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Comment by re5i5tor | Hacker News Reader

Not for me. Better engagement already than I had on Twitter.

Bear in mind if the OP is primarily focused on business accounts, plenty of servers block them pretty aggressively. There are servers that allow businesses and some businesses with a reasonably decent following, but since there's no advertising business there with an incentive to force people to see business accounts, many people choose not to.

It's interesting you mention that. I've seen a few businesses sort of try and get a holding there, but then abandon their efforts. I think I saw an official MS Azure account that had 14 followers or something. Businesses aren't really clear either on whether or not they're expected to be there, or even allowed. Good point.

Generally a core point is that because you can't really push ads in people's faces, business accounts on Mastodon need to push content people choose to follow. Updates on products and services that existing users of said products and services would want to know about... great. Building a direct connection with consumers through interaction... fantastic.

Can't tell you how refreshing this is to experience.

On the other hand, Tailscale is doing pretty well https://hachyderm.io/@tailscale

But really, I think one of the things that attracts users to Mastodon is how uncommercial it all is. The current audience explicitly does not want display advertising or a website full of #brands

With the weird exception of the audience for https://brands.town, an instance full of and for #brands. Though the game there is actually culture jamming, satire/farce, and LARPing fake brands for amusement, and not actually a place for real advertising either.

Same here. The technically inclined portion of the Mac-sphere has largely moved over to Mastodon and stayed, as have a lot of devs and designers. Any time I post something I’ve been working on I get a bunch of new followers and a number of replies, contrasted to Twitter where I got almost nothing.

ironic this comes from a throwaway - I suppose they're really totally all in on mastodon

New account (old one seemed to have expired), not a throwaway. I've never (till now) been an active commenter.

Are you in a specific niche? Honestly curious how you've gone from signing up there to 'better' engagement than on Twitter.

There’s no algorithm, so just posting content isn’t enough. If you don’t follow people on other servers you won’t see anything in the feed, and reply threads will be empty. It took a while to find the right people to follow but now I get as much out of it as I used to get from Twitter. Hashtags are a lot more important too for discoverability since there’s no search function.

My engagement is still low, but on Twitter I would post something and it would just never get seen. Now at least a couple of people will often reply.

In November I got disgusted enough to leave twitter, not just pull the plug, tear it out of the wall. To be clear -- very small twitter account, under 1K followers.

I just set up a new Masto account on a larger server, started watching, following, engaging.

A small case in point: Rands In Repose blog's accounts on both platforms. 42K followers on Twitter and 7.7K followers on Mastodon. Despite Twitter having 5.45 times as many followers, Michael Lopp reports significantly higher engagement on Mastodon. Just had this conversation with him.

Interesting follow up, thanks!

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