Mark SafeNov 21, 2022

Joining a new social media space is kind of like walking into a room filled with a few friends and a bunch of strangers.

You start off pretty quiet, trying to "read the room." Are there business/technical conversations going on? Political/religious discussions and debates? Drunken flirtations or whining about ex-lovers?

Everybody tends to start off quietly while they try to figure it out, but the key to a successful social media system is engagement, so I encourage you to engage.

POST!

Show threadDoctorwhen ☮

@mark_safe yeah, we walked into an awkward party but there appear to be interesting people here if we can figure out how to start up a conversation.

Most social media sites derive profit from engagement so they do things to drive engagement like an algorithm that promotes content that triggers people. Here there is no algorithm, no profit motive. We are the algorithm, it's up to us to drive engagement.

I think one of the ways engagement is driven here is with tags.

#mastodon #engagement

Nov 21, 2022 at 11:20pmWeb
Show threadAndrew KnutsenNov 21, 2022
@doctorwhen @mark_safe
Boosting also looks like a good way to engage people, but inter-instance threads don't really seem to work yet.
Show threadDoctorwhen ☮Nov 21, 2022
@andrew @mark_safe yes, boosting creates reach and can propagate a conversation across instances. It looks like if you wish to participate in a thread on another instance you have to go to that instance but that's just a click. The thread for a post originating on another instance does not seem to fully appear on the local instance. I'm not quite sure how that works exactly. There are also complicating factors like whether an instance talks to another instance. Federation is complicated.
Show threadDoctorwhen ☮Nov 22, 2022

@andrew @mark_safe also, it kinda starts by engaging with the folks on your own local instance which, presumably, is focused on an area of interest that you are interested in. Which is what we are doing here but it doesn't really count since we are already friends from the wayback.

I'm still catching on but it seems like following tags is a good way to find posts you are interested in. Then, commenting and boosting and posting with that tag.

#friends #tags #boost #hello