Exactly the same content, posted on the same time, to similar crowd, gets 10x more engagement here than on Twitter, even tho I have 10x less followers here.
Why are people still using Twitter for promotion? And some are paying money thinking they're getting a good deal.
Reprinted from the Fediverse-City Matrix room, with permission from the author (myself):
I was just participating in another discussion elsewhere on the connotations and perceptions relating to a global feed of the entire known Fediverse, as it pertains to what various platforms call it (in their selector tabs).
Lots of suggestions, and every platform uses a different nomenclature. Some use 'global', some use 'live', and there's a few others as well that try to convey that type of extremely busy feed.
But then I touched on the subject of Local feeds - not all Fediverse platforms utilize this type of concatenated feed. I related that the Hometown fork of mastopub was [at least one of] the first to incorporate this as both a feed, and a type of post that is localized to only that particular instance.
I also, because I've read his contention, included the Dev's reasoning on having such a utility as a feature - because he intended Hometown to be a Fediverse platform that could encourage a Highly localized "community".
So you can select the other various, common types of scope for a post when making a post, as well as posting something that is only viewable to other users on your local instance - thereby supporting the 'local community only' aspect that has eluded and mostly deluded users on other platforms.
Why "deluded", because having a Fediverse account in the minds of most folks coming from the deprecated, monolithic silo space is something that has been heavily promoted by Fedizens as one of the reasons why it's better to use the Fediverse instead of those impersonal deprecated silo systems.
And that's simply not true.
Take me, for example. I have several accounts and interact using them with different circles of people (I won't get into the power of recursive circles as they were implemented in gplus). So I'mma just use mastodon.social, one of the biggest monolithic-like silo instances in the Fediverse, as an example here.
People there, most often n00bs from the November Rain or later) talk about the sense of "community" they have there, when they're really only speaking of the connections they have by following and being followed by not just people on that instance, but across the entire Fediverse.
The sense of community that almost everyone in the Fediverse perceives is mostly a compilation of the follows and followers that they each have, and is unique to themselves alone.
For example, I prolly know 4 or 5 people on each instance I have an account on. My community is comprised almost entirely of the direct connections I have made with others across the Fediverse at large, and yes, people on platforms with 'local-only' feeds to see my posts, know them to be local, but so do folks on other instances watching their 'global feeds' (or home feeds where someone they follow includes a follow of my account).
So to me, in my experience, my community is comprised of those who I've made connections with and the people they are connected to, with very little traffic from the local instance I am on at any given time.
To think that you're going to have a community on mastodon.social consisting of people primarily from that instance is a bit naive, IMO, coz your default feed grows exponentially with foreign user's posts the more you connect with anyone - not just the people you follow that are local to your instance. You see something, you interact because it's interesting, pertinent, or relevant to you - you don't do that because you've discerned that you will only interact with local accounts... that just ain't natural, human tendency.
So the creator of the Hometown fork realized that one type of vehicle in the feature set to mark this kind of delineation was that of the ability to post and see in your feed, local only posts, with the overt assertion that Hometown is a fork that in part, is a platform that can facilitate the social diaspora consisting of a 'mostly local' community.
Even entire instances, named or stated as localized geographically or topically, as having publicly open registrations miss this mark in a big way - people for whatever reason, want a Fediverse account, pick a host/instance, by whatever criteria, and then inadvertently end up creating their own diaspora of social connections across the entire Fediverse anyway.
nostr, Bluesky (when it eventually fully supports other instances), Threads (yeah, I know, it's a bastard, lolz), Minds, and other, bigger instances or monoliths, don't try to capitalize on this notion of "Your instance is your community" because overwhelmingly, it just isn't the case in reality.
I'm not saying that there aren't Fediverse instances are successful in cultivating small communities consisting of connections with others on those particular instances, but the most successful of those are the instances that have actually disabled Federation on those instances, lolz.... There's lots of examples of that, which is kewl - to each their own.
But the tendency of everyone to follow the Ew! Shiny! paradigm of simply liking and following what you like irrespective of whether it's on your local instance or not is the lions share of how people interact with each other.
Your thoughts, observations?
Attached graphic attrib: A Jack Russell, happy as can be, sitting in the pilot's seat flying a Cessna, not knowing WTF he's doing.... but he's really happy! The caption reads: "I have no idea what I'm doing".
