Casey NewtonToday Elon changed the birdhouse on Twitter's homepage to a doge meme and everyone has a joke ready but almost no one seems ready to leave. There is simply no amount of punishment that Twitter users are not prepared to absorb
BenI think everyone is sticking around mainly due to inertia, but I get so agitated by people whose stock in trade is still dunking on Elon on Twitter all day. At the end the day it only serves to prop Twitter up. The joke is absolutely and literally on you
Raphael@caseynewton Exactly!
kugelblitz@caseynewton *cough* newyorktimespitchbot *cough*
Eshu Marneedi@caseynewton Exactly this. Another common complaint: “Mastodon has less people.” Well yeah, that’s why you should join
Staid Winnow
Deborah Apthorp
Bezvodni🐦🚾@EshuMarneedi @caseynewton
Mastodon does not offer you posts to read if you are new, so why would you stick to it. One should be able to see newest "twits" to stay interested.
Mastodon does not offer you posts to read if you are new, so why would you stick to it. One should be able to see newest "twits" to stay interested.
Benjamin Johns@caseynewton It's like an inverted Stockholm Syndrome: the door is wide open and the victims refuse to leave and just keep trying to berate their captor so hard that he walks out instead.
AI6YR Ben@Theoreticalb @caseynewton Oooh.. exactly!!!
author_is_ShrikeTron🔠💉x5@Theoreticalb @caseynewton It's Limbo where all sides are in denial.
Pusher Of Pixels (old account)It's still a simple matter of eyeballs. Low engagement of 400 million vs higher better quality engagement of 10 mil.
It will continue to shift, but getting a big name to move would be game changing. (Does a .swift domain exist yet?)
Mastodon needs journos posting here, and a few more celebrities who engage others.
Need a Black mastodon.
There's #blackmastodon that's reasonably active, but we need more outreach as well.
Connected Places@pixelpusher220 @caseynewton I always recommend this series of posts to indicate that engagement is much closer than you might think https://calckey.social/notes/9cw5gry5ki
Martin Holland (@fingolas)
I wrote my first summary of @[email protected] on #Mastodon almost two months ago: Time for an update. One thing in advance, even if it has become noticeably quieter here in the #Fediverse, the numbers remain pretty stable: Visits via Mastodon are still slightly below that via #Twitter, but as a reminder, I can only compare visits generated via our accounts on #Mastodon with all visits over #Twitter. So the actual numbers are even closer together. (@[email protected] on Twitter has 246.000 Followers, on Mastodon it's 45.500) On the first graph I have summed up the weekly entries via Mastodon vs. Twitter since the #Mastodon account went live at the beginning of November. The steady growth is partly due to the fact that only articles shared both on Mastodon and Twitter are included, and their number has increased. Overall, more visits come via Mastodon than via #Bing or #Xing. The engagement (#boosts plus #likes, no #comments) with posts of @[email protected] stagnates, but remains significantly above that on Twitter. I find only four posts from heise-accounts on Twitter in this time that have been shared at least 50 times, on Mastodon it's a whole 125 (!). At the same time, nothing really goes #viral on #Mastodon, the upward swings of visits are significantly higher on Twitter. A new initiative that shows noticeable effects is #Verpasstodon (something like "missed-o-don"): Under this hashtag @[email protected] re-shares on weekends the most clicked articles of the past week. And they get klicked noticeably again. There is no criticism directed at the practice, the hashtag can be muted without missing anything else. Despite such ideas, 89% of the visits via #Mastodon come on the first two days vs. 81% over Twitter. A few more numbers: In total, @[email protected] has more than 122,000 interactions (#Boosts and #Likes, overview in the second image "Interaktionen"), per article that's an average of more than 26. About 4700 articles were shared, more than 500 of them have more than 50 interactions. More than 1000 each: https://mastodon.social/@heiseonline/109550376533582612 https://mastodon.social/@heiseonline/109670205634915816 Follower numbers of @[email protected] grow very slowly, but the speed has increased since the Twitter account has a link to the Mastodon-account. @[email protected] is now the largest German-language media-account, slightly in front of @[email protected]. In the USA, there is a larger one with @[email protected], but a few regional media are particularly active (#Newstodon). The third picture shows visits via Mastodon and Twitter over the last 80 days. Hope this is interesting for english-speaking accounts, too: @[email protected] @[email protected] @[email protected] @[email protected] @[email protected] @[email protected] @[email protected] (📎3)
MerlinaNatalia@caseynewton I just visited, and my entire Twitter "Following" feed is filled with people I don't follow.
Russell Garner@merlinanatalia @caseynewton this, I have just discovered, is because they are RTs from people you *do* follow, but the "<your friend> retweeted" part is gone
@rgarner @caseynewton ah, thanks for that. What a terrible experience.
@merlinanatalia @caseynewton yep. Just embarrassed myself to someone I actually follow about it. S'brilliant.
I'm at least not posting new content there but there are still people there I need to talk to who haven't moved yet...
Govert Buijs@merlinanatalia @caseynewton In case you used the web version: that seems broken. It doesn't show 'retweeted by X'.
Tarraccas@merlinanatalia @caseynewton Mine too. Not sure there's a difference between "For You" and "Following" tabs anymore.😬
Dave👾@caseynewton He's just a deeply unfunny and unserious person. It's equivalent to dunking on one of those Fisher-Price basketball hoops.
laurakinsale@caseynewton I realize it’s fantasy but I think I just keep hoping he’ll give up and sell it. Meanwhile I stubbornly block every ad and paid blue like some sort of pathetic stick-it-to-the-man bot. Also the #ukraine #osint here is just links to tweets so far. But @darth came so maybe…!
