@Antonio That is soon four years ago and I have no clue anymore how I learned about Mastodon.
However, may I suggest a follow up study? I administrate a Mastodon instance and 90% or more of the people making an account never use it (after a few days). It would help the growth of Mastodon enormously if we understood why and could reduce this percentage only a little bit.
Wow this is very interesting i was not aware of this problem!
It would be super cool to talk to these people and understand exactly what did not work for them.
@Antonio It seems like this is typical for all/many Mastodon instances.
They sign up with an email address. So we could reach them.
@robertwgehl I would not be surprised if it were similar on the commercial silos. But I am not talking about people posting lightly. Nearly all of these cases have never posted, only made an account, sometimes they posted a bit in the beginning.
Given that these people at least signed up, they would be more likely to be future users than random people. So I think they are an important group to try to understand.
I joined FB and didn't find it useful and didn't use it, then a friend joined years later and sent something there and drew me back in.
I joined 🐦, and didn't find it useful, years later I switched to real name and used it to promote my research.
Mastodon, I joined twice, didn't use it. Then Musk happened, and I found a lot of active people and now have a useful feed.
My experience is, I never found it useful from the beginning.
António Vasconcelos
Open Science Feed
Robert W. Gehl
Lukas Fuchsgruber