@adelgado . Sorry, this is the tweet content:
" We are extremely happy to finally have 100 #followers on this Twitter/X account. It's been a long road to reach it, but we're finally there! Thanks a lot again!
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=-Q3dmP1BKh8Mi è capitato questo #video prima… c’è molto da dire. Sapevo già che #Temu è merdaccia, ma evidentemente i colpì di scena non finiscono mai quando si ha a che fare queste aziende #turbocapistaliste gestite da sciroccati e originatesi in paesi con meno restrizioni. 😐️
Ricapitolando:
Io scoprii dell’esistenza di Temu praticamente solo dallo #scandalo che ci fu riguardo la app Android di PinDuoDuo (la compagnia di holding) che conteneva letterale #malware, nemmeno conoscevo il #servizio prima. È evidente già solo per questo che va evitato come la peste, ha intenti malevoli. 👿️
Negli ultimi mesi ho notato molti #influencer che fanno “woo vediamo la roba che mi arriva da Temu!!!”, e qualcuno ho visto che in effetti diceva che la roba gliel’avevano inviata gratis per fare il video… ma molti altri no. E ora così a caso vengo a scoprire che, probabilmente, una parte sostanziale di quegli influencer dal cervello bacato, che non hanno detto nulla a riguardo della provenienza economica della merce (né detto di averla comprata coi soldini propri, né detto di averla ricevuta col video per motivi di sponsor), hanno commesso qualcosa che sarebbe un #reato in tantissime nazioni, perché comporta #danni per i #consumatori, nonché direi una cosa di una scorrettezza etica profonda verso i #followers. Nelle sue #mail, Temu da proprio #istruzioni riguardo il non dire che il video è #sponsorizzato, non vogliono che lo si sappia… non va bene. 💳️
A quanto pare, rompono le palle con incessanti e insistenti #email ai #creator, fin quando non ricevono una risposta positiva riguardo il voler collaborare e fare la #sponsorizzazione. Comportamento praticamente da bambini di 5 anni, non da #azienda rispettabile che vuole competere più o meno legittimamente nel #mercato mondiale. Mamma mamma voglio la #sponsor voglio la sponsor!! Mamma uffa devi sponsorizzarmi, io ti mando 100€ di ciofeche e tu mi devi sponsorizzare, rispondiiii!!!! 🤑️
Ho sentito che, nella loro #strategia di dominazione del mercato, oltre a star perdendo soldi loro (classica cosa, a me non frega questo, non è un’azione direttamente scorretta contro i consumatori), non pagano nemmeno ai #mercanti tutti i #soldi che gli spettano. Non so se è vero questo, non trovo articoli precisi #online, ma considerando tutto il resto non fatico a crederci. E, da un lato sarebbe schifoso ma comunque non “errato” se nel contratto piattaforma-venditori questi ultimi siano messi al corrente del fatto che #PinDuoDuo potrebbe trattenere soldi per motivi arbitrari (nel senso che, come venditore, sei libero di farti andare bene i termini predatori e stare sul #negozio, oppure rifiutarti e vendere altrove); ma qualcosa mi dice che questa cosa la fanno sotto banco, violando la #legge. Tanto già inducono gli influencer a violare la legge, per cui è evidente che non gli frega. 🔪️
Sarebbe il caso di dire che bisogna #BOICOTTARE TEMU, ma qualcosa mi dice che non avverrà facilmente perché, seppur il voto tramite portafoglio sia collettivamente efficace, il problema è che la collettività è clinicamente rincitrullita e i siti che fino a ieri andavano bene, oggi non più, nonostante la differenza di prezzo sia trascurabile per la roba che serve per davvero. Ma, realisticamente, non sarebbe nemmeno la fine del mondo se cerchi un #prodotto e lo compri lì perché in quel momento ti conviene, ma questo vale se quell’acquisto ti serve davvero, se ti porta un qualche tipo di valore; se sai già perfettamente che si romperà in un attimo, o che finirà in disuso dopo pochi minuti perché è spazzatura, perché comprare solo perché costa poco? Vedo fin troppa gente agire in questo modo. 😩️
Btw, opinione personale, ma il claim “Shop like a billionaire” è estremamente #cringe… i miliardari non comprano plasticaccia schifosa da un #sito estremamente invadente (al massimo i #miliardari sono al capo del sito, ecco). 🙄️
Hello 👋
Just a heads up. I don't mind having new followers. But, if you don't have a profile picture of yourself ( not something generated by AI or some random picture from the web or app) then I am less likely to accept you as a follower. Having a few posts helps as well 🙂 #ProfilePicture#Followers
There are more and more #Flipboard-Accounts appearing in #Mastodon.
