10 ms·

Mastodon provides the highest (over 12%) engagement under posts

194 points by ZacnyLos 3y ago

Zemtomo 3y ago
And this is now good or bad or?
- krapp 3y ago
  You're allowed to form your own opinions.
stolenmerch 3y ago
"Network error. There was an error when trying to load this page. This could be due to a temporary problem with your internet connection or this server."
- garganzol 3y ago
  Try to refresh the page, the error seems to be intermittent.
garganzol 3y ago
Mastodon is such a revelation. It is the internet I want to be in.
- davemp 3y ago
  What’s the best way to get started on mastodon? I looked into a bit after it released, but all of the weird manifestos on home servers kept me from making an account.
  - tambourine_man 3y ago
    Don't sweat about it. You either completely identify with a server or you go with .social or .cloud In the first Mastodon wave I thought about setting my own server with my domain and it sounded awesome, but of course, I never did. In this second one, I just went the mainstream way and was done.
    - marcosdumay 3y ago
      > go with .social or .cloud What impact does it have if you change your mind later? I have personally never looked, but the people talking here about actual conversations with a small number of people make it sound interesting.
      - roomey 3y ago
        You can move, it brings your followers and details, but I think it looses your post history. I just picked one from my geographic region, all good!
      - omoikane 3y ago
        You might end up having to create accounts on multiple servers if the servers decide to not federate with each other. (I am on doll.social and mastodon.social, and found that it's impossible for users from the former to follow users on the latter.)
  - krapp 3y ago
    The way I do it: Go to https://joinmastodon.org/servers https://joinmastodon.org/servers or https://instances.social/ https://instances.social/ and find one or more instances you want to join. Use the same account name (but not password, obviously) for all of them. Think of instances as subreddits, but each subreddit is on its own separate server. You can manage those identities though a third party app or just a folder of browser bookmarks. If you're already on Twitter, you can find anyone on your follow list who is also on Mastodon and follow them. You'll wind up with a json file you'll need to upload for each account. It's easy to join or leave instances so there's nothing to worry about. The better way would be to manage your own identity server but i'm not there yet.
  - egypturnash 3y ago
    1. get a mastodon.social account 2. start following people 3. if you notice that a lot of people you are following are on a particular server, consider getting an account there and using the account migration tools to move all your current followers over there 4. alternatively, set up your own server, maybe just for you, maybe for some of your friends and/or family, with your own set of rules and a manifesto that is perfectly sensible and not weird at all because it is yours.
    - timbit42 3y ago
      More importantly, follow hashtags. This is the real power of Mastodon.
    - davemp 3y ago
      So I'd basically have to hope posts from people I'm interested in filter their way onto the server I start on and sort of crawl around until I find communities I'd actually want to participate in? How does the cross pollination between servers work? I haven't seen a good description on it besides that you can DM people across servers. The content is also structured in a twitter microblog + replies style. So I'm seeing basically private forums of old, but twitter format and some weird soft discovery thing. Overall I like the idea of federation, but mastadon seems half baked. I signed up and I'll get it a try for a week or so though.
  - garganzol 3y ago
    You can just use one of the root servers like mastodon.social or mastodon.online and start from there.
  - donio 3y ago
    Once you are on you can try following some hashtags on subjects you are interested in to get your feed jumpstarted.
  - rsynnott 3y ago
    Instance choice largely doesn’t matter (caveat: there are some instances which are widely defederated). Probably easiest to start on .social, and you can always move later.
- stiltzkin 3y ago
  I found that with Nostr.
rmdes 3y ago
Not surprised, even with Blue on Twitter the engagement is close to Nothing, even more on "sensitive" topics such as Ukraine or climate.
- garganzol 3y ago
  Twitter threads get diluted with 3rd party materials I never subscribed to. This kills the focus and any desire to participate in discussions. Twitter feels so fake and cringy nowadays - a distant departure from the hero of a new internet age it used to be.
- renewiltord 3y ago
  Article has 3x-4x engagement on Twitter as Mastodon, actually. So you are having contradictory experiences. The engagement rate against followers is lower, but Twitter dwarfs everything else in engagement for the author. In the end, Elon Musk seems to have come through.
- olah_1 3y ago
  I follow 400 people on Twitter and only see the same 10 accounts non-stop. Nobody else. Where is everyone else I follow? Honestly, I think they're mostly shadowbanned or de-ranked. Who knows why.
  - rsynnott 3y ago
    Have you checked if they’re still tweeting? I still have a twitter account, to hold the username on the off chance that Musk gets bored and divests to spend more time with his car tunnels. At least among my social circle this is rather common; if I look at the ‘following’ tab on that account it’s rather quiet.
bogwog 3y ago
Facebook shadow bans accounts that mention climate change? Wtf?
- browningstreet 3y ago
  I have a climate change project and post on Twitter, YouTube and a few other platforms. The commercial platforms definitely shadow ban and quiet any climate related content, even if it aligns strongly with prevailing scientific lines and the “official notes” attached to content. I’m trying to work around that for now, but it’s a challenging hurdle and makes any community/follower building an exceedingly long term prospect. I’m guessing it’s overwhelmingly controversial. See any climate thread or comment section on major platforms on scientific climate content. It’s nasty.
- Slava_Propanei 3y ago
  [dead]
furyofantares 3y ago
Engagement / Followers is going to be largely ranked by what proportion of your followers are new, I think. I would expect about 0% of your Facebook followers from 10 years ago to engage, if they even log in anymore. I think the absolute graphs are pretty convincing that there's a lot more going on than this, but it's gotta be a big factor.
- mym1990 3y ago
  This doesn’t make sense. A good portion of your engagement is going to come from people who are familiar with you, whether they be friends or “followers”. A ton of my old high school friends(accounts must be 10-15 years old now) still post on FB, to my surprise, as they start families or new jobs or whatnot. On top of this, it is much more likely that a new account or follower is a bot nowadays.
  - furyofantares 3y ago
    Maybe the bot point is true, I don't know. Sure a ton of your old friends still post on FB, it's still very popular. But I'm sure a ton don't. They still count in the follower count of anyone they followed. And the ones who still post on FB have had a decade of following things but still only have one person's worth of attention; they're not engaging everyone they followed. A new Mastodon follower, by comparison, is very likely to still be logging in and engaging with you, given they just chose to engage with you by logging in and following. And they don't have 10 years worth of other accounts they've followed vying for their attention on that platform.
