Yeah, I really don’t understand why people are so confused. From a practical perspective your username is username@instance.tld and that’s it. You’re on some server and can simply follow that guy@mastodon.social and you will see the posts.

Here is the data they are forced to report to the EU:

Logged In X Users 61.8M Logged Out Guests 49.6M Total 111.4M

https://transparency.x.com/en/reports/amars-in-the-eu/amars-in-the-eu-aug-24

“Logged out Guests” is everyone who gets linked to a thread, who was send an video on Twitter and so on. And also take a look at the definition of the logged in users:

EU Active Recipients of the Service - Average between August 1st 2023 - January 31 2024

So you do count as active EU user if you have logged in between August and January with an IP address from the EU. That should even include some tourists.

Still better than Chrome. Mozilla is not perfect, but in comparison to Google and its behavior they are saints.

Kind of not what you’re looking for, but use rss2email to send everything as a mail to a mail address.

I would question your focus on growth. Yes, we all want this place to succeed. But do we really want this unlimited growth like Facebook, Reddit and all those other companies? Small communities are great, they give you a connection between users, they spark friendships and great discourse. Those are great. Yes, they are smaller than those multimillion user subreddits, but we’ve all seen those big subreddits slowly burning down. Dying to bots, to marketing spam, to low effort, popular comments, to reposts, to karma farming, to US politics. We’ve seen subreddit after subreddit dying to moderator burnout - because big subs are really hard to moderate, people will burn out. They are sacrificing their free time to deal with trolls, shills, putins guys and receive no compensation for that.

So maybe … let’s don’t replicate Reddit? Let’s focus on creating small, helpful communities and people will come.

If it is counting website visits, I’m wondering how they are filtering out bots using selenium on a linux system to crawl their sites. That should be a huge amount of traffic