I like the idea of a Hello Page. @alastair wrote about them in 2022.

🔗 https://alastairjohnston.com/introducing-hello-pages/

On his Hello Page he says Mastodon is quiet. Umm, I have 1,000 unread toots per day Alastair!

@cdevroe I wasn't confident off-hand so I checked his About page. It looks like Alastair at least works here, in the UK. Given that, I can tell you the "bit" is not a filler word; it's doing a lot of work.

@cdevroe He said Mastodon is "a bit quiet". It's a common phrase over here; in this case the word "bit" is being used to basically say, "It's not quiet if you think of it in a vacuum but it is quiet within a certain context" and probably many more words to fully explain it... but then the page becomes much heavier and less useful so instead: he says "a bit quiet".

I mean, I could easily be wrong about his intent but I can verify the entirely opaque and slight use of language in this way here in the UK. In this instance I would assume he is making more of a conversational point rather than asserting a specific, technical observation.