soared 3y ago
Mastodon had by far the lowest number of followers (lowest denominator). I’d expect regardless of platform, that the lowest follower count one would have the highest engagement rate. If your page hasn’t reached viral/etc status then only hardcore fans will have seemed out your page to follow it - so on mastodon no semi-interested people have followed who would be unlikely to comment.
- mypastself 3y ago
  It could also be that the proportion of followers likely to engage in scientific topics is higher on a platform that (still) attracts more tech-savvy users.
- yardie 3y ago
  I like it. The Twitter algorithm loads up my TL with viral posts. Posts from users I actually follow just get lost in the churn. I don’t care for viral posts. I want the things I read to be informative. It doesn’t need to drive clicks or make a lot of revenue from me.
  - loloquwowndueo 3y ago
    On twitter i use only the “following” tab, not the “for you” one, and other than promoted posts, I only get things my direct followees posted or retweeted. Then again my list is very heavily curated - I follow fewer than 50 people and ruthlessly block accounts I find objectionable or just annoying.
    - throwaway290 3y ago
      Same, now that they fixed it and it's no longer reset to "for you" every time the "following" tab works wonders for me.
    - yardie 3y ago
      My follow list is ~200. But even under following every 3rd tweet is a sponsored ad. There is still a lot more noise than signal in this new Twitter.
swayvil 3y ago
Speaking as a person with abnormal opinions, are we bemoaning our inability to discuss hot topics? Or are we bemoaning our inability to voice facts? I mean, what's getting choked here : free speech or right speech?
- Jedd 3y ago
  Are you conflating opinions and facts in that first paragraph?
  - swayvil 3y ago
    Let's call it "right speech". That covers both "facts" and "important opinions".
    - Jedd 3y ago
      Are you conflating 'right' with 'abnormal' in that sentence then? I feel you're teasing us with a potentially contentious position on .. something, when you could be just stating that position(s).
      - swayvil 3y ago
        I summed my point in that final question. It was pretty clear.
- neltnerb 3y ago
  I believe that in this case we are talking about a not very scientific measure of how many followers still log in to their account, get exposed to this organically (in a time based feed where their followers definitely see their post with no interference), and then also feel comfortable liking or commenting on it. I'm not sure what that implies, if anything other than what I just said, but if you want to discuss "hot topics" I have no idea what you think is stopping you. If people think you suck they'll just stop reading what you say, same as real life. It's no big deal.
mrj 3y ago
I think that part of this can be explained by the behavior of likes. If I like on Mastodon, I know that's not contributing to the algorithm and showing up in my friend's feed with my name on it. On Mastodon, if I enjoyed something I can share that with the author without all sorts of side effects. That leads to higher visible engagement on Mastodon. I believe this is why Twitter had to share the viewer stats--people have stopped liking as frequently. I really think that sharing activity without an explicit user-driven action is poisonous to the platforms that do it.
- devjab 3y ago
  I know my Facebook feed died in the years following their change to not have it post my friends ridiculous photos and silly posts. I don’t really miss those, so maybe they would’ve gone away anyway, but as someone who’s only on Facebook because it’s where Blood Bowl and Kill Team events get arranged (for whatever reason), as in, someone who doesn’t follow anything, it’s been years since my feed wasn’t completely dead. I’ll admit that I’m friends with two Facebook warriors, and while it was sometimes enjoyable I eventually ended up muting them after they met each other in some political discussion and I felt like I had unlocked some sort of achievement. (They don’t know each other).
  - skinnymuch 3y ago
    My FB is unfortunately too active. Some specific communities and types of people still use it. Outside programming, my interests of left wing issues + community [building] have me primarily interact with women and sites like FB are still over represented in their usage. I don’t think I have a friend who I didn’t meet online who uses FB. It’s actually quite annoying. I’ve been trying to move a community I manage away from FB, FBM for a while too. > they met each other in some political discussion and I felt like I had unlocked some sort of achievement. (They don’t know each other). Funny
kitsunesoba 3y ago
In the short time I've used Mastodon I've had more interactions than I did in years on Twitter, even as someone with no blog presence or anything of the sort. That along with the chronological feed that shows only people I'm following have made it a rather pleasant experience.
- sp332 3y ago
  The chronological feed has been mentioned a few times, but I wanted to point out that most servers have a “local” feed you can browse as well, which is also chronological and shows all the posts made on the server. This can be a way to keep up with what people are talking about, without committing to following a ton of people, or getting lost in a randomly-changing timeline.
- timbit42 3y ago
  I only follow a few accounts on Mastodon, but I follow dozens of hashtags I am interested in. This way I see what I am interested in instead of every post from an account where I may only be interested in some of the things that account posts.
tambourine_man 3y ago
I like Mastodon, but I feel it hosts just one of my bubbles (dev). I miss the scientists, journalists, comedians and even, though it pains me even to type this, the politicians.
- Waterluvian 3y ago
  I think that’s up to you. My Mastodon is all lawyers, comedians, and journalists. I specifically don’t follow tech people.
  - tambourine_man 3y ago
    To a degree, yes. But a lot of the people I used to follow don't even know what Mastodon is, let alone have the inclination to register. I used movetodon.org, so I follow everyone that did move. It's just that a lot of them didn't.
    - neltnerb 3y ago
      There are definitely comedians and authors and artists on Mastodon, but perhaps not name brands from NBC who make it a brand home. Expecting a one to one drop in network swap seems like a consistent barrier, no shade intended. I don't agree with it but I guess I get it. My feed has a little tech but mostly science, authors, artists, and ground level activists. But almost no one I already knew, and of them one is a roommate and one is an amazing but very local author I already supported on Patreon. I'm actually meeting new people and actually getting to know a lot about them. It's much more interesting to see individual real humans doing things to make the world better than to just read them commenting on it. I'm kind of done following big names personally. The added value is overblown relative to how awesome strangers actually often are, plus strangers don't have a communications team filtering out anything too interesting.
      - tambourine_man 3y ago
        That's part of the magic of Mastodon, for sure. Following real people, instead of social media characters. And a lot less hatraed and gossip, at least for now. If you miss seeing big names, though, and let's not pretend there's no appeal in that, Mastodon is lacking.
mjr00 3y ago
