At some point soon, time allowing, I want to write something about the differences between creator reach, interactions and revenue on Twitter Vs Mastodon. I'm aware that as a digital strategist AND ALSO a creator with a platform on both I am relatively uniquely placed to do so.

But trust me, the spaces are not equivalent. Perfectly valid design decisions here do have negative impacts as a small creator dependent on reach.

There are absolutely ways that Mastodon could correct this. The biggest being:

1) Supporting, rather than being hostile to, threading
2) OPT IN for "I will let my quotes be tweeted"

Both would have a SIGNIFICANT positive impact for small creators.

There are also perfectly valid community reasons not to do both. But if, as a federated platform, it decides that's not in its best interest than it needs to be acknowledged that it's also a choice not to make Mastodon small creator revenue friendly

While it DOESN'T support those things though, which is a conscious platform choice, do try to remember that the opportunity for your favourite creator - artist, writer, maker, whatever - to switch to here as their primarily presence are limited.

And for it to be their ONLY presence simply isn't viable, for most.

I appreciate this isn't a thing people are openly saying. I appreciate I am a "first wave" Twitter exile here.

But I like to think my behaviour and posting here has shown how much I've enjoyed and embraced this platform.

And part of that is wanting to see others like me, but more reliant on marginal creator income, find a home here too.

And that's just not possible for so many small creators on Twitter I love right now, who would make Mastodon sing even more than it does already.

@garius It may be a *unique* opportunity for small time creators. There’s a pretty good sized audience here who wants more content, and not that many creators.

It’s not as large and diverse as Twitter, but there’s a lot of people actively looking for new accounts to follow, and there can be advantages to being one of the first here.

That said, adding another network to keep up with is more work, but maybe worth trying out

@scm as one of those first-movers you describe:

No. It doesn't translate. Empirically, the ROI right now is much less - even adjusted for scale. For the reasons I laid out in the thread.

@garius I didn’t mean to come off as telling you you’re wrong 😅

I have another account, and I’ve found it fairly easy to pick up followers, but, importantly, it’s not a business, it doesn’t need to make money.

It’s interesting, but disappointing that doesn’t translate to being worth it for creators. But, like you say, important features are missing. It also matters if the audience you want is even here, it’s not as diverse as the larger networks.

People like you making the case for those features seems valuable though, I hope you get the time to write more 🙂

@scm i think that's all i'm trying to flag really.

There's a sort of optimism that the feature set that already exists is enough. A sort of:

"this is virgin territory! if you build it, they will come!"

hopefulness that's understandable. I just want to flag that the evidence for that SO FAR is limited.

Which is fine!

i just think that needs flagging now, rather than it being a subject of hand-wringing over a missed opportunity to do something extra-special in future.