Advertising-based media gets funding and will work. Due to the nature of funding, any ad-based media will always be bigger and more mainstream. See Youtube, TikTok, Instagram. The content creators are now glorified advertisers who can hawk their attention-economies for money.
You can't beat money, not for mainstream. Those who work for money can make more money, and spend that money to make more money on top of that. That in of itself drives more content and eyeballs, and to some degree higher-quality (or at least, more attention-grabbing) media.
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That's not to say that Mastodon is going to fail. We nerds don't care much about attention and care more about having a discussion space to share ideas. Yes, there's a degree of attention-economy here as well (see any 1980s-era computer magazine: the advertisements for various computer parts are obvious). So there will be a tredmill towards advertising and attention media IMO, even on something like Mastodon. (Ex: Tumblr and Threads might be ActivityPub / Mastodon compatible, what then?).
Recognizing that we're a niche community who prefers to slink away from attention (and indeed: attention-grabbers disgust us rather than intrigues us), that's fine. We just need to build our own little corners of the internet that matches our discussion style and pace.
But don't fall into the trap of believing that Mastodon can displace Twitter (or whatever replaces Twitter in the long term, like Threads or Tumblr or whoever). Appreciate what Mastodon has built, but also recognize its a niche appeal.
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For the non-Mastodon aware, I think the best example of such a discussion site is https://mastodon.gamedev.place/explore, perhaps one of the better Mastodon instances for nerds that match Hacker News's stereotypes.
There's no chance that gamedev.place will ever become a mainstream instance. And that's fine and cool. Their focus on game development and programming issues makes them a pleasant community to interact with. That's the kind of community that only Mastodon can build, that will not work as well on Twitter.
One of the positive aspects about the Mastodon and the fediverse is that, yes, there isn't going to be some mass displacement of Twitter or whatever... but it introduces the ability for all those small niche focused communities to federate and become something larger than the sum of their parts.
Yes, your gamedev Mastodon isn't going to become a mainstream big thing. But it's connected into a broader pool. And that pool has the potential to change the narrative somewhat.
Bigger ad-based social media NEEDS to be big. Their investors need to see growth, so they're always investing in new features to expand their user base or grow into new businesses. If it starts shrinking, it collapses.
The fediverse can simply be. Growth isn't required for survival. Operating a mastodon instance can be quite cheap because all you have to pay for is hardware costs & power, etc. No salaries, no R&D investments. Only build features that users want, there's no hidden incentives.
I see these as two separate things. If you're trying to make money as a journalist, yeah, you need something more than "I compiled a few comments from social media", and that kind of story drives me crazy for how low-effort it is.
However, if you're just writing a personal blog like this, then taking a comment that you found interesting and replying to it in a long-form blog post is participating in the wider community. It's not that much different than replying to someone else's blog post, the only difference is that the original source is short-form instead of long-form.
Personally I did not last long on Mastodon but that's mainly from the standpoint of also never having been super interested in Twitter as a medium. His breakdown of what the average social media feed looks like rings true though. My instagram feed is obnoxious and overrun with the same 12 accounts between ads. I turn off the "recommended" posts every 30 days and will be very sad when those are not optional anymore. I wish I could commit to leaving the platform, but I'm not there yet.
It's still around. I think primarily it's used in Podcasting right now, though a number of entities are trying to get rid of it (Spotify comes to mind specifically)
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:
> 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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
It's surprising to me that forums haven't made a comeback. I guess because forums don't scale well and therefore VC has zero interest in funding them.
Everything I dislike about modern social media was a solved issue on a well-run forum: less spam and self-promotion, a tighter community, more toleration for off-topic discussion. When I look at Mastodon, it still has the same blaring "listen to me!" format that Twitter, Facebook, Reddit, etc. all have.
On the traditional forum, the idea of making a thread purely to "share your thoughts" on the topic-du-jour was anathema. Threads were topic-based, not individual based, and the designated personal spaces (post signatures) also allowed for much more creativity – while still not being the primary focus.
Too disconnected. You are expected to remember to visit multiple forums every day. Think of every forum you are no longer a part of, one day you just forgot about it. What Discord ACTUALLY gives you, is notifications. If forums were as low-friction to join an interact with as Discord, there would be more incentive. Unfortunately centralization usually means centralizing body.
Lemmy is a federated reddit alternative that in some ways is like a modern forum.
That was definitely a factor in the demise of forums, but today it’s possible to get notifications from forums. I agree though that forums require a bit more from their users, which is perhaps why they aren’t as popular today.
Reddit owns the space that forums used to occupy. All forums in one place is more convenient for users. Unfortunately users will pick convenience over the vague centralization risks Every. Single. Time.
The original problem with social media is how content is algo-recommended to people from others they don't directly know, creating a popularity contest often won by dumb things like ragebait, bots, etc. Mastodon doesn't fix the problem, and small forums only avoid it until they become big.
Btw, the old Facebook was pretty benign before pages and various kinds of global recommendations got added. It's still less toxic than Twitter or many others.