They are new, right? Like for example @espn or @cbssports. Yet, they have tens or hundreds of thousands of followers already. Are these numbers correct (they are different from the follower-numbers on Flipboard itself)?
Would vindicate Flipboard's step into the #Fediverse.
And on that note: What is #SportsbotsXYZ? There are multiple mirror-accounts for #Twitter with millions (!) of followers? What's happening there?
@mho@espn@cbssports My Mastodon follower count is way different (340) from my Flipboard follower count (271.2k) I doubt I’ll ever reach that number on Mastodon #mastodon#followers#flipboard
Sometimes, briefly, I miss my days as an influencer online. That was never my plan, but as you know, the former Twitter used Algorithms. The more engagement you made, the higher your presence became. My followers have always been higher than the amount I follow. The more I follow, the less I see, caught up in a fast moving stream of (mostly garbage) ReTweets. #ENGAGEMENT is not Boosting or Liking, it's responding, dialogue, comments, and conversation. #Influencer#Klout#Twitter#Gifts#Thread
BTW, don't take me as an authority on anything, without running it past the standard Judge Judy Smell Test. 😎 Maybe you don't think I know what I'm talking about? Show me your former Twitter following? Did you get gifts as an #influencer ?
I must be doing something right? I can duplicate the process, or teach you how, but let's forget about that toxic X sludge and learn where you are?
If you have to #Beg for #Followers, you're doing it wrong. Go back to Facebook. #SM#Tips#Begging = #Block
Update #3: And it broke again 🧐 I have another idea and meanwhile a static copy. No more updates for this post 😉
Hey #Mastodon & #Fediverse, look what I build: It's an updated table of @tchambers list of journalists in here, that stays up-to-date with data on #Followers and when they were last active:
Ihr lieben #followers
Ich hätte da ne Frage an die etwas techikversierteren unter euch:
Wenn ich folgendes suche würde, welche #Plattform würde sich da am besten anbieten?
Es wird eine Referentin geben. Mit Folien. Die Folien und den Vortrag der Referentin sollen die #Videokonferenz-Teilnehmer sehen können per Bildschirmfreigabe. Der Vortrag wird aber auch im Raum vor Ort auf einen Beamer übertragen. Nach Ende des Vortrags sollen die Video-Teilnehmer über Mikro in den Raum geschaltet werden für Fragen etc.
Zoom scheidet dafür aus, weil Teilnehmer nicht einfach über den Browser teilnehmen können (von unserer Uni aus muss man den Client benutzen).
Ein Tool, das wir hier haben, conf.dfn scheidet auch aus bisher, weil wir die Funktion mit dem Livestream nicht zum laufen bringen in dem Aufbau. BigBlueButton scheint wohl auch nicht zu gehen, hab ich mir sagen lassen.
Ich muss das nämlich für nen kommenden Arbeitsworkshop betreuen und auch Teilnehmer aus einem möglicherweise vorhandenen Warteraum in den Videokonferenz-Raum einlassen.
Fällt euch eine gute Plattform ein, über die man das machen kann, bei der die Teilnehmer über den Browser reinkönnen?
I’m excited about blogging again, since WordPress has a plugin that enables blogs to federation. Please boost this post so that my blog can be discoverable in your server. It’s an #introduction and if you follow it you’ll get weekly posts from an artist who lives and works in Uganda. I #blog about my life, my writings, my films, and my travels, and I share my digital art and photography. I’m a #writer and #filmmaker though I often think of myself as a #transmedia artist. I make stuff in any media there is to tell stories, so at heart I’m a storyteller. Mostly, you’ll find me hanging out in #writingcommunity and occasionally participating in the #writing hashtag games, so #follow this blog if you are interested in the life of an #artist who works in many genres and media.
