Somewhat fewer than 99.99% actively used the site. Google+ literally had billions of registered profiles. The saving grace is the lack of algorithmic amplification, but bad actors are a distinct presence, if largely walled off into their own small, sad world. User controls, admin engagement, reporting tools, and the culture of active management are all far weaker. (Not perfectly, but it's not completely blown up yet either.)ĭiaspora. It's high-touch, and has issues, but at present scale it mostly works. Much resembles the old Usenet model: individual instance administrators can determine what users (locally or remotely) or instances (remote federation) can interact, and to what extent. Each already strains under abuse, spam, and propaganda efforts, though Mastodon seems to have a more robust containment toolkit. Both are far smaller than their comparable commercial equivalents (FB and Twitter, respectively). I'm active on Diaspora (for over a decade) and Mastodon (for about five years now). Netadmins had a hardcopy directory in which everyone's number was listed twice (forward and reverse search). Until ~1992 (the Eternal September), Usenet users were largely represented as cohorts of a few hundred to low thousands, each subject to the disciplinary authority of university network administrators. Facebook has 3 billion MAUs (monthly active users). Google+ was considered a failed social network with at least 10-100 million active users (by my own conservative estimates based on sampled profile data, independently verified by a much larger analysis). Even by the mid-1990s, it was under 1 million active participants. It took me way too long to find the usage numbers (which ironically were within an arm's reach on my bookshelf most of the time), but ~1988 Usenet was under 1 million potential users, and fewer than 150,000 active readers.
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