Agreed. One of my issues with Mastodon is that I cannot see content from people I don't subscribe to. Even if all of my follows like/favorite a toot, I won't see it. This is a flawed design. This is the main reason Twitter is better than Mastodon, IMO. It makes my Mastodon feed pretty calm, but it also feels a bit dead, which makes me wonder why I opened the app at all.
For me, the experience of Mastodon is worse than Twitter - essentially, either you follow the global firehose feed, or you're limited to the small amount of content your direct followings create or re-toot.
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.
I have the opposite problem. Almost no one I follow on twitter is on mastodon. But I really hate the first party client and all the toxic “trending items” for engagement.
Another thing I feel that's missing is that mastodon has higher engagement because it has higher engagement. I've been using twitter mostly as a read-only platform. I've tried replying to people or tweeting stuff out only for those messages to disappear into the void. When I toot something on mastodon or reply to someone I'll most likely get a reply. In turn I actually use mastodon as read/write since there's a point to writing.
(2) if I am on one mastodon site, I can not just retweet that post, I have to go to my server and then cut-and-paste a link to that other site.
(3) no quote tweeting, important for vitality.
(4) and most importantly, no ranked/AI-managed feed. Thus it is filled with noise.
In many ways, Mastodon is a purposely janked product because people don't want to make things easy to go viral. But that reduces engagement and interest.
I love this about Mastodon. I hated that Twitter showed people who follow me what I was liking today, and I hated that Twitter constantly showed me stuff people I followed were liking.
If I want my followers to see something, I have to consciously make a post that says "hey check out this thing". It's great! I open Mastodon, look at what the people I'm following are saying or pointing at, and then I close it and get on with doing something else instead of spending half an hour being distracted by Shit Twitter Thinks I Might Like.
I switched from Twitter to Mastodon a month or two ago and mostly like it. The tech platform is fine; not as polished as Twitter but it works and has some nice features like spoiler warnings. But the community is very thin there. Folks are trying and in some subcultures it's pretty great, but I'm finding I'm missing the wider world of Twitter sometimes.
I am a mod on an instance there. Liked at the beginning of the trend, but it has some real problems, so many little irks that makes the real replacement for Twitter horrible.
1. Proper search. I want to search everything that is on the fediverse. Or at least for content that is federated.... Obviously not possible, but this is a big issue already.
2. You can't see followers outside of your instance! Really, try to see who is your friend following/followed and it will show just your instance folks.
3. Do people realize each instance will show different likes/share and comments, as each one is federated with different instances? This is totally nutz in practice.
4. You open a profile and can't see the posts.... because no one from the instance followed that person before and no relay with it... Again, nutz!
And in practice... The problem lies on the lack of quotes, and lack of important companies/news sites/person. I use Twitter to follow some news, see journalists' posts, and that's just impossible with Mastodon.
As much as I'd love to use Mastodon, both times I tried, I got bored and gave up because I couldn't find interesting people to follow. All of the people I do find interesting are only on Twitter.
It's not about the platform, but the people. Mastodon is nice for some of the techy stuff I'm interested in. But it's useless for other things I used to follow on Twitter: hyper-local news and weather, sports banter, and other researchers in my field.
I use it, and sometimes I unfollow people because the timeline gets to be too much to keep track of (so not dead). I have met people off it in real life.
I also have a twitter account, that I use to follow a few (6 maybe?) accounts I care about. I scroll through that every week or two. I like those accounts, but twitter feels needy, constantly screaming for more attention. This is the website, not using an ad blocker.
You say Mastodon is dead, so maybe you like a website constantly pushing you to engage more? I can understand how it would make the site feel more lively, especially for new users.
Mastodon is not the same as Twitter, but there are plenty of us that prefer it. If you want 100000 followers it's the wrong platform, I'll give you that.
> Even the users who 'moved' to Mastodon came back to Twitter again are still posting on Twitter. Why? Because there is no-one on Mastodon even after the Twitter 'exodus'.
There have been many small exoduses, and some people stayed with Mastodon.
I've been trying to use Mastodon more, but the fact is it just doesn't have the same kind of traffic that twitter does. It seems to get dominated by earnest, long-form threads... which are nice, but the chaos of twitter was one of its selling points and their absence is loud.
Have yet to see anything really appealing about mastodon.
Don't think I really liked Twitter either except for the fact that everyone is on it already.
isn't the point of twitter that you follow only who you want and other people's garbage doesn't show up if you don't want it? what makes mastodon different in that regard?
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