The methodology is "(likes + shares + comments)/followers", and the two platforms that allegedly provide the highest engagement are the ones with an order of magnitude fewer followers. A more likely explanation is that fewer followers means higher engagement, which totally makes sense; for a larger social network account with 100k+ followers, many of those will be bots and people who follow anyone and everyone without really caring. A smaller account will only have followers who care. I don't think there's anything specific about Mastodon here other than it being a smaller social network so you naturally have far fewer followers. In either case, this is a single account talking about a single post, and shouldn't be used to generalize different levels of engagement across social networks.
- JamesLeonis 3y ago
  I think this phenomenon happens to all early social services. A large social network might have the normal 90/9/1 rule apply, but in the early adoption space your userbase skews toward the 9/1 portion. It will be interesting to watch if it regresses to the mean as it grows.
- jason-phillips 3y ago
  > I don't think there's anything specific about Mastodon here These numbers tell me that: 1. Mastodon users are engaged, with an active mind. 2. The grifters/leeches/scammers and their bot legions haven't invaded yet.
  - latexr 3y ago
    > The grifters/leeches/scammers and their bot legions haven't invaded yet. Unfortunately, they have already started. In early May several instances limited mastodon.social due to a large amount of cryptocurrency spam. https://mastodon.social/@Gargron/110310670042459716 https://mastodon.social/@Gargron/110310670042459716 I haven’t followed the case closely so can’t provide much insight, but a web search might return more information.
    - kixiQu 3y ago
TheAceOfHearts 3y ago
How do you make friends and find community on Mastodon?
- EamonnMR 3y ago
  Follow people, and look at who's posts they share. Follow hashtags. Browse your local feed if you joined a topical instance. Occasionally browse the global posts firehose.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- timbit42 3y ago
  Follow hashtags and put hashtags on your posts and comments so people following those hashtags will see your posts and comments.
Jedd 3y ago
I've treated facebook as a write-only medium for several years, and probably 50% of my posts there to my relatively small network (< 100) have been split between news articles about facebook management/algorithms/etc being harmful, and droll triteness. I feel my propagation suffers as a result. A decade ago I experimented with dual-posting to FB and ... whatever that Ruby-based alternative was, that Zuck famously invested in, but to which I have zero memory of the name right now. A friend described it at the time as 'shouting into the void'. I still thought it was worthwhile to duplicate posts manually -- automatic federation was obviously never going to happen, so it was an ethical duty to ease others into the new world. I think we were perhaps a decade too early. I'm on mastodon now, of course, although only as a consumer. And I somehow missed the myspace epoch entirely. So witnessing in real-time the implosion of twitter is quite the delight.
- commoner 3y ago
  > A decade ago I experimented with dual-posting to FB and ... whatever that Ruby-based alternative was, that Zuck famously invested in, but to which I have zero memory of the name right now. I think you're referring to Diaspora. - Website: https://diasporafoundation.org/ https://diasporafoundation.org/ - Source code: https://github.com/diaspora/ https://github.com/diaspora/ - Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diaspora_(social_network) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diaspora_(social_network)
endorphine 3y ago
About 5 years ago, I set up a Mastodon instance in a DigitalOcean VPN, for me and some friends. It never really caught up; I have been occasionally upgrading but almost never used it. A few days ago I finally put some effort to follow interesting accounts. The ability to control what I see (e.g. exclude boosts, no personalized timeline etc.) made me realize how much more engaging it was compared to, let's say, Twitter. It was pretty refreshing to see a no-nonsense timeline and to be able to tailor the interface to my needs (I used the 3-column layout). I haven't been on Twitter for a while, but I think I'll give Mastodon a try as a replacement.
- philipov 3y ago
  Imagine, getting force-fed posts by a company whose business goal is to eliminate your agency in favor of their algorithm isn't very engaging. Add user agency back in, and you get engagement. It's almost like they're the same thing!
  - charcircuit 3y ago
    >Add user agency back in What do you mean by this? Twitter has following, likes, watch time, Not interested in this tweet, etc which give you agency on your recommendations. Mastadon gives you less agency over your feed because it has a primitive recommendation system which isn't able to find as relevant posts as twitter's can.
    - philipov 3y ago
      What I mean is that people who actively participate in the service are more engaged than those who passively prune the output of a recommendation engine. Agency arises from having to do it yourself.
- amitp 3y ago
  Agreed, having control over what you see makes a big difference. I've been using Twitter this way for several years and it's been nice ("Lists" feature and TweetDeck).
- 3y ago
explorer83 3y ago
Am I the only one that doesn't find this metric meaningful?
- trident5000 3y ago
  I started a book club and my engagement is 100%!
rvz 3y ago
*For Posts about climate and biodiversity. Which a very small amount of users on the platform who cares about that. Now the numbers for overall engagement compared with the rest of the other social networks? This time no dismissals like 'You can't compare Mastodon to <INSERT VERY FAMOUS SOCIAL NETWORK>'
keskival 3y ago
This is similar to my own subjective experience across these social networks. Mastodon posts are actually read and engaged with, while on other social networks it seems they aren't. If you look at your own feed on these networks you will notice how you are yourself more engaged with the feed on Mastodon because it's largely about people you have chosen to follow.
kazinator 3y ago
That's a lot of exuberant confidence from the engagement caused by one person's single post. Also, author admits to being (or suspecting being) shadow-banned by Facebook when posting about climate, citing the belief that her post about those topics reaches only a small percentage of followers.
frithsun 3y ago
The mastodon team literally hard codes political censorship into its codebase. I recommend an alternative to mastodon with greater openness that you may wish to check out: twitter.com.
- commoner 3y ago
  Mastodon does no such thing. In fact, Mastodon has been used to host communities of all political persuasions. Where are you getting this from?
  - neltnerb 3y ago
    Good thing it's open source so that they can just cite the line where the hard coding is. I assume pleroma (sp?) or truth social or whatever it was that uses Mastodon code posted many articles about the evidence they found when they removed it from being hardcoded in the open source code they worked from. Or is it still in their hard coding too? Eesh. I think this person must be talking about manual blocking by moderators that happened so fast it seemed automatic? Seems like they just joined the wrong server.
    - commoner 3y ago
