Joshua MarshallSo two questions I have about the Mastodon migration. We're about to learn how much highly watched accounts drive Twitter's broader audience. Here's what I mean. I am stunned at how many people I know have already set up Mastodon accounts in the last 48 hrs. Like it seems like almost everyone I know has set one up. Probably I'm not going to notice a lot who haven't yet. I'm mainly reacting to how many I see. But still, it's a huge number.
2/ The people I'm talking about tend to be very high follower accounts - at least in the news/politics space. But on their own they account for a minuscule number of accounts. A few hundred people. Totally meaningless in terms of Twitters scale. So we're about to see whether it just doesn't matter at all, or whether that small number of high profile accounts pulls over a big chunk of audience or whether no one cares and it's just a few hundred people talking to each other. I don't know.
3/ The other issue is journo/news/politics Twitter is just one thing and not terribly large. I'm always fascinated by how many Twitters there are. Virology twitter, History Twitter, Black Twitter, Tech Twitter, Comics Twitter. There are whole ecosystems of Twitter. And I have zero idea whether anything comparable is happening in those ecosystems. I'm curious to find out the answers to both.
Bharath@joshtpm Science Twitter seems to be migrating rapidly. Lots of prominent accounta starting to set up shop here
nadezhda@rbhar90 @joshtpm Infosec.twitter, econtwitter & journalists.twitter have set up their own instances that are populating rapidly. A bunch of astronomers have set up an instance & a humanities instance is in the works.
Because of the ease to add follows from multiple instances, historodons are organizing through lists of accounts regardless of the instance they’re on. They can organize historical periods,topics & events (like historians at the movies) easily by hashtags on Mast v4.0