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There's a fair bit of criticism for relying too much on Twitter in this thread, but I think the article brings up a good point: >Yes, I know. We should redecen
by AlphaWeaver 8y ago
There's a fair bit of criticism for relying too much on Twitter in this thread, but I think the article brings up a good point:
>Yes, I know. We should redecentralize and put our content on Mastodon, or the BlockChain, or some other convoluted platform which has no users. But that’s just not practical for a small project. We have limited technical resources and have to go to where the people are.
Despite there being better technical options, those options can't be considered just on their technical merits... User adoption is also crucial.
- jordigh 8y agoUser adoption on Mastodon can be pretty big depending on the project. Look at the number of followers F-Droid has on Mastodon compared to Twitter. https://mastodon.technology/@fdroidorg https://mastodon.technology/@fdroidorg https://twitter.com/fdroidorg https://twitter.com/fdroidorg
- stingraycharles 8y agoI know of absolutely no people that use Mastadon. There might be a niche somewhere that uses it, but I can’t help to think that it would hurt rather than help any hobby project to choose Mastadon over Twitter.
- ColinWright 8y agoFirstly, there's no reason to choose only one and not the other. Tweeting on Twitter and tooting on Mastodon can be done with a single command once you've set it up. I'd've thought that was a no brainer. Secondly, I use Mastodon, and I'm on an instance with just over 1000 users. There are over 150K users on the main instance.
- fao_ 8y ago> Secondly, I use Mastodon, and I'm on an instance with just over 1000 users. There are over 150K users on the main instance. For most people I know and follow, that's like, the low bar of twitter follower counts.
- sp332 8y agoFortunately it's not related to follower counts. You can follow people from other instances.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- ColinWright 8y agoWhile I acknowledge that numbers are numbers, to some extent, that's not really the point. If you find a Mastodon instance that has a community that's closely matched to your interests, suddenly that's 1K or 10K or 100K of high-quality followers. And the smaller instances don't suffer the Twitter firehose problem. The instances I use, I watch all the toots, not just those of people I follow. So it's not the number of followers that matters, per se, it's the number of people who see what you say. On Twitter that will only be your followers, but on Mastodon it's pretty much everyone on the instance (for the smaller instances). More, you can be followed by, and have your toots seen by, people on other instances. But my other point remains - there is no need to be exclusively on one or the other. It's comparatively trivial to put everything on both media. If you can do that, and you care about your audience (quantity and quality), why wouldn't you?
- fao_ 8y ago> that's not really the point. That's exactly the point though. If you put amount of people you are likely to reach above technical problems, then going solely to a service where the "high" follower count is 1/100th of the high follower counts on another is completely stupid. > But my other point remains - there is no need to be exclusively on one or the other. It's comparatively trivial to put everything on both media. Oh, I agree.
- rhizome 8y agoWith or without bots?
- dredmorbius 8y agoSee: Price's Law. User count isn't everything. Price's well-known square root law states that half of the literature on a subject will be contributed by the square root of the total number of authors publishing in that area.... https://www.researchgate.net/publication/222619181_Price%27s_square_root_law_Empirical_validity_and_relation_to_Lotka%27s_law https://www.researchgate.net/publication/222619181_Price%27s... Mastodon Monitoring Project https://mnm.social https://mnm.social https://dashboards.mnm.social https://dashboards.mnm.social Also: http://sp3r4z.fr/mastodon/general http://sp3r4z.fr/mastodon/general About 1.3 million users, 120m statuses (I believe that's cumulative). Twitter: https://www.statisticbrain.com/twitter-statistics/ https://www.statisticbrain.com/twitter-statistics/ ~700m users, ~340m active. 58m tweets/dy. I'd compare sqrt of both. That's ~1,100 vs 26,000 top users.
- JasonFruit 8y agoI used Mastodon for a while, and it was a pretty good experience. I guess I just found it wasn't my crowd; every other person with something interesting to say turned out to be a "demi-girl otherkin fur-friend," or something like that, and while I am happy for people to have a place to do their thing — exercise your liberty, fur-friend! — I came to feel a bit out of place. It seems like its strong secondary focus on trigger warnings and safe spaces draws too narrow an audience to achieve wide adoption.
- Angostura 8y agoSimilar experience, but I suspect it depends rather on which local instance you join. Unfortunately, while this is some respects a strength (find a likeminded server, have fun) it also adds significant complexity to the UX.
