Subscriber Rot

I joined Mastodon way back in 2016, but I dropped off and didn't come back until late 2022. When I came back, I made a new account and started fresh, building up a new followers list. That number went up quick for a while, but it eventually leveled off. Today I sit at 4,177 followers. I'm not a celebrity or anything, but that's decent – certainly enough of an audience to build a business on.

But how real is that 4,177 number? We all know that subscriber counts are a bit misleading. Obviously, Mastodon doesn't have an algorithmic feed that decides who should and shouldn't see your posts, but it's not immune from the idea of "subscriber rot". Subscriber rot is the idea that while you may have been interesting enough for someone to follow you at one point, they stop being a real set of eyeballs who might see your stuff when you post something. Maybe they muted you, maybe they don't read every single thing and your stuff falls through the cracks, or maybe they just don't use the service at all anymore.

I was curious, so I started digging. I have 4,000 followers, but it doesn't feel like I do. Engagement on my posts is fine, but it seems focused on a smaller number of people. Interestingly, Mastodon has a page in settings where you can see all the accounts you follow and that follow you, and you can filter for a few things. There's a "dormant" account status that seems to trigger when someone does not use Mastodon for over 30 days. I enabled that filter and it returned 2,914 dormant accounts. Of those, 2,244 haven't been active in over a year.

Assuming Mastodon's own reporting is correct, I actually have 1,263 "real" followers, meaning 70% of the people who follow me, don't even use Mastodon anymore. About half of them haven't used it in more than a year.

This example focuses on Mastodon, not because I'm trying to pick on my favorite social network, but because it's where I can get the best data about this. It sounds kind of bad that 70% of my "audience" isn't actually real, so you could see why corporate social companies might not want to so easily raise this sort of data to their users. An open question I cannot answer is whether the 70% number I got here is typical for Mastodon users. Is this just how it goes, or are my follows more likely to be people who migrated off Twitter a few years ago and ended up not liking Mastodon? Also, how does this line up with other services? If someone has 4,000 followers on X, how many of those are probably active accounts? What about YouTube subscribers? Threads users? I don't know.

I run analytics on this blog, and I get pretty darn good data on referral traffic, aka traffic from when my links appear on other websites. I pulled all the referral traffic data for the last 90 days, and charted it out. Here's what I found:

Google Zero may be coming for us all, but it's not here for me yet. About half of my traffic is direct, coming mostly from people who subscribe via RSS. Of the other half of my visitors, 46% of them come from Google, and 42% come from Hacker News. That leaves just 12% of all referral traffic coming from elsewhere. In fact, let's actually remove those 2 from the chart so we can actually see what's left.

A couple things are interesting to me here. First off is the scale of views coming from alternate search engines. Kagi, DuckDuckGo, and Brave Search are all around the same, and combined deliver about 7% of the traffic as Google. Bing, meanwhile, is basically not in the game at all.

Then we get to Mastodon, which is sending the most traffic, which I would hope to be the case. It's the only social network I'm remotely active on, and it's where I put the most effort into promoting my work. Although it must be said that 600 referrals in 90 days works out to about six referrals per day, which ain't much. More notably, it's nearly identical to the traffic Bluesky is sending me, and I'm not active on Bluesky. I have what amounts to a bot account over there that does share links when I post them, but I'm not scrolling the feed or interacting with folks over there. The Facebook number is more perplexing. I guess shout out to anyone using Facebook sharing Birchtree links?

All this said, I just think it's important to remember that subscriber rot is a real thing, and that one should take these numbers with a grain of salt. This is the case on the big corporate social networks, and it's even the case on the indie, zero-algorithm social web as well. Page views, purchases, and actual engagement are the things that truly matter, and I think it's wise to index on those things more than a subscriber number.