Comment by philippejara | Hacker News Reader

Comment by philippejara | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

I don't think an experiment with a single post on a single topic with accounts on vastly different scales can tell you either of those things.

There are a few holes glaring holes in this methodology but just one is that she has 8.7k followers in Mastodon since joining in late 2022, while she has 241k followers on twitter since 2009. It's not surprising that the users that followed her in the last 5 months are more engaged than the ones that followed her in the previous 14 years. Are the people that just aren't interested in her content or that just stopped using twitter after a 14 year span necessarily grifters/leeches/spammers?

I don't know about 1 but simply due to scale 2 is probably true, however this experiment isn't saying much.

Anecdotally, I've noticed a much higher engagement % on Mastodon compared to Twitter with my own posts as well.

On Twitter, with over 8K followers, I get very good engagement in general (imo). But on Mastodon, with only 1.7K followers, I'll get engagement of almost 50% that of Twitter whenever I duplicate posts. If I had 8K followers on Maston and if those numbers continued the same trend I'd probably drop Twitter altogether.

Off-topic I also find the folks that comment on my posts on Mastodon to be friendly by default. It's a very refreshing vibe.

For a much smaller audience, I'm seeing a very active user base for the topics at hand. It also helps that I tag my posts in Mastodon (like people do on Instagram) to help increase reach a little bit.

Depending on your social circle, it may be the case that a lot of twitter followers have essentially gone dead. I still have a Twitter account (I don’t want anyone taking the username; the account is over 16 years old, and, who knows, Twitter may sort itself out one day) but no longer tweet; if I look at that account, most of the people I followed also appear to be no longer tweeting much (though, who knows, maybe the ‘Following’ tab is just broken).

Reply on news.ycombinator.com