      > I assume pleroma (sp?) or truth social or whatever it was that uses Mastodon code posted many articles about the evidence they found when they removed it from being hardcoded in the open source code they worked from. Pleroma isn't a fork of Mastodon and I can't find Truth Social claiming anything like this about Mastodon's code, so I don't think this is it. Perhaps Mastodon is being confused with a different social network that used to have a hard-coded "slur filter": https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33615058 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33615058
      - neltnerb 3y ago
        Ah, so I made two mistakes that I guess ended up being right. Pleroma is a fork of Mastodon, it's not the site I was thinking of though. I was thinking of Parler, which has nothing to do with Mastodon. Truth Social, on the other hand, definitely tried to use Mastodon code. It was pretty funny drama when they had to release some of their code under the GPL. https://www.theverge.com/2021/10/29/22752850/mastodon-trump-truth-social-network-open-source-gab-legal-notice https://www.theverge.com/2021/10/29/22752850/mastodon-trump-...
trident5000 3y ago
So like....engagement that's in line with any small niche platform where mostly enthusiasts use it? Comparing it to Instagram is ridiculous.
nologic01 3y ago
I cant imagine a thoughtful, informed person with a common denominator of morality actually endorse adtech social media and surveillance capitalism (irrespective of political views). People of all stripes and colors got trapped there, pure and simple. But the escape hatch is now open thanks to amazing vision and work by pioneers. They mostly happen to have certain "views". Altruism is strong with that crowd. But that is actually irrelevant in the scheme of things. The big issues of our time will come to be debated in the fediverse and people will re-engage as this post already hints. The precise manner remains to be seen. Polarization and online strife cannot be wished away. Moderation will have to become a true civic skill. But its pretty obvious that having to fight manipulative algorithms and dark patterns and "being the product" will never work better in this respect than the what you see is what you get fediverse.
- busterarm 3y ago
  I don't know. I think everyone on Hacker News would consider themselves to be "thoughtful, informed people with a common denominator of morality" but most people here are using some kind of big social media. Even if it's LinkedIn. Even here we pay the "small price" of Y Combinator posts being boosted and comment-free in our feeds. And any time subjects like homelessness or rent control or zoning come out, most of HN loses their effing minds and the seething anger (about rent prices in NY/SF) and hatred of the poor washes over the whole thread like a tidal wave. The way I see it, Mastodon is just the place where all of the smug, self-righteous people have gone -- to the benefit of the rest of us.
  - nologic01 3y ago
    Some early adopters of mastodon have high expectations that the absence of adtech will create a utopia. Ofcourse that wont happen. Online platforms had problems way before adtech. Some also have plain wrong experctations e.g regarding privacy. You also have enormous inertia and network effects to overcome for people to switch. Many simply disengage or opt for the least bad option. In any case most flavors of the fediverse not ready for mass market from a ux perspective. What is interesting about the fediverse at the current stage is that it has established beyond doubt the viability of flexible new patterns for how to organize social platforms. An enormous step but it will require many more before its the new normal.
Slava_Propanei 3y ago
[dead]
s1k3s 3y ago
So someone shared a link on various social media sites, counted the likes they received, and now this headline goes around the internet as if it was some serious research? We can do better guys
busterarm 3y ago
a.k.a the most nutters. I can't see praising this as a good thing. The vast majority _of people_ do not post things online. Now you just have an extremely small community of talkers. Imagine instead that social media was a house party. In the case of Mastodon, only 5 people showed up, but they talk endlessly about every (or their specific niche) topic. You wouldn't want to be there.
skymast 3y ago
And you know, even if it didn't. they would say it did. Because the narrative needs twitter to fail.
yafbum 3y ago
This kind of metric is tricky to interpret: one where both numerator (likes etc) and denominator (followers) are "good things", so that a ratio going up can mean good or bad. This person is testing just one piece of content, but in aggregate, I'm not sure you would see the same. Recommended content on other platforms makes it possible to have lots of engagement even with zero followers, to "bootstrap" your audience in ways that Mastodon doesn't support. The biggest difference between these platforms is how much, as a content creator, you "own" your followership. On Mastodon there isn't a lot of second guessing by the platform - your stuff goes to your followers about the same every time. Most other platforms treat followers as a kind of vanity metric that gives content producers a way to measure up and monetize off platform, but it's not a primary driver of content distribution anymore - neither are your followers guaranteed to see what you post, nor do you have to get followers to help your content be seen by anyone. It sounds user-hostile that the main social media platforms "don't give users what they want", by more or less ignoring their expressed desire to follow someone, but it's the opposite. Platforms that are dominant today grew their audience by following this playbook through the 2010's, because in the end, it works for users. Now what it does pose, from the content producers point of view, is fairness problems. A lot of the whining about bad performance is in fact just because - sorry folks - the content plainly suck, and rather than show sucky content to followers, the platforms show better content. But it's also true that it's easier to find ways to characterize the algorithms as unfair to an individual producer. The platforms grow the pie in aggregate but as a producer you lose control. The "fediverse" offers control and transparency, but what remains to be seen is whether it can do so while remaining an engaging platform for a sizeable enough chunk of the population to matter.
remram 3y ago
This is a weird take: I have the least engagement from Mastodon, but I also have the least followers on Mastodon (even less), therefore "Mastodon provides the highest engagement".
- timbit42 3y ago
  They key to Mastodon is hashtags. Ensure your posts have relevant hashtags and people who are following hashtags will see them even if they're not following your account. This way, people who are interested in your post will be more likely to like, boost or comment. Alternatively, follow hashtags that you are interested in. I follow dozens of hashtags but only follow a few accounts of people that I know I want to see all their posts.
  - remram 3y ago
    That part of my comment was meant as a paraphrase of the original tweet, perhaps I should have put quotes. I am not looking for engagement tips, just pointing out that OP's measure of engagement is bogus.
tortoise_in 3y ago
No one comment on mustodon. Google plus was far better than all these things. But yeah it was Google plus at last
- timbit42 3y ago
  If you want comments on Mastodon, put hashtags on your posts and comments. This way, even if no one is following you, they will see your post due to the hashtags. People on Mastodon follow hashtags more than people.
fennecfoxy 3y ago
Breaking news, niche topics highly engage those that fit into that niche. More at 7.

