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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.

> 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.

I don't think an experiment with a single post on a single topic with accounts on vastly different scales can tell you either of those things.

There are a few holes glaring holes in this methodology but just one is that she has 8.7k followers in Mastodon since joining in late 2022, while she has 241k followers on twitter since 2009. It's not surprising that the users that followed her in the last 5 months are more engaged than the ones that followed her in the previous 14 years. Are the people that just aren't interested in her content or that just stopped using twitter after a 14 year span necessarily grifters/leeches/spammers?

I don't know about 1 but simply due to scale 2 is probably true, however this experiment isn't saying much.

Anecdotally, I've noticed a much higher engagement % on Mastodon compared to Twitter with my own posts as well.

On Twitter, with over 8K followers, I get very good engagement in general (imo). But on Mastodon, with only 1.7K followers, I'll get engagement of almost 50% that of Twitter whenever I duplicate posts. If I had 8K followers on Maston and if those numbers continued the same trend I'd probably drop Twitter altogether.

Off-topic I also find the folks that comment on my posts on Mastodon to be friendly by default. It's a very refreshing vibe.

For a much smaller audience, I'm seeing a very active user base for the topics at hand. It also helps that I tag my posts in Mastodon (like people do on Instagram) to help increase reach a little bit.

Depending on your social circle, it may be the case that a lot of twitter followers have essentially gone dead. I still have a Twitter account (I don’t want anyone taking the username; the account is over 16 years old, and, who knows, Twitter may sort itself out one day) but no longer tweet; if I look at that account, most of the people I followed also appear to be no longer tweeting much (though, who knows, maybe the ‘Following’ tab is just broken).

Go on Youtube or Twitter and you'll see that small creators always have a much higher engagement ratio than larger ones. It's quite natural that a small community is more involved than a large one.

Actually, it’s even simpler than that. Mathematically, if you are in a network with 100 people, the platform can show you a higher proportion of posts before you hit that Dunbar number or limit of how many posts are going to read. If the same network has 1 million people, and you have thousands of connections there, then obviously, each person’s posts are seen less and there is more filtering happening. The real question is, how much advertising, memes, cat videos in general garbage the network pushes into your feed.

Incidentally this is also the mundane reason behind the Women in Tech controversy. Women in tech reported more asshole behavior by men because the probability of encountering a man was higher, than in other industries, and not because tech has more assholes (if anything I have found tech people to be nicer and meeker in general than others, like comics or lawyers). If the ratio was more 50/50 then this phenomenon would go away. (Also, tech workers get a lot of money and prestige which is why it makes the news more than, say women in plumbing or carpentry.)

> 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

I haven’t followed the case closely so can’t provide much insight, but a web search might return more information.

I'm not saying anyone was wrong to limit mastodon.social, but for comparison: since Twitter was bought, I have been periodically checking the main feed Twitter shows an non-logged-in visitor, maybe a couple times a week. The "large amount of cryptocurrency spam" my instance saw from mastodon.social was maybe ~15% of what that couple-times-a-week visit showed on Twitter (to say nothing about my old account's poor DMs). Sure, anecdotal as heck, but I'd unscientifically class Mastodon's current spam problem as approximately equivalent to the level of spam one gets as an Instagram user being tagged into posts for sunglasses or diet pills etc.

> The grifters/leeches/scammers and their bot legions haven't invaded yet.

They are, unfortunately, on their way; just had my first crypto spam on Mastodon the other day.

Another fairly reasonable hypothesis is the difference in account age. If you've been on Twitter for a decade, a lot of the accounts following you are just dead: people who no longer use the platform, who forgot their passwords, etc. The followers you have on Mastodon are more likely to be engaged because the vast majority joined in the past 12 months or so.

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.

I don't buy the bot explanation, even if 10% of followers are bots it wouldn't change the calculation.

The more likely explanation is feed manipulation by as demonstrated most prominently by FB where "following" is barely more than a suggestion to the algorithm.

This is just a single user with a single post so you can't draw any useful conclusions,

but... The main difference with Mastodon here is there is no fancy algorithm. It's just a chronological timeline.

So as a user, you quickly unfollow people who waste your time with uninteresting posts. Whereas on algorithm-driven services (literally every other social network) the algorithm will suppress posts of people you don't engage with, but leave you showing as following them (even though you don't see their posts)

So with mastodon no matter how big the network gets, you'll always have fewer followers (as bored people unfollow you) but they will be more engaged (as your posts are never hidden)

Also note that this is observation by one person from one post. I was hoping it was a larger scale study of sorts that covers users who did not have as large a follower base to begin with.

This one is easily explained by the fact that Mastodon is young and people who migrated are the most active social media users.

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.

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!

>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.

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.

The real power of Mastodon is in following hashtags, more so than following accounts.

Interesting. I’ll try it out if I can remember my info

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).

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.

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.

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.

Same, now that they fixed it and it's no longer reset to "for you" every time the "following" tab works wonders for me.

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.

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.

