to the total but relative to recent history this is very significant.

      Edit: the bigger issue from a data interpretation perspective is the date range sampled is small.

      •  Rob Bos   ( @rbos@lemmy.ca ) 
        3•1 year ago

        Yeah, a couple days of temporary spike does not a wave make.

        Mastodon (and the Fediverse) tends to see “scalloped” growth: big increases, followed by gradual declines. Every time Musk does something dumb, you see days or weeks of increased signups. Then the new users fall off, and they become inactive. Usually, it stabilizes a little higher than the last wave.

        The waves come in, and the tide rises. The weather passes over, but the climate stays stable (or increases).

        If Twitter collapses, then the tsunami arrives. :P

    •  Queen HawlSera   ( @HawlSera@lemm.ee ) English
      5•1 year ago

      Yeah I’m tired of having to look up something, only to find that I have to stop Google from trying to log back into my banned Reddit account.

      It’s amazing I’ve been on Lemmy for months now and I’ve yet to be banned from anything on it, it’s almost like not having normies modding out of a desire to solely Power Trip is good for business

    •  be_excellent_to_each_other   ( @be_excellent_to_each_other@kbin.social ) 
      20•1 year ago

      Thanks for posting this. It’s hard not to become the “but muh firefish” guy every time a thread like this pops up.

      Solves nearly every complaint I’ve seen about the Mastodon interface, has features I haven’t even seen folks ask for (I like the “antennas” feature a lot), federated with Mastodon, and will guide you through importing everyone you follow or who follows you - literally migrating your Mastodon account over in just a couple clicks.

      I’m not anti-Mastodon whatsoever, but for the folks who find it klunky, Firefish is the answer for sure.

      •  Kichae   ( @Kichae@kbin.social ) 
        13•1 year ago

        I like the “antennas” feature a lot

        For the uninitiated, Firefish’s antennae are saved searches, where you can specify lists of keywords and users and come back to them over and over again. It’s similar to Mastodon’s hashtag follow feature, only more flexible. Though, IIRC, it doesn’t add the search results to your home feed; it keeps them separate, and undiluted.

        From an administrator’s point of view, Firefish’s Recommended timeline is super cool, and is similar to Akkoma’s ‘bubble’ feature. It lets you specify a list of other federated servers to display posts from, creating a kind of “super-local” timeline. It’s the kind of thing I’d love to see in Lemmy and kbin.

    •  Izzy   ( @IzzyData@lemmy.ml ) 
      9•1 year ago

      It looks pretty cool, but I can’t help but feel that a really catchy name for a service is important. I wish it weren’t true as it is such an insignificant aspect of an entire platform.

      Either way I’m going to sign up and check it out.

      •  Kichae   ( @Kichae@kbin.social ) 
        6•1 year ago

        Firefish is definitely a bit of an unfortunate rebranding. Though ‘Calckey’ wasn’t exactly setting the world on fire, as a name, either. But at the end of the day, we really need to learn to recontextualize fediverse plataforms as software that runs a service, not the service itself. They’re website engines that power social websites, not a social brand in and of themselves, kind of like how WordPress is a quasi-static website suite that is used for a huge number of blogs and quais-static websites.

        No one shares something from, say, the TechCrunch website, or Time website, and goes “Hey, Iook what I found on WordPress!”

    •  Kichae   ( @Kichae@kbin.social ) 
      9•1 year ago

      Can confirm. I find Firefish (formerly Calckey) a much nicer, much more refined, and much more expressive piece of kit.

      I’ve liked Akkoma, too. And there’s something really comforting about Friendica, with its “Facebook as it should have been” interface.

    •  antonim   ( @antonim@lemmy.dbzer0.com ) 
      8•1 year ago

      Elon didn’t say he would charge all the X/Twitter users.

      What do you mean by that? He didn’t say he was definitely going to do so right now, but he proposed it with quite some degree of seriousness. I don’t intend to watch the whole video with Netanyahu to make sure what he said exactly, but all the articles I’ve seen are too detailed and explicit for it to be just an aside that the media blew out of proportion.