194 points by ZacnyLos 3y ago

Zemtomo 3y ago

And this is now good or bad or?

krapp 3y ago
You're allowed to form your own opinions.

stolenmerch 3y ago

"Network error. There was an error when trying to load this page. This could be due to a temporary problem with your internet connection or this server."

garganzol 3y ago
Try to refresh the page, the error seems to be intermittent.

garganzol 3y ago

Mastodon is such a revelation. It is the internet I want to be in.

davemp 3y ago
What’s the best way to get started on mastodon? I looked into a bit after it released, but all of the weird manifestos on home servers kept me from making an account.
- tambourine_man 3y ago
  Don't sweat about it. You either completely identify with a server or you go with .social or .cloud In the first Mastodon wave I thought about setting my own server with my domain and it sounded awesome, but of course, I never did. In this second one, I just went the mainstream way and was done.
  - marcosdumay 3y ago
    > go with .social or .cloud What impact does it have if you change your mind later? I have personally never looked, but the people talking here about actual conversations with a small number of people make it sound interesting.
    - roomey 3y ago
      You can move, it brings your followers and details, but I think it looses your post history. I just picked one from my geographic region, all good!
    - omoikane 3y ago
      You might end up having to create accounts on multiple servers if the servers decide to not federate with each other. (I am on doll.social and mastodon.social, and found that it's impossible for users from the former to follow users on the latter.)
- krapp 3y ago
  The way I do it: Go to https://joinmastodon.org/servers https://joinmastodon.org/servers or https://instances.social/ https://instances.social/ and find one or more instances you want to join. Use the same account name (but not password, obviously) for all of them. Think of instances as subreddits, but each subreddit is on its own separate server. You can manage those identities though a third party app or just a folder of browser bookmarks. If you're already on Twitter, you can find anyone on your follow list who is also on Mastodon and follow them. You'll wind up with a json file you'll need to upload for each account. It's easy to join or leave instances so there's nothing to worry about. The better way would be to manage your own identity server but i'm not there yet.
- egypturnash 3y ago
  1. get a mastodon.social account 2. start following people 3. if you notice that a lot of people you are following are on a particular server, consider getting an account there and using the account migration tools to move all your current followers over there 4. alternatively, set up your own server, maybe just for you, maybe for some of your friends and/or family, with your own set of rules and a manifesto that is perfectly sensible and not weird at all because it is yours.
  - timbit42 3y ago
    More importantly, follow hashtags. This is the real power of Mastodon.
  - davemp 3y ago
    So I'd basically have to hope posts from people I'm interested in filter their way onto the server I start on and sort of crawl around until I find communities I'd actually want to participate in? How does the cross pollination between servers work? I haven't seen a good description on it besides that you can DM people across servers. The content is also structured in a twitter microblog + replies style. So I'm seeing basically private forums of old, but twitter format and some weird soft discovery thing. Overall I like the idea of federation, but mastadon seems half baked. I signed up and I'll get it a try for a week or so though.
- garganzol 3y ago
  You can just use one of the root servers like mastodon.social or mastodon.online and start from there.
- donio 3y ago
  Once you are on you can try following some hashtags on subjects you are interested in to get your feed jumpstarted.
- rsynnott 3y ago
  Instance choice largely doesn’t matter (caveat: there are some instances which are widely defederated). Probably easiest to start on .social, and you can always move later.
stiltzkin 3y ago
I found that with Nostr.

rmdes 3y ago

Not surprised, even with Blue on Twitter the engagement is close to Nothing, even more on "sensitive" topics such as Ukraine or climate.

garganzol 3y ago
Twitter threads get diluted with 3rd party materials I never subscribed to. This kills the focus and any desire to participate in discussions. Twitter feels so fake and cringy nowadays - a distant departure from the hero of a new internet age it used to be.
renewiltord 3y ago
Article has 3x-4x engagement on Twitter as Mastodon, actually. So you are having contradictory experiences. The engagement rate against followers is lower, but Twitter dwarfs everything else in engagement for the author. In the end, Elon Musk seems to have come through.
olah_1 3y ago
I follow 400 people on Twitter and only see the same 10 accounts non-stop. Nobody else. Where is everyone else I follow? Honestly, I think they're mostly shadowbanned or de-ranked. Who knows why.
- rsynnott 3y ago
  Have you checked if they’re still tweeting? I still have a twitter account, to hold the username on the off chance that Musk gets bored and divests to spend more time with his car tunnels. At least among my social circle this is rather common; if I look at the ‘following’ tab on that account it’s rather quiet.

bogwog 3y ago

Facebook shadow bans accounts that mention climate change? Wtf?

browningstreet 3y ago
I have a climate change project and post on Twitter, YouTube and a few other platforms. The commercial platforms definitely shadow ban and quiet any climate related content, even if it aligns strongly with prevailing scientific lines and the “official notes” attached to content. I’m trying to work around that for now, but it’s a challenging hurdle and makes any community/follower building an exceedingly long term prospect. I’m guessing it’s overwhelmingly controversial. See any climate thread or comment section on major platforms on scientific climate content. It’s nasty.
Slava_Propanei 3y ago
[dead]

furyofantares 3y ago

Engagement / Followers is going to be largely ranked by what proportion of your followers are new, I think. I would expect about 0% of your Facebook followers from 10 years ago to engage, if they even log in anymore. I think the absolute graphs are pretty convincing that there's a lot more going on than this, but it's gotta be a big factor.

mym1990 3y ago
This doesn’t make sense. A good portion of your engagement is going to come from people who are familiar with you, whether they be friends or “followers”. A ton of my old high school friends(accounts must be 10-15 years old now) still post on FB, to my surprise, as they start families or new jobs or whatnot. On top of this, it is much more likely that a new account or follower is a bot nowadays.
- furyofantares 3y ago
  Maybe the bot point is true, I don't know. Sure a ton of your old friends still post on FB, it's still very popular. But I'm sure a ton don't. They still count in the follower count of anyone they followed. And the ones who still post on FB have had a decade of following things but still only have one person's worth of attention; they're not engaging everyone they followed. A new Mastodon follower, by comparison, is very likely to still be logging in and engaging with you, given they just chose to engage with you by logging in and following. And they don't have 10 years worth of other accounts they've followed vying for their attention on that platform.

