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

@garius Mastodon is an open source project. It's entirely possible to fork it and produce a version which does these things, and indeed there are groups working on variants.

Further, the protocol on which it runs, #ActivityStreams is an open protocol and it's entirely possible to build alternative but interoperable implementations – and again, groups are doing that too.

It might be worth your while finding the right group and rallying people behind it.

@simon_brooke I understand how Open Source works. I've been involved in a few things over the years.

But - bluntly - I don't have the time. And, realistically, most small creators don't have the time or the knowledge to participate in open source projects to that level. Both are a privilege, in a way.

This kind of stuff has ALWAYS been a flaw in the OS approach, despite it's significant benefits.

Hence why I'm just saying to peeps: be mindful. This ISN'T a small creator-friendly platform rn.

@garius I don't think I know what a "QT" really is, in the world you have come from. Could you please explain just what it is, also in terms of how it assists the creator community you want to help?

It might not be obvious, but some fediverse tools do seem to have a "QT" feature; and if what you're wanting is "a link to someone's previous post, but not a reply to it" then you can fight with the UI to achieve that; but the results are often disjoint enough that it probably doesn't achieve the outcome you might want. Hence the question, what do you define "QT" as?

@yojimbo ultimately, it's what it is on Twitter. An comment on another post with an inline, clickable display of the post being commented on.

For why it's disproportionately valuable to small creators, see some of my replies to others who've asked. It provides both validation and reach, basically.

@garius I don't know what Twitter does, which is why I'm asking :-)

I suspect you know this already, but it might be worth saying ...

I can include an explicit link to your post, and it's up to your client to decide what so do with it. The UI for doing this is different from "reply" and isn't obvious.

Plain Mastodon behaves differently from forks like Hometown, Glitchsoc and so on. It also renders differently from the various app clients for Mastodon, and of course is different again from the many non-Mastodon fediverse services like Pleroma, Akkoma and oh so many others.

Some of these will already have the "QT" functionality that you want.

But I suspect that isn't enough, you aren't actually asking for you to have this UI option, are you? That's not going to help creators, they're not going to benefit by QTing their own posts anyway. You're asking for everyone else to have this UI by default, I think.

I'm not sure I've completely understood why a simple Reply to a post saying "this is cool" isn't visible enough. Here, I might be misunderstanding Mastodon myself ... I often see middle-of-conversation replies in my feed, from people that I follow, and if they look interesting it seems easy enough to click on the thread and see what it is.

But I do think you're only really looking for a different UI gloss over the features that are already present.

https://mastodon.me.uk/@garius/110159790530289077

@yojimbo yes - in a nutshell what i'm saying is that it has to be a default UX thing or it doesn't deliver the required value.

People don't click through. And they demonstrably don't engage in the same way with a reply-to-a-good-thing to a quoted-good-thing.

The former requires being interested enough to take proactive actions to establish context. The latter comes with the context pre-provided.

@garius Excellent, I'm glad I was able to understand what you meant 🙂

I'm pretty sure that the only way to achieve that goal is to go back to ActivityPub itself, and try to align your goals with the core verbs that they have. There might be some latitude there so add something like a "Promote" verb, that's distinct from the existing features. If that gets accepted, then each of the AP services get to decide how to present that verb in their UI - if at all.

@yojimbo yup. that may well be the case.

Ultimately, I'm not saying:

"It MUST change to be like this!"

Simply flagging that there's a needs mismatch right now. So judging people on the basis that they haven't given up on a product that still meets their needs for one that doesn't is unnecessarily harsh.

@garius Actually, "judging people" is something we should try to limit in general.

Promoting Mastodon by saying "it's an alternative to Twitter" is too much like saying "it's an equivalent to Twitter in all respects", which just isn't correct. In any case, that's what the audience will probably assume.

Mastodon/fediverse is an alternative to some of the things that Twitter does. But never all of them.