2026-08-20 01:00:00
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.
Back to that 4,177 number on Mastodon.
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.
2026-08-19 21:00:00
Simon Wilson has the best description of LLMs that I’ve seen so far. He called them a calculator for words, and I think it’s a great way to put it.
A traditional calculator takes numbers and operators as input, does some math, and outputs an answer. LLMs are essentially the same thing, except the input and output are words. You input some words, it does some math on them, and it gives you an answer. They’re tools that do a job. We can debate the implications of this sort of calculator existing, but I think it’s a really useful way to describe them.
I bring this up because the definition of writing, and what constitutes a "perversion of writing", has been…let's just say…a topic of conversation this week. This debate revolves around watermarking text that AI generates. The complaint here is that of the enormous amount of math being done to generate the text models deliver already, adding a specific bit more is an affront to everything.
Quick aside, this video does a good job explaining how watermarking systems work in LLMs if you want to actually understand what's being discussed.
As far as what I think about watermarking text so that software can determine whether it was generated by AI, fuck yeah. I think anything generated with AI, whether it’s images, video, code, or text, should be able to be checked by the user if they want to know.
Arguments have been made about how text is somehow different from images or video, and I think that's incredibly misguided, and shows a lack of respect for other mediums. Sure, writing can be sacred, but nothing these language models generate is sacred. Like number calculators, these word calculators are hugely useful, but no one is going to type something complex into a TI-83 Plus, gasp, and go, "hang it in the fucking Louvre".
The general population has clearly indicated that they want to know when something is AI-generated. I think it is a particularly nihilistic view of the world to suggest that people do not deserve to know this if they want to find out.
2026-08-17 20:01:22
There is a phrase that's come up more in the tech punditry recently: nanny state. This comes up when discussing any sort of regulation on technology. "Oh, you want social media platforms to be regulated at all? Guess you want to live in a nanny state. Meanwhile I, a big brain boy myself, think individuals can make good decisions and don't need some governing body telling them what they can and can't do."
At the same time, a lot of people who think this way also love the nanny state and will fight tooth and nail to protect it. Prominent tech pundits will call people "morons" if they think that people should be trusted to install apps outside of the App Store. They love the nanny state when it's corporations doing it, and they hate it when a government does it. Except when it's AI…then it's good when the government does it, bad when corporations do it…it's a lot to keep track of.
Look, I understand there are risks when you let people install software from outside an app store's walled garden. I would actually be okay with Apple requiring App Store distribution as long as they stopped requiring their own payment method and would only block apps for safety and security reasons, not business or content reasons. But these anti-nanny state warriors are tricky to pin down. They want absolute control over how adults use their computers in some cases but not others.
I don't know. How about we tell them that the EU mandates that Apple approve all apps on iPhones? Then suddenly they'll think it's the worst idea in the world.
2026-08-16 06:00:00
Ming-Chi Kuo: A recent media report claims that tight DRAM suppl...
My industry checks suggest that Apple has indeed scaled back its hardware shipment plans this year due to memory shortages.
Ten years ago, if you wanted to buy the new iPhone and get it on release day, you had to have Apple.com open in three different browsers. You needed to have the Apple Store app open on your phone, and you needed to be frantically refreshing these every couple seconds at the stroke of midnight Pacific time to have any hope of ordering one quick enough. Mercifully, in recent years, Apple has improved their availability significantly, to the point that even though new phones sell significantly more than they did ten years ago, they are readily available on launch day, even if it takes you a few minutes, hours, or in some cases, even days to get your order in.
Well, strap in because I am a bit worried that 2026 iPhone pre-orders will feel a lot more like 2016 iPhone pre-orders.
2026-08-16 03:30:00
Max Kan: Gemini is Cooked but GCP is Cooking
For all intents and purposes, we believe DeepMind is no longer a frontier lab.
I think this is being a bit overdramatic. It is true that there's been a good amount of executive shakeup and that the company has failed to release any semblance of a frontier model in all of 2026. That's an eon in this industry right now, but Google could come out with something extremely impressive any day now and change the narrative. How often has the narrative shifted over the past couple years of who was winning, who was losing, who was dead?
I'm not arguing that all of the cynicism around Google's delivery of Gemini models this year is wrong. Just that until they throw in the towel like Apple did earlier this year, ironically, by going all in on Gemini, I wouldn't count anyone out. It was barely a month ago, people were talking about how XAI was just going to sell its server capacity going forward, and now they've released Grok 4.6, which appears to be pretty darn good (obviously, Fuck Elon Musk).
2026-08-16 03:08:09
Samsung's new foldable is an early look at what Apple will be announcing next month.