soared 3y ago

Mastodon had by far the lowest number of followers (lowest denominator). I’d expect regardless of platform, that the lowest follower count one would have the highest engagement rate. If your page hasn’t reached viral/etc status then only hardcore fans will have seemed out your page to follow it - so on mastodon no semi-interested people have followed who would be unlikely to comment.

mypastself 3y ago
It could also be that the proportion of followers likely to engage in scientific topics is higher on a platform that (still) attracts more tech-savvy users.
yardie 3y ago
I like it. The Twitter algorithm loads up my TL with viral posts. Posts from users I actually follow just get lost in the churn. I don’t care for viral posts. I want the things I read to be informative. It doesn’t need to drive clicks or make a lot of revenue from me.
- loloquwowndueo 3y ago
  On twitter i use only the “following” tab, not the “for you” one, and other than promoted posts, I only get things my direct followees posted or retweeted. Then again my list is very heavily curated - I follow fewer than 50 people and ruthlessly block accounts I find objectionable or just annoying.
  - throwaway290 3y ago
    Same, now that they fixed it and it's no longer reset to "for you" every time the "following" tab works wonders for me.
  - yardie 3y ago
    My follow list is ~200. But even under following every 3rd tweet is a sponsored ad. There is still a lot more noise than signal in this new Twitter.

swayvil 3y ago

Speaking as a person with abnormal opinions, are we bemoaning our inability to discuss hot topics? Or are we bemoaning our inability to voice facts? I mean, what's getting choked here : free speech or right speech?

Jedd 3y ago
Are you conflating opinions and facts in that first paragraph?
- swayvil 3y ago
  Let's call it "right speech". That covers both "facts" and "important opinions".
  - Jedd 3y ago
    Are you conflating 'right' with 'abnormal' in that sentence then? I feel you're teasing us with a potentially contentious position on .. something, when you could be just stating that position(s).
    - swayvil 3y ago
      I summed my point in that final question. It was pretty clear.
neltnerb 3y ago
I believe that in this case we are talking about a not very scientific measure of how many followers still log in to their account, get exposed to this organically (in a time based feed where their followers definitely see their post with no interference), and then also feel comfortable liking or commenting on it. I'm not sure what that implies, if anything other than what I just said, but if you want to discuss "hot topics" I have no idea what you think is stopping you. If people think you suck they'll just stop reading what you say, same as real life. It's no big deal.

mrj 3y ago

I think that part of this can be explained by the behavior of likes. If I like on Mastodon, I know that's not contributing to the algorithm and showing up in my friend's feed with my name on it. On Mastodon, if I enjoyed something I can share that with the author without all sorts of side effects. That leads to higher visible engagement on Mastodon. I believe this is why Twitter had to share the viewer stats--people have stopped liking as frequently. I really think that sharing activity without an explicit user-driven action is poisonous to the platforms that do it.

devjab 3y ago
I know my Facebook feed died in the years following their change to not have it post my friends ridiculous photos and silly posts. I don’t really miss those, so maybe they would’ve gone away anyway, but as someone who’s only on Facebook because it’s where Blood Bowl and Kill Team events get arranged (for whatever reason), as in, someone who doesn’t follow anything, it’s been years since my feed wasn’t completely dead. I’ll admit that I’m friends with two Facebook warriors, and while it was sometimes enjoyable I eventually ended up muting them after they met each other in some political discussion and I felt like I had unlocked some sort of achievement. (They don’t know each other).
- skinnymuch 3y ago
  My FB is unfortunately too active. Some specific communities and types of people still use it. Outside programming, my interests of left wing issues + community [building] have me primarily interact with women and sites like FB are still over represented in their usage. I don’t think I have a friend who I didn’t meet online who uses FB. It’s actually quite annoying. I’ve been trying to move a community I manage away from FB, FBM for a while too. > they met each other in some political discussion and I felt like I had unlocked some sort of achievement. (They don’t know each other). Funny

kitsunesoba 3y ago

In the short time I've used Mastodon I've had more interactions than I did in years on Twitter, even as someone with no blog presence or anything of the sort. That along with the chronological feed that shows only people I'm following have made it a rather pleasant experience.

sp332 3y ago
The chronological feed has been mentioned a few times, but I wanted to point out that most servers have a “local” feed you can browse as well, which is also chronological and shows all the posts made on the server. This can be a way to keep up with what people are talking about, without committing to following a ton of people, or getting lost in a randomly-changing timeline.
timbit42 3y ago
I only follow a few accounts on Mastodon, but I follow dozens of hashtags I am interested in. This way I see what I am interested in instead of every post from an account where I may only be interested in some of the things that account posts.

tambourine_man 3y ago

I like Mastodon, but I feel it hosts just one of my bubbles (dev). I miss the scientists, journalists, comedians and even, though it pains me even to type this, the politicians.

Waterluvian 3y ago
I think that’s up to you. My Mastodon is all lawyers, comedians, and journalists. I specifically don’t follow tech people.
- tambourine_man 3y ago
  To a degree, yes. But a lot of the people I used to follow don't even know what Mastodon is, let alone have the inclination to register. I used movetodon.org, so I follow everyone that did move. It's just that a lot of them didn't.
  - neltnerb 3y ago
    There are definitely comedians and authors and artists on Mastodon, but perhaps not name brands from NBC who make it a brand home. Expecting a one to one drop in network swap seems like a consistent barrier, no shade intended. I don't agree with it but I guess I get it. My feed has a little tech but mostly science, authors, artists, and ground level activists. But almost no one I already knew, and of them one is a roommate and one is an amazing but very local author I already supported on Patreon. I'm actually meeting new people and actually getting to know a lot about them. It's much more interesting to see individual real humans doing things to make the world better than to just read them commenting on it. I'm kind of done following big names personally. The added value is overblown relative to how awesome strangers actually often are, plus strangers don't have a communications team filtering out anything too interesting.
    - tambourine_man 3y ago
      That's part of the magic of Mastodon, for sure. Following real people, instead of social media characters. And a lot less hatraed and gossip, at least for now. If you miss seeing big names, though, and let's not pretend there's no appeal in that, Mastodon is lacking.

mjr00 3y ago

The methodology is "(likes + shares + comments)/followers", and the two platforms that allegedly provide the highest engagement are the ones with an order of magnitude fewer followers. A more likely explanation is that fewer followers means higher engagement, which totally makes sense; for a larger social network account with 100k+ followers, many of those will be bots and people who follow anyone and everyone without really caring. A smaller account will only have followers who care. I don't think there's anything specific about Mastodon here other than it being a smaller social network so you naturally have far fewer followers. In either case, this is a single account talking about a single post, and shouldn't be used to generalize different levels of engagement across social networks.

