Eight years ago Lance Ulanoff had a problem. William
Shatner could not find him on Mastodon.
His distress is understandable, relatable even. Who wouldn’t want to
be found by Captain Kirk himself! The
I feel like the majority of people I see quit Mastodon do so because the platform (and Federation in general) don’t coddle their egos. With no algorithm to game and ingratiate themselves on everyone’s timelines, they make a public exit and talk about how broken Mastodon is and offer their takes on what it needs to be. Which, unsurprisingly, sounds like a non-Elon-ed Twitter.
I love Mastodon. I love discovering new people and accounts by happenstance (and not spoon-feeding).
From a content creation standpoint, it does kind of suck. There’s no ego about it. The system doesn’t carry your content to nearly as many eyes, even accounting for the reduced audience. Discovery and suggestion algorithms are extremely effective, and if I’m trying to get my stuff to reach as much of my audience as possible, I wouldn’t only be on Mastodon. I’m not just talking about mediocre content either - even extremely motivating stuff in the niche doesn’t generate even a small fraction of engagement as regular social media sites.
For some people, this is a benefit - it’s a poorly commodified system. For small content creators trying to build an audience and generate paid subscribers, it’s not enough. Most creators on Fediverse are contributing as a free or non-profit hobby.
I’m not talking about ads. Let’s say I’m a video essayist and I publish my essays on PeerTube. The recommendation algorithms aren’t going to show the free content I make to nearly as many people as if I put them on YouTube or Tiktok. And overall, that translates to fewer Patreon subscribers, FAR fewer.
That’s still an ad, you want money for a product you’re offering. The only difference is in your case there’s an extra step between impression and conversion.
I’m so sorry but you really need to reevaluate this because it categorizes like 80% of authentic internet content as ads. Is a graphic artist who works commission posting their art on social media an ad, if they’re doing it to hunt for commission? A streamer who posts their funniest clips on social media to get more paid subscribers? A game dev promo-ing features in their next game patch?
Self promotion is a form of advertising, doubly so if it’s done for the purpose of attracting revenue via some means. People can opt into it if they want via subscribing/following but it’s still advertising.
So yes most “authentic” content is just people advertising themselves. I would prefer not to see that unless I have opted into it.
I’d be totally cool with that. I’ll take quality discussion with less people to talk to over huge quantities of slop and rage bait any day of the week.
I think we need to let go of this idea that online platforms need to be as big as possible or be considered huge failures. This is a lie told by the owners of corporate-run and owned social media that needs to grow at the expense of basically everything else, because they somehow managed to convince investors to pour money into what is effectively a shitty glorified message board and they expect a return on that investment. There used to be thousands of niche forums all over the internet before corporate social media and link aggregators effectively staged a hostile takeover and homogenised everything, they did numbers that would look pathetic in comparison to daily users of X or Facebook, but they still had a busy feel balanced with a sense of community. It doesn’t actually take that many people to achieve that, it’s a fraction of what some people will have you believe.
I would be totally fine with that tbh. Though I wonder if we’ll ever get to the place where a Mastodon client somehow incorporates an algorithmic timeline for those who want that?
I didn’t know it was so old. I joined in Nov 2022 and check it about as much as I check any social media. I don’t really post and just boost here and there.
Edit: Now that bluesky is (seemingly) taking off, I wonder how much of a chance it has to survive.
Bluesky is still pretty centralized and venture-capital backed. There’s been discussions about monetization. It’s only a matter of time before it enshittifies.
Yup, that’s a major reason why people didn’t want to leave twitter. They’d built a following that they didn’t want to rebuilt.
I know people who hated elon Musk and had accounts on other microblogging platforms, but continued to post on twitter because that’s where they got their fill of engagement.
Shifting away from reddit to lemmy is fundamentally easier than it is from Twitter to mastadon. I think it’s part in due to the nature of the type of social media platforms they are.