I love the fantastic, things that are out of this world, and so many of my creations are in #sff#scifi#fantasy and sometimes #horror – uhm – I hesitate to call myself a horror artist. Every time I try to make horror, it ends up a comedy. You can read about my first attempt here. I thought I was writing the most terrifying screenplay ever, with a monster ripping apart men’s bodies in her quest to win back her husband’s love. Then, my mentor at that time told me, “No, Dilman, this is not a horror. This is a romantic comedy!” Oh, I was pissed. I wondered if he had even read my script. Couldn’t he see all the gore, all that blood and all that killing?
Close up of a black woman, an actress in a film scene, with a scared face, looking to the left of the camera, mouth slightly ajar as if in shockA still image from my first feature film, The Felistas Fable, which I started to write as a horror, but it ended up a comedy.This mentor was Steve Cohen (RIP) and he wrote the highest grossing romantic comedy of 1999, The Bachelor. Critics hated that film, getting only 8% on rotten tomatoes (ha, I like reading negative reviews of films, they are fun!) Steve also hated the film. He said Hollywood butchered his idea and he was not keen on getting my scripts to be made there. “They’ll ruin it!” He taught at Columbia University, at that time, around 2006, and I met him through Maisha Film Lab, which Mira Nair founded to give East African filmmakers a chance at mentorship from experienced Hollywood. He was a good teacher. I saw an email he wrote to Mira saying “Dilman took his mentors advice and ran away with it!” Yes, there were like three of mentors, but Steve stuck around and over a period of three or so years he helped me re-write that script, The Felistas Fable, into a romantic comedy. (You can watch the film if you send me an email.) Yes, I pride myself at being an artist who listens to mentors and critics, and I’m the biggest critic of my own works, so I re-read the story and looked at it from the mentors’ point of view and I saw what they saw.
After that experience, I thought seriously about comedy. I distinguished between different genres. That was the biggest thing I learned from Steve, to know when a story is a horror, or when it’s comedy…. Oh, am I funny? Some people think so. I’ve written a few blog posts whose comments suggest they are hilarious, and I’ll try to get out one every month to at least make you smile. You see, I’ll only have to think of it as a horror and viola, #comedy comes out. Yes, like that time I baked a cake for a girl who had her eyes on me. Pure horror!
Though, some of the funniest stories I’ve written are not fictional. They are about my travels and a clash of cultures makes the best comedy. I #travel a lot, being I’m an artist, people are always inviting me to attend this festival or that event or to present my works here or there. I’ve been to eighteen countries. I think they are eighteen, I must sit down and count properly. I travel with an open mind, and I try as much as possible to learn the languages and cultures of people I visit, and this leads to trouble. When in Nepal, my language teacher taught me a song and I didn’t know that if a person sung that song, it means they are looking for a marriage partner. It’s like putting your profile in a dating app, the old fashioned way. So I would sing it, and then get into a lot of trouble. And trouble makes comedy. I got into even hotter soup in Nigeria, after I learned pidgin English and spoke like a Nigerian because I thought it would be easy for me to blend in. You can read about the fun I had backpacking in Nigeria. Ah, yo, I was nearly jailed. Perhaps a lynch mob might have gotten to me for they thought I was a terrorist. Is that funny?
Digital Art of an underwater scene, depicting a futuristic fishing net, a fish in it, and a lot of plastic trash floating about.A piece of digital art I made. Not yet titled it, perhaps ‘Fish-n-Trash’ will do.Oh, I started this as a simple introduction of my blog to the #fediverse, but my fingers develop a brain of their own when they touch the keyboard. I honestly never know where the words come from. See all this rambling? A few notes about #wordpress and the #ActivityPub plugin that enables blogs to federate. On the Free, Personal and Premium WordPress sites, go to Settings, Discussion, and enable “Enter the fediverse.” Make note of your default fediverse name, which references the blog’s domain. Like @nogranniesinafrica.wordpress.com@nogranniesinafrica.wordpress.com. This profile can then be shared with others so they can follow it on Mastodon and other platforms.
