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Comment by mg | Hacker News Reader

I don't know if I am an outlier, but even though I love the idea of decentralized social media and dislike a lot about Twitter, my Twitter experience is better than my Mastodon experience.

I use both as a log of interesting stuff I want to preserve and maybe review in the future.

Both work fine for this purpose.

But when I see "529 Views, 7 likes, One Reply" on Twitter, it gives me an additional sense of community:

https://twitter.com/marekgibney

On Mastodon, I have never seen any reaction whatsoever:

https://masto.ai/@mg

It might be just because my Twitter account is older. I don't know. But somehow I have the feeling it will stay this way.

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I looked at your feed and it's obvious why your interaction is low: you're not tagging your posts.

The interaction model on Mastodon is perhaps inverted from X, FB, IG, and so on. On those platforms, it makes sense to follow handles; those platforms are creator focused. On Mastodon, it makes sense to follow tags first ("the community") and then follow interesting people in those communities.

Scanning all of your posts, only the most recent one has a tag (#buildinpublic) while the rest are just text. This means that your content won't reach into the home feeds of folks who share common interests.

Your June 8 post on Apple's stock value: you might have seen better engagement with simply using the #apple tag.

Your Nov 19, 2022 post should be tagged with #css, #html, maybe #webdev.

If you don't tag your posts, they won't show up in any home feeds and because the feed is linear in time, they won't have much visibility. Try better usage of tags and see how you do.

Hard disagree. Following anything other than people whose content you actually want to see breaks the model completely.

This is kind of a narrow view isn't it?

Do you follow people on Reddit or do you follow communities?

I make no claims of whether one model is superior to another; only an observation that on Mastodon, one model will yield better results than the other if what you seek is engagement.

Mastodon -- at least for now -- is topic-oriented rather than creator-oriented.

For me the point is that either I curate aggressively by only following people I trust will post interesting stuff or I follow topics on a platform with a solid recommendation algorithm (this doesn't even need to be adapted to my personal usage patterns, it could just be intelligent interaction based sorting of the posts landing in my feed).

E.g. I would never use the /new feed across all my subreddits for example, simply because it would show me way too much irrelevant / low quality content. The same is true to some extent when following hashtags on Mastodon.

I find mastodon to EASILY be the best format for microblogging. I have 100% total control over the content on my feed. No nonsense algorithms. I can follow any hashtags or people as I see fit. It’s truly an amazing platform.

Twitter is garbage.

If you follow topics like this you're inviting all kinds of moderation problems, etc, by seeing content from people you don't know.

Microblogging (well, all blogging) was perfectly designed not to have these issues by you seeing only feeds you subscribe to.

That feels like a system that works only on a low-volume platforms. If I were to follow #apple tag on Twitter, my feed would update every single second.

That falls into "good problems to have" territory. A platform where following a (relatively) popular simple tag means "you will get flooded" is also the one where you can have similar engagement numbers/followers as Twitter does today.

Similar to other commenters, I've experienced the opposite: way more interaction on Mastodon than Twitter.

Unsure if you're seeking any advice, but in case you are, I notice that you make sparing to no use of hashtags in your post. Because Mastodon doesn't have a timeline algorithm to boost your posts, you really need to rely on hashtags to get your post seen. Think about hashtags more like one uses them on Tumblr rather than Twitter.

Interestingly I always post identical posts to twitter and mastodon and I do not use hashtags, and I still find that plenty of my mastodon posts get more engagement. It’s about 50/50 whether I get more engagement on twitter versus mastodon, and I have 800 followers on mastodon and 2000 on twitter.

If you have 800 followers, when they favorite or boost your posts, it will show up in the home feeds of users they are connected to, even if they don't follow the tag.

I think for folks just starting on Mastodon, the right way is to properly tag the content and broadcast to a community. Then from there, follow interesting people that produce good content within that community.

> If you have 800 followers, when they favorite or boost your posts, it will show up in the home feeds of users they are connected to, even if they don't follow the tag.

IIRC, boosts will show up in your Home Timeline, follows (and possibly likes?) will result in them showing up in your Public Timeline if they are on a different instance.

I've had the opposite experience. On Mastodon I get a small, but consistent, amount of engagement with my posts, and I have over 400 followers. Twitter was like shouting into the void.

Mastodon really serves no purpose.

If you want to find a sense of community with real discussion, you join a threaded discussion forum with like-minded individuals. If you want to scream in to the ether and have other people "follow" you, that's what Facebook, Instagram, Twitter/X, TikTok are for. Centralized ether screaming will always be better than decentralized ether screaming because ego reinforcement from counters is a "more is always better" kind of thing.

Where are there still forums?

Look up. * music from Inception grows louder *

Cars, motorcycles, urban development, piloting, semiconductor engineering, etc... all have sizable active forums. Not every niche but in a lot.

In those cases Mastodon really is more akin to decentralized shouting into the void then a hotbed of genuinely valuable discussions.

Stackoverflow etc.

Stackexchange is definitely NOT a forum. It is not for discussions. If there is a debate then it means the question is not well posed.

