I also think that the people who most need to read it are unlikely to read something longer than (insert today's Twitter character limit here) characters long.
Due to a lack of "The Algorithm" you actually get much more reach on mastodon with fewer followers.
Users who follow you will always get your posts, period. There is no mechanism which will randomly or otherwise restrict the reach of your posts, it's dependent solely on the number of followers.
No exaggeration, every user I've seen come from Twitter has remarked on this fact. It's a very frequent topic of conversation across the entire network.
The flipside of this coin is that mastodon is bad for Brands. There's no mechanism for forcing your posts into other users' feeds, you need to actually earn followers organically.
Which is to say, mastodon takes work and active maintenance to build and keep a sizable following, but your posts reach 100% of your followers. Because those followers are people who made an active decision to follow you, they are vastly more likely to share your posts to their followers.
Also, all of this is by design. Mastodon was designed for people to connect with each other. Lack of advertising is a feature that mastodon users generally value very highly. To be successful as a Brand on mastodon, you have to actually be valuable to people on mastodon. It's hard, and you can't just throw money to make the work go away.
This has been my experience as well. The "algorithm" removes power from users...it like having someone between you and your *friends deciding whether what you said is important enough to see.
This has been my experience as well when I switched over to Mastodon -- "random posts" such as questions, "off-topic" thoughts from me get more replies from people I know well. However, this also meant that I had to see everyone else's "random posts". It's a trade-off.
Personally, I went back to Twitter because the signal-to-noise ratio on Mastodon was too bad, and I use Telegram/Discord instead to communicate with friends privately.
Twitter's ability to provide reach seems to be diminishing rapidly, whether mastodon thrives or not. I don't know that they'll ever cross on an imaginary chart over time; it could be that twitter always delivers reach better than mastodon does, but the gap between them is definitely shrinking.
One of the things people keep finding on mastodon is that engagement is vastly higher on mastodon. The same post on both platforms might seem to get thousands more impressions on twitter (reach), but received far more comments and likes and boosts on mastodon (engagement).
Some people are truly pursuing reach, and so far if you want to get the attention of a fast-food brand or congressional staffer, twitter is your better bet. Some people are actually more interested in engagement, even when they didn't realize it was an option since there's so little of it outside the top tier on twitter.
>Twitter is all about the reach beyond your followers, and that's why most twitter users won't ever consider a switch.
Also, the inability to move existing posts or DMs from one instance to another discourages Twitter blue-check types. What if your instance is blocked by others (as this guide briefly mentions)? What if your instance shuts down?[1] What if you change jobs? (I think the last is why we haven't seen CNN or BBC or Yale create an instance and its people start using it.)
Part of the culture of mastodon is that most people consider posts to be ephemeral. There's built in (default off) tools that automatically delete posts after X time unless they meet conditions like Y boosts or Z favorites.
I was on .lol and switched servers the same day. My daily experience hasn't changed one tiny bit. I'm a little bummed about losing the "good" posts, but reposting them on the new server is a good way to build engagement in a new place anyway.
As always, the counter argument to this is that "influencers" should be running their own instance, and not freeloading on someone else's server to run their business. Many, many people run single-user instances on an rpi, and there's services out there that will manage larger servers for you.
We're back to the first days of the cloud: It's just someone else's computer. If you want guarantees, you have to use your own computer.
This is pretty good! Like most quick overviews, however, this one is shaped considerably by the writer's experiences.
Experiences of the writer that I don't share include:
> It's possible for users to require permission before accepting follows. Most users do.
Yes, it's possible. I'm not sure what percentage of the people I try to follow require approval, but offhand I'd say it's less than 10%. Far from "most."
> Most users block everyone from mastodon.social simply because it's full of randos.
Another "most." I guess I can't speak for users but it turns out there's a way to see what the most-active blockers around (the "FediCouncil") are blocking at the server level[0]. It turns out that mastodon.social is not in the Tier 0 or Tier 1 blocklists, but is in the Tier 2 blocklist. So greater than 33%, but fewer than 50% of blocklists include mastodon.social. Clearly, however, the writer is on a server that does.
> There is no quote-retweet on Mastodon. This is on purpose.
What follows is an explanation of why, but this explanation is both incorrect, and out of date, since the primary developer of mastodon has put "quote-toots" on the dev roadmap, primarily in response to people often suggested as the primary targets of hate on twitter, who said nearly-unanimously that quote-tweets were not the cause, and were in fact helpful.
My own server lets me quote posts, and many of the GUI clients similarly allow for quoting posts in different ways. So the average user experience may be more likely to allow quoting than not, but if not yet, then in the near future.
Absolutely, for sure, although I'm not sure anyone expected literally everyone to switch overnight? Twitter growth curve involved peaks and troughs for years, too. The idea of treating anything short of a 100% conversion rate as negative is very weird to me. I see pretty large and steady growth in servers, users, posts, engagement, everything. As the mobile clients are booming, the rate of growth in full-time active users actually seems to have accelerated from the bumpy spiked of Musk's initial nonsense.