JamesLeonis 3y ago
I think this phenomenon happens to all early social services. A large social network might have the normal 90/9/1 rule apply, but in the early adoption space your userbase skews toward the 9/1 portion. It will be interesting to watch if it regresses to the mean as it grows.
jason-phillips 3y ago
> I don't think there's anything specific about Mastodon here These numbers tell me that: 1. Mastodon users are engaged, with an active mind. 2. The grifters/leeches/scammers and their bot legions haven't invaded yet.
- latexr 3y ago
  > The grifters/leeches/scammers and their bot legions haven't invaded yet. Unfortunately, they have already started. In early May several instances limited mastodon.social due to a large amount of cryptocurrency spam. https://mastodon.social/@Gargron/110310670042459716 https://mastodon.social/@Gargron/110310670042459716 I haven’t followed the case closely so can’t provide much insight, but a web search might return more information.
  - kixiQu 3y ago

TheAceOfHearts 3y ago

How do you make friends and find community on Mastodon?

EamonnMR 3y ago
Follow people, and look at who's posts they share. Follow hashtags. Browse your local feed if you joined a topical instance. Occasionally browse the global posts firehose.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
timbit42 3y ago
Follow hashtags and put hashtags on your posts and comments so people following those hashtags will see your posts and comments.

Jedd 3y ago

I've treated facebook as a write-only medium for several years, and probably 50% of my posts there to my relatively small network (< 100) have been split between news articles about facebook management/algorithms/etc being harmful, and droll triteness. I feel my propagation suffers as a result. A decade ago I experimented with dual-posting to FB and ... whatever that Ruby-based alternative was, that Zuck famously invested in, but to which I have zero memory of the name right now. A friend described it at the time as 'shouting into the void'. I still thought it was worthwhile to duplicate posts manually -- automatic federation was obviously never going to happen, so it was an ethical duty to ease others into the new world. I think we were perhaps a decade too early. I'm on mastodon now, of course, although only as a consumer. And I somehow missed the myspace epoch entirely. So witnessing in real-time the implosion of twitter is quite the delight.

commoner 3y ago
> A decade ago I experimented with dual-posting to FB and ... whatever that Ruby-based alternative was, that Zuck famously invested in, but to which I have zero memory of the name right now. I think you're referring to Diaspora. - Website: https://diasporafoundation.org/ https://diasporafoundation.org/ - Source code: https://github.com/diaspora/ https://github.com/diaspora/ - Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diaspora_(social_network) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diaspora_(social_network)

endorphine 3y ago

About 5 years ago, I set up a Mastodon instance in a DigitalOcean VPN, for me and some friends. It never really caught up; I have been occasionally upgrading but almost never used it. A few days ago I finally put some effort to follow interesting accounts. The ability to control what I see (e.g. exclude boosts, no personalized timeline etc.) made me realize how much more engaging it was compared to, let's say, Twitter. It was pretty refreshing to see a no-nonsense timeline and to be able to tailor the interface to my needs (I used the 3-column layout). I haven't been on Twitter for a while, but I think I'll give Mastodon a try as a replacement.

philipov 3y ago
Imagine, getting force-fed posts by a company whose business goal is to eliminate your agency in favor of their algorithm isn't very engaging. Add user agency back in, and you get engagement. It's almost like they're the same thing!
- charcircuit 3y ago
  >Add user agency back in What do you mean by this? Twitter has following, likes, watch time, Not interested in this tweet, etc which give you agency on your recommendations. Mastadon gives you less agency over your feed because it has a primitive recommendation system which isn't able to find as relevant posts as twitter's can.
  - philipov 3y ago
    What I mean is that people who actively participate in the service are more engaged than those who passively prune the output of a recommendation engine. Agency arises from having to do it yourself.
amitp 3y ago
Agreed, having control over what you see makes a big difference. I've been using Twitter this way for several years and it's been nice ("Lists" feature and TweetDeck).
3y ago

explorer83 3y ago

Am I the only one that doesn't find this metric meaningful?

trident5000 3y ago
I started a book club and my engagement is 100%!

rvz 3y ago

*For Posts about climate and biodiversity. Which a very small amount of users on the platform who cares about that. Now the numbers for overall engagement compared with the rest of the other social networks? This time no dismissals like 'You can't compare Mastodon to <INSERT VERY FAMOUS SOCIAL NETWORK>'

keskival 3y ago

This is similar to my own subjective experience across these social networks. Mastodon posts are actually read and engaged with, while on other social networks it seems they aren't. If you look at your own feed on these networks you will notice how you are yourself more engaged with the feed on Mastodon because it's largely about people you have chosen to follow.

kazinator 3y ago

That's a lot of exuberant confidence from the engagement caused by one person's single post. Also, author admits to being (or suspecting being) shadow-banned by Facebook when posting about climate, citing the belief that her post about those topics reaches only a small percentage of followers.

frithsun 3y ago

The mastodon team literally hard codes political censorship into its codebase. I recommend an alternative to mastodon with greater openness that you may wish to check out: twitter.com.