- ColinWright 8y agoThat depends heavily on the instance you choose. There's much, much less of that on the instance I'm (mainly) on. And if they're saying interesting things, why do you care if they turn out to have a different lifestyle from yours? Pick a different instance and try again.
- anigbrowl 8y agoBut that defeats the whole point. Yeah it's nice that you can have your sub-communities but the value of Twitter such as it is is that it;s the universal default microblogging platform in the English-speaking world. Almost everyone who is important in society is accessible via Twitter, just the way that having an email address is a universal default. When someone is telling you that their experience of a product or service sucks, and you tell them to use it differently, you're failing to understand them.
- ColinWright 8y agoI'm not telling people they're using it wrongly, I'm saying that Mastodon has benefits that they may not (yet) have realised, and that it's not Twitter. This is why I say that using both is a perfectly reasonable option. And Mastodon is not Twitter. Twitter does have some advantages over Mastodon, and if that's what you want or need, then great. But if you want a quality audience, Mastodon might be a reasonable alternative, and criticising it for not being the same as Twitter, or using the same metrics that you use for Twitter, is misguided. I'm not good at analogies - never have been - but let me try one. If someone tells me that their experience of using my car sucks and I point out that it's a stick-shift and not an automatic, that's not my failure to understand them, that's me providing information to try to help them get the most out of an alternative experience. Choosing an instance that matches your interests is part of the federated/non-centralised experience. It's different, and for some, like me, there is value in that difference.
- jordigh 8y agoYou know of two now: me and Colin.
- magissima 8y agoI think this is evidence of how much lower the bar is on Mastodon. 2k followers is insignificant on Twitter, irrespective of how few followers F-Droid has there.
- jordigh 8y agoOpen Benches had "hundreds" of followers, so they're already way more insignificant than 2k followers on Masto.
- AlphaWeaver 8y agoI imagine it also has to do with audience. F-Droid is a fairly technical project and more technical people may be fine with Mastodon... for a project that might not be oriented towards tech people I imagine it'd be more difficult to build a following there.
- jordigh 8y agoThat's what I said, it depends on the project. An open data project has a good chance of finding an audience on Masto, I think.
- codetrotter 8y agoThe twitter feed being a mirror also affects the numbers. Following a mirror account is less interesting. Just like how a mirror repo on GitHub is less interesting to star than a repo that has GitHub as its designated main location.
- jordigh 8y agoThe F-Droid Twitter feed had existed for several years and was always tiny. It became a mirror instead once the Mastodon account got vastly more popular.
- mintplant 8y agoI'm just happy to see there's an expectation that Mastodon will be acknowledged in a post like this. That's progress!
- DoreenMichele 8y agoI want to want to participate on Mastodon. But I feel like it's a bunch of little walled gardens and I feel like that's a barrier to entry for me. It's a bug, not a feature. I also can't figure out where to start. I don't feel that way about Twitter.
- dredmorbius 8y agoThe gardens are interconnected, for the most part. That's the point. And you can either join one or run your own.
- DoreenMichele 8y agoAnd if I wanted to message you personally with questions about it for an indefinite period of some weeks or months while I get oriented, are you okay with that? "Here, Doreen, here's my email address and my phone number. Don't hesitate to contact me. Happy to explain like you are my clueless little sister until you feel comfortable."
- exolymph 8y agoIf you can figure out Twitter, you can definitely figure out Mastodon. They have similar levels of complexity — you're just not familiar with Mastodon's quirks yet. If you don't want to put in the effort, though, that's fine.
- DoreenMichele 8y agoSo the answer is no, you don't want to talk to me. I can figure it out myself. (I realize you aren't the GP, but you did choose to reply.) I think you are thinking of Mastodon primarily as a technical platform. I am thinking of it primarily as a social environment. When I was active on Metafilter, there was a new social platform all the members were talking about. It was invitation only. I was homeless at the time and I was generally treated pretty badly by most members there. Nonetheless, someone gave me an invitation and I joined. And it was pointless because what few people I did recognize were people with a track record of treating me terribly. If people have little walled gardens, but are hesitant for any reason to admit me to their inner circle, then there's no there there for me. Sure, I can figure out the technical details, if I have reason to. But I don't have sufficient connection to have reason to. Walled gardens serve an inner circle of people. I don't belong to any inner circle that are using Mastodon. Perhaps that will change. But it won't likely change by joining Mastodon. It might change by somehow becoming an insider somewhere with a group that already uses and prefers the platform.
- loceng 8y agoWhat I'm wondering is does Mastodon and the like fit with Europe's GDPR?