I mostly left Mastodon once Twitter stopped being so onerous with their wrongthink policies. The abundance of splintered fiefdoms is reminiscent of the power tripping found amongst IRCOps in years past, and is frankly a bit of a yawn fest.
I'll stick with a platform where I can expect that people I'm conversing with won't be cut loose because one server operator doesn't see eye to eye with another.
The irony is if you asked most of these folks how they feel about net neutrality, they'd say they were big proponents.
As a Mastodon user myself, I find this post to be very often wrong and a bit nutty too. For example:
"Most users block everyone from mastodon.social simply because it's full of randos."
"It is common practice to turn on an option that auto-deletes old toots. But even if you don't turn on this option, it's very hard to access old toots, for technical reasons."
"The only reliable way to have access to someone's toots is to be a follower."
There's no "rise" or "growing quite well". The article author's statement was inaccurate, a gross overgeneralization. Most people do not do that. The article author mistakenly projected their own idiosyncratic behavior and preferences onto an entire platform.
> On Mastodon you can only see or be seen by your close circles. Mastodon is like a library full of small study rooms. You can raise your voice to reach everyone in your small room, but you cannot talk to the whole library at once. People can only get into your room if the room moderators let them in; if they're not in your room, they'll never find out what you're talking about.
I legit have no idea what this metaphor is trying to convey.
I have regularly posted or commented on other people's posts, only to have those favourited or boosted by people on other instances, often ones I've never heard of.
How does that happen?
Well, first, I have followers on other instances, which means my posts end up on their Federated timeline, and anything I mark with a hashtag will show up in searches on those instances.
Second, if folks I don't know spot something I write that they like, either through a hashtag search, the Federated timeline, or by participating in a thread, they may boost my post which makes it visible to their followers, and thus content propagates through the network.
The result is that ultimately that post gets to a large part of the fediverse, it just happens a bit differently.
In fact, I've had higher engagement within the fediverse across instances than I ever did across all of Twitter because there is no algorithm I have to game to get attention.
I disagree with almost everything in this article.
Mastodon is being portrayed as a network of seperate communities, which simply isn't true. The netwotk is fully interconnected. It does not matter which instance you're on, you always receive content from the entire network.
You just don't get _everything_ because of blocks and inefficiencies. But I strongly disagree with "small reach on purpose". I've reached far more people on Mastodon (Fediverse) than on Twitter.
The biggest drawback I found is it's impossible to search across the network for a query. On Twitter if I want to find out what people are saying about $NewMovieTitle I just search for it, and can narrow it down using the advanced search criteria. The strangest part is that this is apparently intended behavior in Mastodon, but their documentation doesn't offer a clear explanation why (and I can't really think of one).
I've heard that it's possible to build your own instance that does indexing but I haven't tried yet, and I haven't found any existing instances that offer this very basic feature either.
Most movies will have a hashtag (or more than one), which you can use to search. Full-text search isn't available without opt-in, because that's not a feature the majority of historical mastodon users have wanted, nor a feature the seeming majority of current mastodon users want. Me, I've opted in at some POC sites, but mostly you'll want to user hashtags for search. So #AntManAndTheWaspQuantumania instead of "Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania"
I can't tell you how much I dislike the CW system. Treating warnings about cat photos or Linux (I've seen both) as equivalent to warnings about sexual violence is awful and I feel it must be harmful.
I recognize this is not a common feeling and has also been litigated to death, but I remain unmoved.
One thing I like about the Discourse forum software is the rather generic "Summary/Details" naming around spoilers/content warnings/etc. Use it however you like. If it's a content warning, prefix it with "CW" or "Content Warning." If it's just a long post, prefix it with "Long post inside!"
35 comments
[ 0.23 ms ] story [ 95.2 ms ] threadI also think that the people who most need to read it are unlikely to read something longer than (insert today's Twitter character limit here) characters long.
Twitter is all about the reach beyond your followers, and that's why most twitter users won't ever consider a switch.
Users who follow you will always get your posts, period. There is no mechanism which will randomly or otherwise restrict the reach of your posts, it's dependent solely on the number of followers.
No exaggeration, every user I've seen come from Twitter has remarked on this fact. It's a very frequent topic of conversation across the entire network.
The flipside of this coin is that mastodon is bad for Brands. There's no mechanism for forcing your posts into other users' feeds, you need to actually earn followers organically.
Which is to say, mastodon takes work and active maintenance to build and keep a sizable following, but your posts reach 100% of your followers. Because those followers are people who made an active decision to follow you, they are vastly more likely to share your posts to their followers.
Also, all of this is by design. Mastodon was designed for people to connect with each other. Lack of advertising is a feature that mastodon users generally value very highly. To be successful as a Brand on mastodon, you have to actually be valuable to people on mastodon. It's hard, and you can't just throw money to make the work go away.
Personally, I went back to Twitter because the signal-to-noise ratio on Mastodon was too bad, and I use Telegram/Discord instead to communicate with friends privately.