Mastodon - or rather the 'fediverse' of which Mastodon is part - 'rewinds the clock on social media' in that it makes it possible to recreate the heavily censored echo chamber which Twitter ended up being under Dorsey, Agarwal, Roth, Gadde and the rest of the old leadership group. At the same time the fediverse makes it possible for those who are censored by the former to create their own instances where they can act in any way they want ranging from erudite conversations on important matters (if only...) to shit-posting memes. The rampant censorship - shunning entire instances because they do not toe the party line in some way - which permeates the fediverse has led and will continue to lead to the formation of disparate islands of federation with hardly any connections between them.
With a bit of luck there will eventually emerge a large enough contingent of federated sites which neither cave to the censorship demands from the 'progressive/left' factions nor devolve into the God & Guns parochialism often seen on the 'conservative/right' side. A place where 'conservative' and 'progressive' subjects can be discussed without the immediate labelling - 'racist!', 'nazi!', 'homophobe!' or 'commie!', 'hippie!', 'purple-haired freak!' - which is all too common on 'social' media. For this to happen people should stop being afraid of being labelled and start standing up for their own ideas instead of simply parroting whatever some influencer-type puts in their mouths.
Quite a few of them crypto enthusiasts and sometimes timeline can look like you've come across some crypto scam page, lol. This scares some people.
What I like about Nostr is its simplicity comparedy to ActivityPub.
The protocol is basically a set of NIPs[1] (Nostr Implementation Possibilities). Each of them describes what features relays and clients may or have to implement.
Out of 99 (currently) NIPs only one (NIP 01) is mandatory and around twelwe are stable\final (the other ones are drafs for now). So to create a basic nosrt relay or clien you have to implement a bare minimum of functionality.
The way it works:
Each user has a public and a private key.
Public one is to be shared with other people and can be published online.
The Private one is your identity you use to "log in" via nostr client of you choice.
As soon as you log in with your private key a client will fetch your notes (and notes of other people you follow if any) from relay(s), assuming you were communicating with these relays before (which will be the case unless you are using more than one client with completely different sets of relays they are talking to).
In Nostr a client (a web app, mobile app, cli tool etc) simple publishes notes to N relays and gets\receives notes from them.
Quite similar to RSS, except you have more than one RSS agregator and feed is being actively pushed to the said agredgator by "publisher".
Also if you are using a client that implemented NIP-72 (like https://satellite.earth/) you basically get a simple reddit alternative
Thanks for the reply, that all makes sense. I remember now logging onto it once and seeing a very barebones feed. Not much discovery or anything to play with. I wish it well.
I'm trying urbit now which I'm impressed with so far, quite a few applications written on top of it already, people with good taste in music sharing stuff at least.
Nosrt will have to find its ways, that for sure. Right not discovery can be done via tags, "trending" topics or people timelines and aggregator clients like https://nostrends.vercel.app/
Nice, thanks. I don't suppose the music is hosted on nostr is it? Urbit seems to prefer pushing everything to s3-compatible buckets (which makes sense if you're already hosting the VM on your VPS, but it's a little dissapointing that the filesystem of this "martian computing" simply takes URLs to external resources, similar problem to not storing large binaries in git) - if I had it my way everything larger than a 4KB text string would be stored as a magnet link to be swarmed by peers but what do I know? :p
Just to return the favor re: music,
https://www.door.link/ - some mixtapes urbit introduced me to, some more ambient then others, good for reading documentation to :)
For most folks, it probably makes more sense to change the interaction model.
Instead of following handles on Mastodon, it makes a lot more sense to follow tags first and then discover and follow interesting handles that post those tags.
Most of us are conditioned now for a "creator" focused social interaction model. Mastodon and the Fediverse -- my sense -- is a "topic" focused social interaction model and also what makes it better.
And it is a Wordpress site with an ActivityPub plugin
For a turn of the wheel
Every Internet site a small node, hosted by friends or family, sharing your thoughts with the world, with far fewer middlemen (for good and for ill)
Until the corporations get enough of their claws into the AP attention stream to co-opt it and become it’s main host and cut it off from its roots to feast on greater portions of everyone’s attention and money
And once again we are watching places like Facebook and Google and Twitter and Amazon devour the Internet
And once that, too has passed
There shall be a new protocol for the people to talk upon
And whatever it is, however it works, ultimately it will be a plugin
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again my unpopular opinion is that Mastadon will never become mainstream outside of tech literate communities - it’s just too complicated to wrap your head around if you’re used to centralised social media sites. There is a certain learning curve and unfortunately I can’t see it taking off for the average non-technical person who just likes to doom scroll in front of the TV
The secret to Mastodon is to use hashtags. Put them in your posts and comments and follow hashtags. This will immediately immerse you in conversations you are interested in and will elicit lots of comments on your posts.
If you don't use hashtags, the only way people will see your posts is if they are following you, but when you first sign up, no one is following you.
I follow dozens of hashtags and only three people because there are few people that I want to see everything they post. Following people increases the noise in your feed.
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