Depends what your purpose is. If you want to be a broadcaster, have a message to sell, then there's a larger audience. If you want to have good conversations, you don't need many people. Who talks to millions of people in a lively back and forth?
But at the same time, being an expert, leader and overall interesting person is not synonymous with public reach, and there is a huge subset of interesting people that have never touched Twitter. There's also been a slow and steady descent in the level of discourse on Twitter to the point that it's widely regarded as a cesspool now, with many formerly active interesting people having abandoned it, and many others holding their nose to drop their broadcasts but not engaging in any discourse due to the amount of polarization and armies of angry partisan nobodies ready to dogpile on the slightest misplaced word.
Ultimately, the most interesting parts of Twitter as being a marketplace for ideas, public square, and open platform with diverse use cases that everyone was so excited about in 2008-2012 was eventually subverted by the financial incentives that VC investment demands. The result is a significant divergence between what constitutes an interesting idea and what will make you successful on Twitter. Therefore I thoroughly reject the idea of treating Twitter as any kind of baseline bar for contemporary human notability. I'd rank a large scale following there somewhere above reality TV star, and somewhere below traditionally published author.
There's no comparison. This isn't about audiences nor number of users. It's about the ability for people to form connections. Twitter has been way better of a place to do that, to find & discover new connections to make, in a place everyone sharp already was at.
I agree that the majority of the world or even sharp people weren't actually there. But in effect, every other place for conversations was a drop in the bucket compared to Twitter's ocean. Finding some good inspiring informative people to follow, & look up other potentially interesting conversationalists as you go, and you'd be hella winning.
Twitter enabled following & expanding your network intelligently nearly infinitely. Every other place, you will be bound to whomever you can attract.
Frankly, I tend towards the opposite view. How smart can you be if you spend any significant amount of time engaged in the worst platform for intelligent conversation on the internet?
Well, clearly there are plenty of smart people in either category, but we can objectively say there are a lot more smart people that don't use twitter than do.
This continues to strike me as passing up on something amazing. Most issues with birdsite depend on where you tread. The forum itself is not exceptional but really people just make such mountains over little molehills. Just learn to unfollow & trust your own judgements. Focusing only on negatives is a "whether you believe you can or whether you believe you can't, you're right".
If I am interested to know what experts and industry leaders think, I can monitor their media (where by the way HN is wayyy better than Twitter, and I'm sure there is a better community for every industry), but for good conversations I'd probably head to a smaller group which can exist anywhere, Matrix, Discord, FB group, Whatsapp communities, Discourse, etc. If I have an industry leader who is also a friend, those places is probably where they are having the good conversations.
Agreed. It is organic interaction, which you get at the Fediverse. Much more so than on Twitter is my anecdotal observation. On Twitter you have to hone your messages in hope the algorithms make you 'go viral'. There are quite a few experts, academics, scientists and journalists migrating to the Fediverse. Increasingly some of the industry leaders too. I do not know if that is good for the dynamics. It is quite refreshing to have a social network where people don't try to become influencers.
On the contrary, algorithms are to a large extent irrelevant. You see what the people you follow tweet and retweet. No algorithms involved. What made Twitter special is rather that you can interact with anyone. You can live in the middle of nowhere and still share knowledge and network with the best in your field. Making a copy of the platform but removing the people, also removes the whole point of Twitter.
Do you though? If you're unlucky with your instance of choice, there will be as much "organic interaction" as in an abandoned mining town.
Coupled with aversion to search this makes Mastodon "organic" only on large instances and/or only if you specifically know which people on which instances to follow.
I have no idea what algorithm throws at me because I only use "for you"
Then there's "weird tech", which was already on mastodon. (Tube time, foone, etc.)
Really depends on the industry you're talking about. Some have never been on Twitter to begin with.
(e.g. the network engineers bubble: the gray beards are on IRC and the youngsters are on TikTok.)
I still need quite a few of them to have interesting follows. I'm following 180 accounts on Twitter but only 20 on Mastodon. And basically all of those on Mastodon are tech people.
Not that I really want to follow people on Mastodon anyways. I'm hoping that Bluesky is gonna become the go-to Twitter replacement once it opens up.