Disagree. Mastodon isn't so much a Twitter alternative as a Tumblr alternative with Twitter-like UX. And its value proposition is much the same as Tumblr: curate a collection of interesting discussions and memes from across the network, and in the process find people who like the same kinds of things and build connections with them.

It's not about "number go up" in the same way Twitter or Instagram is because there's no algorithm to give it a feedback loop.

Both Twitter/Instagram and Tumblr/Mastodon are about getting community/attention from strangers by posting what you want and letting them come to you (as opposed to Reddit or forums where you join existing discussions). But the Twitter/Instagram model relies on an algorithm so it only benefits those who are already famous or who invest in gaming the system, whereas Tumblr/Mastodon make it easy for everyone to find their community of a few dozen mutuals without being buried by the algorithm.

It's all ether screaming mate. You scream into a black hole and hope someone (or something) responds. The only reason people continue to do it is because numbers go up. If numbers don't go up, people leave.

I'm not knocking it, I do it too. We are all desperate for connection and have a desire to be heard. We don't even care if it's real or not, we just don't want to feel alone. We are so desperate for connection, in fact, that we will create work that others profit from just so we don't feel alone.

It's why we are talking to each other right now. We could be doing anything else right now, but here we are. Desperate to be heard. Clicking refresh. Wanting to feel validated. Even if one of us is a bot, does it matter? The feeling is real.

I dunno. I've met most of my friends, including a lot of people in my local area, via the Fediverse, long before these recent waves of migration. Numbers are a lot less important than real connection.

Thanks for posting this -- as someone who was never on Tumblr, nor used Mastadon, this still felt like an interesting explanatory facet that helps me understand it better, both in terms of mindset and how people use it.

    > Centralized ether screaming will always be better than decentralized ether screaming because ego reinforcement from counters is a "more is always better" kind of thing

This reads like you pretty much described the essence of why Twitter is kinda terrible: "ego reinforcement" is about as far as you can get from engaging with a community.

Nail on the head, but also why services like twitter will always be the preference for most people. To the majority of people, community engagement means a platform to speak to a community and see that what you've said has had some kind of effect.

Rather than "taking part" in a community, what most people want is to "make use of" a community in a way that stimulates their emotions.

To bring the topic off on a slight tangent - I think this is an example of a distillation of natural human instincts. We've recognized the dopamine hit we get from the evolutionary favored behavior of building a community and engaging with it, and then found a way to separate it and repeat it without the effort that led to its evolution.

I get near zero engagement on twitter these days. I can post the identical things on both places, and twitter is just tumbleweed. I have ~17K followers on twitter, and 3K on mastodon.

I used to get a fair amount of engagement on twitter, but I don't have a paid blue tick - but I do have one via my employer. That makes no difference.

The problem is you are using Mastodon incorrectly. It's not Xitter.

On Mastodon, you want to put hashtags in your posts and comments so people who are following those hashtags will see your post and because they are interested in those hashtags, they will interact with you.

Your post would have to be really boring or with no hashtags to only get one reply on Mastodon.

I follow dozens of hashtags but only three people on Mastodon.

>stuff I want to preserve

That seems like sheer folly on a system owned by a tantrum baby.

Agree 100

You're using Mastodon incorrectly. If you put hashtags in your posts and comments, you will get lots of interaction because Mastodon users follow hashtags more than people. This is especially important starting out because you won't have many people following you starting out, but if you use and follow hashtags, you are immediately immersed in conversations you are interested in.

There are few people who I want to see all of their posts. All I want to see are their posts that are relevant to my interests. So instead of following people, follow hashtags and you will see lots of posts related to what you are interested in and very few posts you aren't interested in.

By following hashtags instead of people, the signal to noise ratio is almost 100% signal. I'm following dozens of hashtags and only three people.

> I don't know if I am an outlier, but even though I love the idea of decentralized social media and dislike a lot about Twitter, my Twitter experience is better than my Mastodon experience.

According to the hundreds of millions of daily active users that still use Twitter / X, You are not an outlier.

Because Mastodon's home feed doesn't have an algorithm, it really requires more concerted curation to get a good experience.

As I wrote, it can be a bit "disorienting" at first until you find the right people and tags to follow (at least this was my experience).

The correct way to use Mastodon is to follow hashtags, not people, and use lots of hashtags in your posts and comments so other people can find them.

When you follow people, you get all their posts, including the ones you aren't interested in. When you follow hashtags, you get all the posts that are relevant to you and none of the posts that are irrelevant to you.

If you put hashtags in your posts and comments, you will attract people with similar interests and they will engage with you. Xitter is a lonely place compared to Mastodon w/hashtags.

> The correct way to use Mastodon is to follow hashtags, not people, and use lots of hashtags in your posts and comments so other people can find them.

Imagine having to explain how to use a social network ‘correctly’ to attempt to convince users on other social networks to make the move.

> Xitter is a lonely place compared to Mastodon w/hashtags.

How many daily active users are on Mastodon compared to Twitter / X right now?

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