@dredmorbius @admin @admin @eugene Uh hi! I'm not apart of Mastodon at all, but you should talk to @Support

Sorry if I confused you 😊

@eugene Gah, sorry.

@Staming Check the links and evidence yourself.

@dredmorbius Never said you were wrong, just saying you're maybe slightly exaggerating and trying to public shame someone because he wrote he was a cofounder... Who cares?

@Staming I give a shit about truth, and don't much care for lairs and fraudsters.

What's it to you? Why defend a fuckwit like that?

@dredmorbius Well, to be honest, the thing I love with Mastodon is that you can be whoever you want here, nothing really matters and every thing is focussed on the interaction. But if you want to ruin that, please proceed, especially if being a justice warrior makes you feel better.

@Staming There's being who you want to be, and there's claiming specifically to be someone you're not.

I'm all about pseudonymity. I'm rather anti-bullshit.

And if I /am/ going to call bullshit on someone, or denounce them, I'm going to have my evidence lined up.

I'm not 100% certain this guy's a fraud, but I'm 99.999% there, based on the evidence.

@Staming Case in point, I got annoyed at @gideonro a ways back in a G+ convo re-hashing just what user activity numbers were there. So I pulled 20+ GB of sitemap files and polled 50k randomly-selected profiles to generate an estimated active user count:
https://ello.co/dredmorbius/post/naya9wqdemiovuvwvoyquq

Basically: I don't like bullshit, and Google were bullshitting their numbers in really annoying ways.

@Staming An SEO marketing firm took an interest in the question and re-ran the methodology with 10x the sample size and a more robust analysis. I had no idea until they published results, but they validated mine:
https://www.stonetemple.com/real-numbers-for-the-activity-on-google-plus/

@dredmorbius Super impressive! And quite scary to be honest.

@Staming It was fun.

The critical moment was realising that the sitemaps gave me just what I needed. The rest was some really simple shell scripts, and time.

@dredmorbius Well, your dedication is admirable.

@Staming It's ... something.

@Staming @dredmorbius Yeah, I remember that one. You were pretty tweaked, but in hindsight it is clear that there was misinformation going on there. Now, there is no discussion of numbers by Google. I suspect there is a reason for that.

@gideonro @Staming Heh. I just hate speculating without data, especially where it turns out the information is available. Which is part of what annoyed me about the whole thing: Google were lying through their teeth and losing credibility in front of /everyone/, and I just wanted them to STAAAHP doing that.

Another bit: "space alien cat" comes from that episode. I was writing up the account at Ello, and ...

@Staming @gideonro figured I needed a disclaimer. As in "this could literally be anyone". So I threw in something like "I'm this space alien cat", e.g., Joe Random Anonymous User. But here's the methods, and sources, and data.

So ... the next morning I see that Business Insider have picked up the story. And the reporter quoted that line....

@gideonro @Staming I don't think I've laughed that hard in a decade or two -- my moment of glory, and ... that line. It was about fifteen minutes before I could see straight. It still randomly cracks me up.

@Staming https://mastodon.technology/users/Staming/updates/5480