Adam S. SmithI remember many months ago @mike you were wondering if it's possible to set up an auto-reply to mentions on Twitter/X to direct people to your Mastodon profile. Did you find a way?
Mike Taylor 🦕@AdamStuartSmith I did; but of course it stopped working when the Twitter API was shut down. I do miss some people who are not here (@TetZoo for one) but not as many as I expected.
@mike @TetZoo Ah, thanks. Same
.
My feeling, when I drop by to see if I've had any notifications is that activity is heavily skewed (much more so than before) to organisations and accounts with large follower bases.
e.g. the first ten posts in my feed (excluding ads) are:
Best for Britain
Griffin Lab
BBC Radio Nottingham
BBC East Midlands
Steve Battlemuch (local politician)
British Geological Survey
personal account
personal account
Tom Holland (author/podcaster)
British Trust for Ornithology
@AdamStuartSmith @TetZoo Yes, I very much have the sense that among the other dreadful mistakes it's making, Twitter is trying to shift into being a broadcast medium. Which of course is *exactly* what it wasn't when it attracted all those users who wanted to interact.
@mike @TetZoo Yes, everyone's set to transmit but not necessarily to receive. There are barriers to transmission there anyway, which is why reach is so poor.
It's understandable why people have stayed. Accounts with large followings have more to lose on the face of it, while organisations are subject to a kind of inertia so they can't just jump ship on a whim, and those running the social media accounts probably don't have a say anyway.
Amy 🇹ðŸ‡@AmyIsCoolz @AdamStuartSmith @TetZoo Yes, me too. I guess if you have successfully crossed the threshold on Twitter into being primarily a broadcaster with a big audience, that's hard to give up.
@mike @AdamStuartSmith @TetZoo IG there is bird.makeup that posts tweets from twitter although you can't use your mastodon account to reply to the person who wrote the tweet :/ (Like for Ex: @[email protected] )
@mike @AmyIsCoolz @TetZoo That "big audience" is, increasingly, becoming an illusion.
I've seen accounts with thousands of followers get one or two likes for a post surely deserving of more interaction. Their followers aren't seeing their posts because the algorithm is working against them or because many of their followers are no longer actually there.
@AdamStuartSmith @mike @TetZoo very true! I have half of the followers I have on Twitter but I get a lot more engagement :P (might be because I don't really post controversial stuff so I don't get engagement on an algorithmic platform like Twitter?)
@AmyIsCoolz @mike @TetZoo Yeah, I generally get more engagement here than I used to on Twitter. However, the popularity of a post here tends to be more fleeting, as after a few hours the post is lost to the sands of Mastodon time. This is why I'm comfortable boosting my own posts to bump them up for followers who may have missed them the first time around.
John Conway@AdamStuartSmith @AmyIsCoolz @mike @TetZoo the fleeting nature of posts here is something I dislike about the lack of algorithm. A painting I spent a week on is not the same as a passing thought I had abou Elon Musk, but they stick around for roughly the same time.
@AdamStuartSmith @AmyIsCoolz @TetZoo Yes, I have heard this from multiple sources. "Followers" are increasingly meaningless on Twitter, because they don't see posts from the people they follow.