Also looks like someone at the UK's Royal Astronomical Society set up a Mastodon account and is crafting custom posts for it, but it only has ~300 followers compared with their >50K on Twitter:

@royalastrosoc

I see this all too often -- major public/nonprofit organizations set up shop here, but don't know how to best cross-link/promote it, so the accounts get kind of lost. If you care about #astronomy & like their work, give them a boost or follow :)

@eloquence @royalastrosoc
They only tweeted it once on Nov 18. Clever to use the name astrodon, that should escape the Chief Twit's censors. So they should include it in their profile info.

Few posts here compared to the birdsite. Makes sense to look after the majority but I'd suggest they try a cross posting tool. I don't use one but @fetzert frequently posts advice on it.

@PatrickOBeirne @royalastrosoc @fetzert

I generally advise against cross-posting (it makes it seem like you're only maintaining a shadow presence here and not actually looking at any replies etc.). If you do it, I recommend filtering out RTs and mentions.

I'd rather have a few hand-crafted posts than an autogenerated feed from Twitter, tbh.

@PatrickOBeirne

It's 4.5% now, and that's without them having posted anything new -- just after calling attention to their existing, non-robotic presence here. And those numbers, in my experience, translate into actually higher levels of engagement. Never take Twitter follower counts at face value, especially now.

Organizations like ProPublica (54K followers), the Auschwitz Memorial (74K followers), and others have found that actually putting time into a presence here is well worth it.

@eloquence that increase was fast! Yes, engagement actions are probably a better measure.

Do you think Mastodon will ever be able to scale to Twitter levels? Or is it more likely that it will stabilise at smaller numbers of real people as distinct from bots?