4 ms·

I think it depends on what you mean by _celebrities_. For me, the appeal of Twitter is being able to interact with various communities (such as the legal twitt

I think it depends on what you mean by _celebrities_. For me, the appeal of Twitter is being able to interact with various communities (such as the legal twitter community). There are people who are fairly popular in that sphere, that I really like being able to see their thoughts on various issues and even ask the occasional question (Popehat, Akiva Cohen, Mike Dunford, Greg Doucette), etc. Are these people celebrities? Kinda, in their niche, yea. In the broader sense of the word not really. But all of those people have moved to Mastodon. So, I think that kind of reinforces the point. It's more communities within Twitter that move. That move is relatively sticky. And there are people within that community that are highly connected in that community ("celebrities" within the niche), and when they move it tends to solidify the move of the community.

rsynnott 4y ago
Yeah, that's another point that I think probably goes in Mastodon's favour. Most of the people who could be loosely classed as celebrities that I follow either are posting to both, or have flat-out moved. But they generally are niche "celebrities", not people with millions of followers.
noirbot 4y ago
Yea, I think this is the biggest thing. Most "real" celebrities can still post on Twitter or whatever. If Elon Musk or Lebron James or Barack Obama posts something important, I'll probably see it wherever they decide to post it. They could just yell random things at passersby on the street and I'd probably find out about it if it was interesting enough. The value of Twitter a lot of the time is less the big name Blue Checks, but the long tail of niche blue checks. I bet a massive amount of people on Twitter have no idea who Paul Graham is, or Popehat, or Marco Arment, or even dril, but they all have some number of people who were mostly on Twitter because of them primarily, so if they and their friends all move to something else, their fans will follow. In some ways, it's not too different from TV hosts or journalists of note. People will watch John Oliver on whatever TV network he's on. For certain niches, no one cares where they write/speak as long as it's not so insanely paywalled or otherwise cumbersome that it's a problem to follow them to it.

rsynnott 4y ago

Yeah, that's another point that I think probably goes in Mastodon's favour. Most of the people who could be loosely classed as celebrities that I follow either are posting to both, or have flat-out moved. But they generally are niche "celebrities", not people with millions of followers.

noirbot 4y ago

Yea, I think this is the biggest thing. Most "real" celebrities can still post on Twitter or whatever. If Elon Musk or Lebron James or Barack Obama posts something important, I'll probably see it wherever they decide to post it. They could just yell random things at passersby on the street and I'd probably find out about it if it was interesting enough. The value of Twitter a lot of the time is less the big name Blue Checks, but the long tail of niche blue checks. I bet a massive amount of people on Twitter have no idea who Paul Graham is, or Popehat, or Marco Arment, or even dril, but they all have some number of people who were mostly on Twitter because of them primarily, so if they and their friends all move to something else, their fans will follow. In some ways, it's not too different from TV hosts or journalists of note. People will watch John Oliver on whatever TV network he's on. For certain niches, no one cares where they write/speak as long as it's not so insanely paywalled or otherwise cumbersome that it's a problem to follow them to it.