Stuart P. BentleyI had, in so many words, the same thought https://twitter.com/stuartpb/status/1642958100499140609
Stuart P. Bentley (@[email protected]) on Twitter
“anyway, fuck this shit, I am not using this fucking site as long as Dickless keeps Larry down in favor of his own fucking "lol I can do whatever because society is broken" shit. Meet me in Montauk https://t.co/msSbyrujPy”
Gregory Dodwell
Adam Cook@caseynewton My more immediate concern is public emergency services that are still not adopting the #Fediverse.
We are being actively denied potential life-and-death information in service of the totally unreliable platform that #Twitter has become.
There are valid arguments that official government communication channels (foolishly) relying on Twitter are keeping Twitter important to many.
Mike Swanson@adamjcook @caseynewton This is the problem right here. Folks have become reliant on actually important communications that happen only there. And, the folks who provide that information don’t understand anything else. It’s like email before email turned into a cesspool of 95% spam.
Phil Sherry@caseynewton The news outlets, brands, and celebs use it as a broadcast channel and follow very few accounts each. They don’t care about the things that make this place work.
Too many regular people became “internet famous” for the first time on that site and they are not going to give up their follower count so easily. I mentioned that here earlier. https://home.social/@philsherry/110136111825349549
People are weird to stay there. But they can have it. As long as they don’t bring it over here.
Phil Sherry (@[email protected])
@[email protected] @[email protected] On here, people seem far less inclined to believe their own hype, or become their follower count—unless they bring that attitude with them. A few have, so I’ve unfollowed all the people who seem to think I should pay to talk to them. I think that same attitude is what’s keeping a lot of people hostage on the bird app. Anyway, you two are okay. (You can frame that.)
LAUREN@caseynewton I want to watch my hypothesis come to fruition and the best place to experience that is on the inside. We are learning. Nothing about this should be ignored. The occasional poke at him is healthy and necessary for some to move on. Others want to stay and bash their enemies. Still others have no hope of recreating what they have over there anywhere else. This is a seismic shift in social media. Death of anything requires grief, understanding, and arson in some cases...
Frank Bennett 🇯🇵@caseynewton Boredom as entertainment. Now that's innovation.
Pyperkub@caseynewton Most of them probably block all the Dogecoin accounts, and now they can't! ;)
Mike Fraser@caseynewton Sometimes I check in because I have people there. I always call out the big accounts that rag on Twitter with: "Why are you here then. You're literally putting money in his pocket."
Kirk Flashner@caseynewton Remember all the gushing press reports over @adamdavidson and journa.host. I follow approximately 90 accounts from that instance and most of them are dormant.
Ben Lamb@caseynewton I logged on Sunday afternoon because there is literally nowhere else that has realtime motorsport information / commentary / fan feedback
Except maybe reddit, but, you know, even dogs that eat their own vomit have standards
@bennyfactor i think reading it is fine ... it's the posting that concerns me
@caseynewton I mean I tweeted a handful of tweets. I've tried to move as much of that as possible to instagram or here, but literally nobody cares here and the only people who watch my insta stories are people's moms so several Mrs So-and-Sos got a full measure of my Takuma Sato fandom I guess.
menotti@caseynewton I keep saying this, why sit around and take all the kicks between the legs? To post le epic burns?
One needs to realize it's a weird Stockholm syndrome and break free.
Adam Stein@44 @caseynewton For some people that's it. For a lot of people it's still where things are happening.
I'm trying to improve who I follow but content in things I'm interested is lacking on Mastodon right now. Almost 0 baseball content, no one I follow even mentioned the men's NCAA championship, very little on politics, I do see indictment talk.
Casey is pretty active but Zöe hasn't logged in since February in terms of tech news, but people keep sharing her tweets with me offline.
@adamstein @caseynewton yeah for sure. It's hard to replace whole communities like that. Especially sports.
Andrew Woodward@caseynewton isn't the other side true? Everyone saying why haven't you left yet, well because there are communities that are important to me that don't exist here and we don't all have the same hobbies
ben@caseynewton i’m literally just still there out of habit. like some weird habit of typing twitter into the search bar on my computer. trying to stop doing that
Ambiorickx@caseynewton you know that thing about how when you find yourself at a table with 9 nazis and you don’t leave, you’re at a 10-nazi table? Twitter’s like that.
@caseynewton not sure. There is no alternative so far. Mastodon due to the idea of multi servers and the same number of registrations looks like an archipelago of a thousand islands.. embarrassing..
Gustomela 🏕️🪵🐻@caseynewton yeah, inertia, maybe. What’s the alternative? The awful user experience of Mastodon? Good clients care about design and niceness, but the web UI where you’re supposed to look around and eventually join is a nightmare and (biggest problem) nobody cares. Mastodon is very unwelcoming. And I say that as someone who hates Elon with a passion.
Ken@caseynewton truth be told there are still conversations/people on there that I don't know where else they are.
In my case, a lotta sports stuff, specifically
Shane Tobin@caseynewton just read your newsletter and thank you for disengaging on Twitter. More need to follow and will over time
PerkyCatsup@caseynewton Agreed. Why do we do this to ourselves?