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If your followers are "real" followers, and if you are important to them, they'll get in touch outside the fed and will know where to find you. Maybe that's wha

If your followers are "real" followers, and if you are important to them, they'll get in touch outside the fed and will know where to find you. Maybe that's what we should strive for. I have 200+ followers on Twitter, but if you ask me, I can only name 15 with real, social interaction. And I think that's great.

input_sh 6y ago
I second this. While I foolishly didn't export the list of people I was following when I've decided to shut down my own instance and just use an already established one, I've seen other people switching between instances without really losing much in terms of interactions.
auganov 6y ago
If that's how you define "real" followers then you might as well use an IM application instead. IMO the whole point of (Twitter style) social media is having effortless reach and interactions without explicitly sending stuff to anybody. I had over 10 thousand and had many interactions with people but wouldn't feel like bothering them on other platforms (unless it was of the same nature). And the few people who bothered to contact me personally felt a little awkward too. I don't necessarily want to be talking to these people directly. The magic is you just publish whatever you want and people can look at it. They can comment but there's no obligation to respond. Having actual conversations with that many people would be a huge chore. The whole thing isn't about having relationships with people at all but about spreading information. It could be about yourself in which case there would be some implicit one way relationship but that's just one use case.
- searchableguy 6y ago
  Maybe that's why people are feeling lonely. They think their voice should reach thousands of people while they simply don't care about those thousands. How can I expect someone to care about me when I don't care about them beyond a useless number or marketing campaign? People are thinking of others as consumers while expecting to be treated as a friend?

input_sh 6y ago

I second this. While I foolishly didn't export the list of people I was following when I've decided to shut down my own instance and just use an already established one, I've seen other people switching between instances without really losing much in terms of interactions.

auganov 6y ago

If that's how you define "real" followers then you might as well use an IM application instead. IMO the whole point of (Twitter style) social media is having effortless reach and interactions without explicitly sending stuff to anybody. I had over 10 thousand and had many interactions with people but wouldn't feel like bothering them on other platforms (unless it was of the same nature). And the few people who bothered to contact me personally felt a little awkward too. I don't necessarily want to be talking to these people directly. The magic is you just publish whatever you want and people can look at it. They can comment but there's no obligation to respond. Having actual conversations with that many people would be a huge chore. The whole thing isn't about having relationships with people at all but about spreading information. It could be about yourself in which case there would be some implicit one way relationship but that's just one use case.

searchableguy 6y ago
Maybe that's why people are feeling lonely. They think their voice should reach thousands of people while they simply don't care about those thousands. How can I expect someone to care about me when I don't care about them beyond a useless number or marketing campaign? People are thinking of others as consumers while expecting to be treated as a friend?