Well, I did it. Contacted 6 of my friends on Twitter who aren't here and I thought were the most likely to come over- the top ones I miss who aren't already here. One told me he couldn't figure it out, he's on Bluesky now. Still waiting to hear from the others, but expecting similar things. I think the feeling of starting over is too much for people? They're used to it? They like the high follower count? I don't fully get it. Whatever you want to call "engagement" or whatever, it's WAY more here. Even with separated instances, hashtag and search weirdness, it's STILL better here than Twitter or anywhere else. The only reason I wasn't here faster is because I just didn't know about it until November 2022.
@jake4480 As somebody who is always looking for new, usually open source tech solutions, asking a person to create a new account anywhere stops 80%* of people before they even try a thing, unless it is already getting mass hype.
“Ugh I have to choose an instance and figure out what all this means? No way.”
But also
“I’d sell my left kidney for a BlueSky invite let me in please please please.”
You can’t convince a user that great features are worth the initial time investment, you can only build hype, and the two are not the same.
*a number I just made up but seems reasonable based on my own experience.
@benmo wow, ALL of this. 80 might really be close. It's a lot. Over half, at least. All of these recent developments really show that - and that people don't even really care about privacy, fascism, corporatocracy, anything else. It sucks, but hey haha. Here we are 🙄
@benmo also, yeah- I like open source stuff too, when I started Twitter 10 years ago, it was super small, a great alternative to FB or anything else. Just a place to find weird people and be weird (the ONLY real reason I use social media haha) - but I still use Gmail, Google products too. Just for convenience, having an Android, it's all there and logged in. Convenience, right? We're all guilty of it in one way or another. It's almost impossible to fully avoid.
@benmo 😂 right? It's like, pick your poison. Unless you do that cheap prepaid phone thing, we all have smartphones, GPS, it's all tracked and monitored ANYWAY. But yeah, people are slow to adopt stuff. I guess that's where the whole 'early adopter' thing comes from. My wife and I have always kinda been like that, poking around with whatever- but trying to avoid dumb fads and trends. Metaverse, Threads, Bluesky, all of this crap kinda falls under that. hahaha. I'm not gonna be that old Luddite that's against any new thing, but come ON, right?
@jake4480 I think that’s a good outlook though. I’m more susceptible to hype than I care to admit (enough to be on BlueSky, NOT enough to even consider Thread for a moment). But when you’re in the hype it’s easy to ignore the personal data implications or the “this company literally and unapologetically enables genocides” thing because hype is HYPE. If more people scrutinized it, they couldn’t survive on hype alone; they’d have to be good and they’d have to be trustworthy.
@jake4480 For sure. I’m the guy in my friend groups who is always like “hey there’s this cool thing that would let us do xyz and directly solve a specific problem we have” and then friends go “great!” and then I say “go to this website and create an account” and they go “uhhhh yeah I’ll do that later” and it never happens.
It took me years to convince friends to sign up for a Plex account so they could watch MY stuff on a server I set up. All they had to do was create one account and install one app on their streaming box. I could not convince them it was worth the effort.
@jake4480 good job on reaching out! Yeah people seem to allow themselves to be put off super easily, even the techy people who have clearly worked out way more complicated things before 🤷
@sarajw@jake4480 I did setup a Mastodon Account years ago, but gave up on it because Twitter ‘wasn't all that bad' back then... Mastodon was just another platform that I needed to engage on.
Then Elmo bought Twitter and turned it into the dumpster fire that it is now, and I have a compelling reason to make Mastodon my home.
I think for many, the idea of starting over and managing their presence on a new platform is just too daunting.
@andycarolan@jake4480 I think I first signed up in April 2022 when he announced he was buying it.
Then poked my head in again and started using it in earnest as the first big twitter migration happened in Oct/Nov after the thing actually went through and he started making horrible decisions.
Tried to bring people with me but not all that much luck - thankfully lots of the people I wanted to follow came over anyway. Those who stayed stolidly put are now trickling into Bluesky.
@sarajw Sounds similar to my own experience, albeit on a different timescale.
I have found many people I have tried to bring over from Twitter to Masto have been resistant and I do wonder if they are so disillusioned with the space, they will just fizzle out and not move to a similar space. @jake4480
@andycarolan@sarajw@jake4480 That’s definitely the case with some of my friends. Very active Twitter users whose use tailed off over the years, they’ve left social media entirely rather than migrate somewhere new.
@tldr@andycarolan@sarajw I did have a few of those - and some ended up here, which is wild! But I still have like 10-20 good friends over there who just continue to post on Twitter. They're not in war-torn states or journalists or anything else, guess they just don't care.
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