One of the things people keep finding on mastodon is that engagement is vastly higher on mastodon. The same post on both platforms might seem to get thousands more impressions on twitter (reach), but received far more comments and likes and boosts on mastodon (engagement).
Some people are truly pursuing reach, and so far if you want to get the attention of a fast-food brand or congressional staffer, twitter is your better bet. Some people are actually more interested in engagement, even when they didn't realize it was an option since there's so little of it outside the top tier on twitter.
Also, the inability to move existing posts or DMs from one instance to another discourages Twitter blue-check types. What if your instance is blocked by others (as this guide briefly mentions)? What if your instance shuts down?[1] What if you change jobs? (I think the last is why we haven't seen CNN or BBC or Yale create an instance and its people start using it.)
[1] Such as the recent spectacular implosion of mastodon.lol after its owner got horribly abused by members over Hogwarts Legacy. <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34748195>
I was on .lol and switched servers the same day. My daily experience hasn't changed one tiny bit. I'm a little bummed about losing the "good" posts, but reposting them on the new server is a good way to build engagement in a new place anyway.
As always, the counter argument to this is that "influencers" should be running their own instance, and not freeloading on someone else's server to run their business. Many, many people run single-user instances on an rpi, and there's services out there that will manage larger servers for you.
We're back to the first days of the cloud: It's just someone else's computer. If you want guarantees, you have to use your own computer.
Experiences of the writer that I don't share include:
> It's possible for users to require permission before accepting follows. Most users do.
Yes, it's possible. I'm not sure what percentage of the people I try to follow require approval, but offhand I'd say it's less than 10%. Far from "most."
> Most users block everyone from mastodon.social simply because it's full of randos.
Another "most." I guess I can't speak for users but it turns out there's a way to see what the most-active blockers around (the "FediCouncil") are blocking at the server level[0]. It turns out that mastodon.social is not in the Tier 0 or Tier 1 blocklists, but is in the Tier 2 blocklist. So greater than 33%, but fewer than 50% of blocklists include mastodon.social. Clearly, however, the writer is on a server that does.
> There is no quote-retweet on Mastodon. This is on purpose.
What follows is an explanation of why, but this explanation is both incorrect, and out of date, since the primary developer of mastodon has put "quote-toots" on the dev roadmap, primarily in response to people often suggested as the primary targets of hate on twitter, who said nearly-unanimously that quote-tweets were not the cause, and were in fact helpful.
My own server lets me quote posts, and many of the GUI clients similarly allow for quoting posts in different ways. So the average user experience may be more likely to allow quoting than not, but if not yet, then in the near future.
Overall, though, pretty good summary piece.
0. https://codeberg.org/oliphant/blocklists/src/branch/main/blo...
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It comes and goes, but the recent SMS 2FA change has triggered another wave.
https://www.techdirt.com/2023/02/08/lazy-reporters-claiming-...
I'll stick with a platform where I can expect that people I'm conversing with won't be cut loose because one server operator doesn't see eye to eye with another.
The irony is if you asked most of these folks how they feel about net neutrality, they'd say they were big proponents.
"Most users block everyone from mastodon.social simply because it's full of randos."
"It is common practice to turn on an option that auto-deletes old toots. But even if you don't turn on this option, it's very hard to access old toots, for technical reasons."
"The only reliable way to have access to someone's toots is to be a follower."
I don't think it's a good or accurate summary.
Bill Hicks would be proud; his people who hate people party has been growing quite well.
> On Mastodon you can only see or be seen by your close circles. Mastodon is like a library full of small study rooms. You can raise your voice to reach everyone in your small room, but you cannot talk to the whole library at once. People can only get into your room if the room moderators let them in; if they're not in your room, they'll never find out what you're talking about.
I legit have no idea what this metaphor is trying to convey.
I have regularly posted or commented on other people's posts, only to have those favourited or boosted by people on other instances, often ones I've never heard of.
How does that happen?
Well, first, I have followers on other instances, which means my posts end up on their Federated timeline, and anything I mark with a hashtag will show up in searches on those instances.
Second, if folks I don't know spot something I write that they like, either through a hashtag search, the Federated timeline, or by participating in a thread, they may boost my post which makes it visible to their followers, and thus content propagates through the network.
The result is that ultimately that post gets to a large part of the fediverse, it just happens a bit differently.
In fact, I've had higher engagement within the fediverse across instances than I ever did across all of Twitter because there is no algorithm I have to game to get attention.
Mastodon is being portrayed as a network of seperate communities, which simply isn't true. The netwotk is fully interconnected. It does not matter which instance you're on, you always receive content from the entire network.
You just don't get _everything_ because of blocks and inefficiencies. But I strongly disagree with "small reach on purpose". I've reached far more people on Mastodon (Fediverse) than on Twitter.
I've heard that it's possible to build your own instance that does indexing but I haven't tried yet, and I haven't found any existing instances that offer this very basic feature either.
I recognize this is not a common feeling and has also been litigated to death, but I remain unmoved.