Sigmoid has really slowed down in user growth, and active user count is slowly going down (although it is still more than 4k). Curious to see if the active user count will ultimately reach a rough steady state (my guess). Kind of sad more people are not joining though...

@andrey Thoughts on the future? Twitter has been a little less insane for a couple months now which I assume is driving the drop, but I'm definitely not ready to go back to a norm where Twitter/Elon dominates.

@micahcorah I think a good number of people are liking it here, so it may be it will be a community of some consistent not-too-big size, which is not bad. We could consider some stuff like more cross-instance interaction, maybe. I hope we won't have an issue where so many people leave this dies out, but it is a real possibility (though doesn't seem like it's happening rn).

@andrey iOS/Apple community has fully moved to Mastodon. Sad that this is currently not the case for the bulk of the ML community :/

@andrey I do hope people keep joining and Sigmoid was extremely useful when I joined in finding other people in #MachineLearning 🙂

Regarding people dropping out, is it possible that they are perhaps moving to their own instances or, as they get more used to the Fediverse, moving to other places which have the particular functionality they are looking for?

Speaking for me personally, I found that posting about #MachineLearning papers, I constantly kept hitting the 500 character limit and had to struggle sometimes to condense things down to 500 characters 😛

Plus, I had plans to doing serialised stories on here and 500 characters was just too limiting …

So I switched to my own Akkoma instance which gave me the ability to have much longer posts. Doing papers daily is much easier now since I don’t have to spend a lot of time trying to stick to the 500 character limit ….

So possibly there are others who are moving for similar (or other) reasons? I don’t know … Just suggesting a possibility.

@f I imagine people are just dropping out from Mastodon after moving here during the big Twitter migrations. It's no big deal though, kind of to big expected.

@andrey I guess it all depends on what people are looking for. Some just got annoyed at Twitter but they really want what Twitter offers while others (like me) actually find the Fediverse way much better. The former will leave when they can’t get what they want, the latter will (hopefully) stick around 🙂