Since I have a hosted blog, I installed the ActivityPub plug-in, then followed prompts to set up the profile. But there was a problem. I couldn’t follow my blog. I was stuck on ‘follow requested’ yet I could not see any follow request on the wordpress dashboard. After much stressing about it, I learned it has something to do with modsec, or id rule on server end. These things are beyond my comprehension. I contacted BlueHost, who host my blog, and they made it possible for my blog to be followed. You can learn more about how to trouble shoot the ActivityPub plugin in this article, and you can read more on this mastodon thread. Well, now that I got it working I’m looking for #followers so perhaps I should use the #followfriday hashtag, or the #ff thing? You know I’m just looking for excuses to use as many #hashtags as possible.
Why am I excited about this? Simple. Readers. I blog so that people can find what I write about, and engage with it. When I wrote my first blog, perhaps around 2005, I was struggling to write. I wanted to share my experiences with others, as writing is a lonely job, especially since I was in a rural town of Uganda, where the arts as a career was not even a thing to think about. I found this website scriptologist.com for screenwriters and filmmakers, and it had a blog section. I wrote there a few thoughts, and got a lot of real engagement. Then around 2009, or was it 2010, I got onto blogger, and I got a personal domain name, and the experience was good. A lot of high engagement on my blog since there were things like blog hops and blogging communities. Then Facebook encouraged people to create profiles, and get followers, and it was okay for a while, until they started to suppress posts unless you paid to reach out to your followers. My blog readership fell drastically. I wrote into the void. It discouraged me from blogging.
I still got a bit of traffic from search engines, but they are low quality, and I honestly don’t see the point of that kind of traffic. It doesn’t lead to any meaningful engagements. Just spam. I’ve since deactivated the Yoast plugin, and RankMath, and all that, and I just write for fun. And well, now that I can share my blog directly to the fediverse, it gets me excited that I’ll have that old school engagement on my posts again, that people will read what I have written and give me a pat on the back or leave a thoughtful comment.
Ah, I must say that I’m in a blogging group called Afrobloggers, where it’s possible to share your thoughts and other bloggers read and engage, but it is a small circle, and after a while you lose the joy of strangers finding your works and saying something nice. It becomes a bit disheartening to keep writing and only the same people reading what you wrote.
That’s why I’m really crazy about this, and if you’ve read up until this point, you could perhaps help my blog become discoverable in your server by giving it a boost, and a follow. I’ll leave with a few more hashtags. Ah, I’m not sure how hashtags work yet, with this workflow, they say I should put these in the tag section of wordpress, but just in case, I’ll put them here, and also in the tags, and see what it looks like.
Oh, since you’ve read to this point, have a small favor to ask. I regularly make science fiction short films and I’m looking for your support. It’s very difficult to make it as a filmmaker in Africa, where there is virtually no market to encourage big film investments, and so any dollar you can spare will go a long way into changing things. Please pledge on patreon.com/dilstories or you can buy me ko-fi. You only pay after I make the film, and you can stop payments at anytime. For other options, like donating via mobile money or PayPal, please go here dilmandila.com/donate
I’m researching Mastodon accounts with huge follower numbers and looking for help.
In the US George Takei has over 400000 followers, in Germany Eugen Rochko has over 300000 and Jan Böhmermann nearly 200000, in the UK Stephen Fry has over 100000.
Know any other big accounts? Any over 500K? Any in #Asia? Who's big in #France, or #Spain, or #Italy, or #Argentina? Who is the most followed woman? Did most of them take their followers from Twitter?
I'm thinking about Mastodon in a wide view, in the world of social media, this feels a little outsider, while at the same time it also feels like it might be the future. So, let's talk about it!
What do you get out of Mastodon?
Why are you here?
How has it compared with your other social media experiences?
What do you see for the future of Mastodon?
What do you want to see?
And basically anything else about it you want to say about Mastodon.
LET'S TALK!
White supremacy, racially motivated hate crimes, and the murders of racial, religious and sexual minorities don’t happen in a vacuum. They are encouraged, given life, and ultimately driven by leaders who knowingly deploy the terror to advance and increase their own power.
#ElonMusk's #X follower count bloated by millions of new, inactive accounts
"Of the 153,209,283 X accounts following Musk at the time the data was collected, around 42 percent of Musk's #followers, or more than 65.3 million users, have zero followers on their own account. Just over 72 percent, or nearly 112 million, or nearly 112 million, of these users following Musk have less than 10 followers on their account." 🤡