commoner 3y ago
Mastodon does no such thing. In fact, Mastodon has been used to host communities of all political persuasions. Where are you getting this from?
- neltnerb 3y ago
  Good thing it's open source so that they can just cite the line where the hard coding is. I assume pleroma (sp?) or truth social or whatever it was that uses Mastodon code posted many articles about the evidence they found when they removed it from being hardcoded in the open source code they worked from. Or is it still in their hard coding too? Eesh. I think this person must be talking about manual blocking by moderators that happened so fast it seemed automatic? Seems like they just joined the wrong server.
  - commoner 3y ago
    > I assume pleroma (sp?) or truth social or whatever it was that uses Mastodon code posted many articles about the evidence they found when they removed it from being hardcoded in the open source code they worked from. Pleroma isn't a fork of Mastodon and I can't find Truth Social claiming anything like this about Mastodon's code, so I don't think this is it. Perhaps Mastodon is being confused with a different social network that used to have a hard-coded "slur filter": https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33615058 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33615058
    - neltnerb 3y ago
      Ah, so I made two mistakes that I guess ended up being right. Pleroma is a fork of Mastodon, it's not the site I was thinking of though. I was thinking of Parler, which has nothing to do with Mastodon. Truth Social, on the other hand, definitely tried to use Mastodon code. It was pretty funny drama when they had to release some of their code under the GPL. https://www.theverge.com/2021/10/29/22752850/mastodon-trump-truth-social-network-open-source-gab-legal-notice https://www.theverge.com/2021/10/29/22752850/mastodon-trump-...

trident5000 3y ago

So like....engagement that's in line with any small niche platform where mostly enthusiasts use it? Comparing it to Instagram is ridiculous.

nologic01 3y ago

I cant imagine a thoughtful, informed person with a common denominator of morality actually endorse adtech social media and surveillance capitalism (irrespective of political views). People of all stripes and colors got trapped there, pure and simple. But the escape hatch is now open thanks to amazing vision and work by pioneers. They mostly happen to have certain "views". Altruism is strong with that crowd. But that is actually irrelevant in the scheme of things. The big issues of our time will come to be debated in the fediverse and people will re-engage as this post already hints. The precise manner remains to be seen. Polarization and online strife cannot be wished away. Moderation will have to become a true civic skill. But its pretty obvious that having to fight manipulative algorithms and dark patterns and "being the product" will never work better in this respect than the what you see is what you get fediverse.

busterarm 3y ago
I don't know. I think everyone on Hacker News would consider themselves to be "thoughtful, informed people with a common denominator of morality" but most people here are using some kind of big social media. Even if it's LinkedIn. Even here we pay the "small price" of Y Combinator posts being boosted and comment-free in our feeds. And any time subjects like homelessness or rent control or zoning come out, most of HN loses their effing minds and the seething anger (about rent prices in NY/SF) and hatred of the poor washes over the whole thread like a tidal wave. The way I see it, Mastodon is just the place where all of the smug, self-righteous people have gone -- to the benefit of the rest of us.
- nologic01 3y ago
  Some early adopters of mastodon have high expectations that the absence of adtech will create a utopia. Ofcourse that wont happen. Online platforms had problems way before adtech. Some also have plain wrong experctations e.g regarding privacy. You also have enormous inertia and network effects to overcome for people to switch. Many simply disengage or opt for the least bad option. In any case most flavors of the fediverse not ready for mass market from a ux perspective. What is interesting about the fediverse at the current stage is that it has established beyond doubt the viability of flexible new patterns for how to organize social platforms. An enormous step but it will require many more before its the new normal.

Slava_Propanei 3y ago

[dead]

s1k3s 3y ago

So someone shared a link on various social media sites, counted the likes they received, and now this headline goes around the internet as if it was some serious research? We can do better guys

busterarm 3y ago

a.k.a the most nutters. I can't see praising this as a good thing. The vast majority _of people_ do not post things online. Now you just have an extremely small community of talkers. Imagine instead that social media was a house party. In the case of Mastodon, only 5 people showed up, but they talk endlessly about every (or their specific niche) topic. You wouldn't want to be there.

skymast 3y ago

And you know, even if it didn't. they would say it did. Because the narrative needs twitter to fail.

yafbum 3y ago

This kind of metric is tricky to interpret: one where both numerator (likes etc) and denominator (followers) are "good things", so that a ratio going up can mean good or bad. This person is testing just one piece of content, but in aggregate, I'm not sure you would see the same. Recommended content on other platforms makes it possible to have lots of engagement even with zero followers, to "bootstrap" your audience in ways that Mastodon doesn't support. The biggest difference between these platforms is how much, as a content creator, you "own" your followership. On Mastodon there isn't a lot of second guessing by the platform - your stuff goes to your followers about the same every time. Most other platforms treat followers as a kind of vanity metric that gives content producers a way to measure up and monetize off platform, but it's not a primary driver of content distribution anymore - neither are your followers guaranteed to see what you post, nor do you have to get followers to help your content be seen by anyone. It sounds user-hostile that the main social media platforms "don't give users what they want", by more or less ignoring their expressed desire to follow someone, but it's the opposite. Platforms that are dominant today grew their audience by following this playbook through the 2010's, because in the end, it works for users. Now what it does pose, from the content producers point of view, is fairness problems. A lot of the whining about bad performance is in fact just because - sorry folks - the content plainly suck, and rather than show sucky content to followers, the platforms show better content. But it's also true that it's easier to find ways to characterize the algorithms as unfair to an individual producer. The platforms grow the pie in aggregate but as a producer you lose control. The "fediverse" offers control and transparency, but what remains to be seen is whether it can do so while remaining an engaging platform for a sizeable enough chunk of the population to matter.

remram 3y ago

This is a weird take: I have the least engagement from Mastodon, but I also have the least followers on Mastodon (even less), therefore "Mastodon provides the highest engagement".

timbit42 3y ago
They key to Mastodon is hashtags. Ensure your posts have relevant hashtags and people who are following hashtags will see them even if they're not following your account. This way, people who are interested in your post will be more likely to like, boost or comment. Alternatively, follow hashtags that you are interested in. I follow dozens of hashtags but only follow a few accounts of people that I know I want to see all their posts.
- remram 3y ago
  That part of my comment was meant as a paraphrase of the original tweet, perhaps I should have put quotes. I am not looking for engagement tips, just pointing out that OP's measure of engagement is bogus.

tortoise_in 3y ago

No one comment on mustodon. Google plus was far better than all these things. But yeah it was Google plus at last

timbit42 3y ago
If you want comments on Mastodon, put hashtags on your posts and comments. This way, even if no one is following you, they will see your post due to the hashtags. People on Mastodon follow hashtags more than people.

fennecfoxy 3y ago

Breaking news, niche topics highly engage those that fit into that niche. More at 7.