Having your "page" or "account" reach viral status doesn't matter as much on Mastodon. Most Mastodon users follow hashtags more than accounts. If you use a hashtag that lots of people are already following, lots of people will see it even if no one is following your account.

This makes a lot of sense because instead of seeing everything an account posts, most of which may not be what your are interested in, following hashtags means you will see all posts related to your interests, even if you're not following any accounts.

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.

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).

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

> 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.

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!

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.)

The way I do it:

Go to https://joinmastodon.org/servers or 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.

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.

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.

More importantly, follow hashtags. This is the real power of Mastodon.

Once you are on you can try following some hashtags on subjects you are interested in to get your feed jumpstarted.

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.

You can just use one of the root servers like mastodon.social or mastodon.online and start from there.

I found that with Nostr.

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.

Facebook shadow bans accounts that mention climate change? Wtf?

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.

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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.

I think that’s up to you. My Mastodon is all lawyers, comedians, and journalists. I specifically don’t follow tech people.

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.

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.

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.

I use Mastodon for social networking. Not for consuming news or media. Things where it being a two way street is nice.

I actually just have manual bookmarks to Twitter pages of the like half dozen people I think are at all worth reading. And then I use libredirect (https://libredirect.github.io/) to avoid hitting the actual Twitter website so I don't have to log in (don't have an account anyway) and don't see nonsense recommended posts.

I assume that will break with API changes, at which point I just won't read those people anymore unless they cross post on Mastodon. But it's worked well so far.

Obviously eliminates any possibility of trying to win the comments section, but I don't really see that as a true negative.

> And then I use libredirect (https://libredirect.github.io/) to avoid hitting the actual Twitter website so I don't have to log in (don't have an account anyway) and don't see nonsense recommended posts.

Thank you for this! I know of and use some of these already, just from luck of discovery, and having a compilation of several more is so freeing!

Maybe the distinction between social network and media consumption needs to be heightened and that will ultimately be a great thing.

But there was a period where I could do it all on Twitter and it was convenient. Perhaps it was never meant to be, as the incentives are kind of twisted.

I was looking for something like movetodon.org to find the accounts I follow on Twitter, but it currently is down due to Twitter's inane API changes.

Anyone know of another service?

I think that window has closed.

They key to Mastodon isn't to follow accounts, but to follow hashtags. This way you see posts that you are interested in without having to find accounts you are interested in. Most accounts post other stuff I'm not interested in so that's just excess noise I don't need. With hashtags, I see what I want and none of what I don't want.

With this[1] and checking servers like journahost, that'd solve more than half your problems. You can follow hashtags, so follow like #comedy too.

1. https://github.com/nathanlesage/academics-on-mastodon

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

*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>'

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.

> 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/

- Source code: https://github.com/diaspora/

- Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diaspora_(social_network)

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?

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.

Are you conflating opinions and facts in that first paragraph?

Let's call it "right speech". That covers both "facts" and "important opinions".

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).

I summed my point in that final question. It was pretty clear.

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

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".

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

I started a book club and my engagement is 100%!

"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."

Try to refresh the page, the error seems to be intermittent.

How do you make friends and find community on Mastodon?

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.

Follow hashtags and put hashtags on your posts and comments so people following those hashtags will see your posts and comments.

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

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

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.

And you know, even if it didn't. they would say it did.

Because the narrative needs twitter to fail.

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.

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

More at 7.

And this is now good or bad or?

You're allowed to form your own opinions.

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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.

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.

Mastodon does no such thing. In fact, Mastodon has been used to host communities of all political persuasions. Where are you getting this from?

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.

> 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

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-...

I'm not sure how Pleroma (written in Elixir) could be a fork of Mastodon (written in Ruby). Both Pleroma and Mastodon implement ActivityPub, but that alone doesn't make either one a fork.

Truth Social does use Mastodon's code with the federation features stripped out like Gab, but what I meant was that I couldn't find any reports of Truth Social claiming to have evidence of hard-coded political censorship in Mastodon (other than the generic blocking features found in most social networks).

Mastodon itself doesn't, but maybe he's referring to Tusky, a popular FOSS Mastodon client, preventing its users from logging in with an account tied to an alt-right instance (gab and a few others I think). They used to also filter any content coming from these accounts but I can't it in the code so they must have removed that part.

As for the login block itself it's there: https://github.com/tuskyapp/Tusky/blob/01b3cb3a53b1e08ed26e7...

For a while F-Droid considered forcing all clients to implement such a ban but in the end they decided against it, see https://f-droid.org/en/2019/07/16/statement.html

Gab is not a Mastodon instance because its code base has been altered to the point that it no longer federates with any Mastodon instance or fediverse service, so that line of criticism is outdated at best. While Tusky has a great user interface, it is just one of many Mastodon clients and it is not developed by the Mastodon team.

Also, Gab has a lot of content that is prohibited on Twitter, but allowed on a self-hosted instance of Mastodon. Mastodon would actually be of "greater openness" than Twitter in the case of Gab's content.

Link to where the censorship occurs, please?