A meme I made in reaction to all the tweeps still arguing for tight character limits on #Mastodon, claiming it "forces them to be concise" (ignoring the fact that many tweeps would just break those "concise" sentences up into dozens if not hundreds long tweet-threads...

Seriously, geniuses. No one is holding a gun to your head and forcing you to use the entire character limit. You wanna cut your thought off at 140, 280, or 500 characters? Great! Get to it! Stop using that as a nonsense argument to force OTHERS to truncate their thoughts to match your limited attention span. 🙃

#twittermigration #twitterinvasion

Someone posted a meme using a screenshot from this old music video (without attribution) which reminded me it existed. This is "Carmen" by Stromae, a pretty catchy French musician who has other great songs. Keep in mind this music video came out SEVEN YEARS AGO. Reminding us that #socialmedia toxicity (and of course the cursed obsession with #fame) has been going on for more than a decade, and is only getting worse.

#twitter #twitterinvasion #twittermigration #fkelonmusk

https://youtu.be/UKftOH54iNU

@mistertim @moritz

Thanks for that link. That language crystallises the discussions I’ve been having with people here who think they will convert and contain the #TwitterInvasion by sheer force of argument.

A piece of advice for the #twitterinvasion newbies from someone who has long used both Twitter and mastodon--don't be afraid to explore the content warning options (both the post itself, and if you choose, just the photo), and the visibility of the post--every instance your instance is open to, only your instance, followers only, or only to those directly tagged in the post. It's MUCH easier to take a conversation with someone from a public post into dms without the whole public following you, where you can have an honest conversation without the constant threat of having strangers jump in and lecture you anywhere mid-conversation.

For content creators looking to grow their audience specifically, trust that most mastodon users are more patient than the average Twitter user. Many will make the effort to click "show more" if they're interested despite your content warning, instead of just scrolling past looking for the next zingy dopamine hit.

But also be aware that as there is NO *ONE* MASTODON - - if you join a server and find you don't like it, or don't like the other servers it interact with, you can always leave that server and start a new account somewhere else! Or make entirely new accounts and keep yourself entirely separate between them. This is common practice among mastodon users (I'm told) and isn't thought of as deceptive, unless you start having straight up fake conversations with yourself.

One more thing to remember is that, there's no such thing as fame on mastodon. Some accounts obviously have more than others, but acting high and mighty on here does not impress longtime mastodonites, and will most likely just make you LOSE followers. Appeal to people genuinely, see your followers as people not just viewcounts, and use this as an opportunity to reorient your perception of social media and remind yourself that, behind all our screens, we're still real people, and most of us are doing our best. It's easy to make snap judgements and go for the jugular - - much harder to have a lengthy conversation with someone, get to know their point fully before you make your decision, and definitely a lot more work. But, I think in the end, worth it.