Esteban MoroNov 6, 2022
[This post contains an error in the number of Twitter users. Check the new one here: https://mastodon.social/@estebanmoro/109302968305953555 ] Something big is happening in Mastodon over the weekend. Here is my graph, updated. Right now Mastodon is growing ~3 times faster than Twitter.
Show threadPatrick McLaughlinNov 6, 2022

@estebanmoro also, I wonder how much the mastodon growth has been suppressed by people trying to join, and finding the instances they try to join closed.

I’ve seen a few people saying that they *tried* to join mastodon and couldn’t because it was closed — the subtleties of multiple instances and needing to select one and so on seems a little daunting at first. At least for those of us who’ve not had to think about in when singing up for FB or Twitter, etc.

Show threadEsteban MoroNov 6, 2022
@McPatrick Yes, the sign-in process is not trivial. That creates a lot of friction for the normal user. This is why I feel a lot of bias towards tech+academia in Mastodon. Hopefully, other groups will come in the end if the process gets easier.
Show threadgren.elliotNov 7, 2022
@estebanmoro @McPatrick indeed. Friendly error messages instead of "403" or "forbidden" would help a lot. Now I'm here it looks more promising than I expected. 😃 Really hope it gains more traction as an open source, decentralised model for critical stuff is much nicer😱
Show threadPatrick McLaughlinNov 7, 2022

@grenelliot as a former tech writer, I am *not* going to disagree.

<side eyes the engineers and programmers>

Show threadgren.elliotNov 12, 2022
@McPatrick I'm a programmer. Feeling your eyes burning into me 😂
Show threadPatrick McLaughlin

@grenelliot 😆

I often described my role as translating from geek to English.

Dude, no — no one other than maybe another engineer is going to just naturally imagine that to reboot the damned thing you press the two outermost buttons. It’s not obvious. You have to tell me that so I can explain it to them.

And the classified presentation docs from a real rocket scientist, where he returned the draft marked up in crayon.

Love you guys. Most of my family and many friends are you folks. And…

Nov 12, 2022 at 2:50pmWeb