Mastodon for Twitter users in 5 minutes
wordsmith.social
wordsmith.social
"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.
> 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.
Bill Hicks would be proud; his people who hate people party has been growing quite well.
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.
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...
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.
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.
I recognize this is not a common feeling and has also been litigated to death, but I remain unmoved.
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.
https://www.techdirt.com/2023/02/08/lazy-reporters-claiming-...
As of this comment
9,652,679 accounts
+1,543 in the last hour
+29,624 in the last day
+178,438 in the last week
It comes and goes, but the recent SMS 2FA change has triggered another wave.
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.