I feel like the majority of people I see quit Mastodon do so because the platform (and Federation in general) don’t coddle their egos. With no algorithm to game and ingratiate themselves on everyone’s timelines, they make a public exit and talk about how broken Mastodon is and offer their takes on what it needs to be. Which, unsurprisingly, sounds like a non-Elon-ed Twitter.
I love Mastodon. I love discovering new people and accounts by happenstance (and not spoon-feeding).
From a content creation standpoint, it does kind of suck. There’s no ego about it. The system doesn’t carry your content to nearly as many eyes, even accounting for the reduced audience. Discovery and suggestion algorithms are extremely effective, and if I’m trying to get my stuff to reach as much of my audience as possible, I wouldn’t only be on Mastodon. I’m not just talking about mediocre content either - even extremely motivating stuff in the niche doesn’t generate even a small fraction of engagement as regular social media sites.
For some people, this is a benefit - it’s a poorly commodified system. For small content creators trying to build an audience and generate paid subscribers, it’s not enough. Most creators on Fediverse are contributing as a free or non-profit hobby.
I’d prefer for my social media to not be full of ads for “content”.
I’m not talking about ads. Let’s say I’m a video essayist and I publish my essays on PeerTube. The recommendation algorithms aren’t going to show the free content I make to nearly as many people as if I put them on YouTube or Tiktok. And overall, that translates to fewer Patreon subscribers, FAR fewer.
That’s still an ad, you want money for a product you’re offering. The only difference is in your case there’s an extra step between impression and conversion.
I’m so sorry but you really need to reevaluate this because it categorizes like 80% of authentic internet content as ads. Is a graphic artist who works commission posting their art on social media an ad, if they’re doing it to hunt for commission? A streamer who posts their funniest clips on social media to get more paid subscribers? A game dev promo-ing features in their next game patch?
Self promotion is a form of advertising, doubly so if it’s done for the purpose of attracting revenue via some means. People can opt into it if they want via subscribing/following but it’s still advertising.
So yes most “authentic” content is just people advertising themselves. I would prefer not to see that unless I have opted into it.
We may have to just accept that it won’t ever be a big platform for this very reason and just have fun there as a niche site.
I’d be totally cool with that. I’ll take quality discussion with less people to talk to over huge quantities of slop and rage bait any day of the week.
I think we need to let go of this idea that online platforms need to be as big as possible or be considered huge failures. This is a lie told by the owners of corporate-run and owned social media that needs to grow at the expense of basically everything else, because they somehow managed to convince investors to pour money into what is effectively a shitty glorified message board and they expect a return on that investment. There used to be thousands of niche forums all over the internet before corporate social media and link aggregators effectively staged a hostile takeover and homogenised everything, they did numbers that would look pathetic in comparison to daily users of X or Facebook, but they still had a busy feel balanced with a sense of community. It doesn’t actually take that many people to achieve that, it’s a fraction of what some people will have you believe.
I would be totally fine with that tbh. Though I wonder if we’ll ever get to the place where a Mastodon client somehow incorporates an algorithmic timeline for those who want that?
This has long existed. It’s an Open Social Web client called SoraSns
TIL lol
I didn’t know it was so old. I joined in Nov 2022 and check it about as much as I check any social media. I don’t really post and just boost here and there.
Edit: Now that bluesky is (seemingly) taking off, I wonder how much of a chance it has to survive.
Bluesky is still pretty centralized and venture-capital backed. There’s been discussions about monetization. It’s only a matter of time before it enshittifies.
Yup, that’s a major reason why people didn’t want to leave twitter. They’d built a following that they didn’t want to rebuilt.
I know people who hated elon Musk and had accounts on other microblogging platforms, but continued to post on twitter because that’s where they got their fill of engagement.
Shifting away from reddit to lemmy is fundamentally easier than it is from Twitter to mastadon. I think it’s part in due to the nature of the type of social media platforms they are.