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Person with over 1,000 followers: I don’t want to go to Bluesky but I don’t know if I’ll find enough people to engage with here.
Dude, what do you want, meaningful conversations or a fan club?
(I was as perfectly happy when I had a literal handful of people I was engaging with here eight years ago as I am now. Remember the Dunbar number, people. Remember quality over quantity. Small is beautiful and all that.)
@aral it's the hold over from those other media sites. Back when I was on Twitter (pre-Musk buyout), you only started to get credibility and algorithmic reach at 1,000 followers, but in truth took closer to 10,000. When I came here, needing to have a large follower base just became meaningless.
@aral yes, it’s so noticeable that none of the “big wigs” came here, or very few. Activists, journalists etc with large follower numbers. They use social media in a different way, not for dialogue but for dissemination, and I guess for that mastodon is not ideal. It really is best for dialogue and real connection, not as oart of your prrofessional or activist work. It certainly doesn’t work for for book promotions etc.
@pvonhellermannn @aral it doesn't work for book promos unless you're https://mastodon.social/@violetblue !
They use social media in a different way, not for dialogue but for dissemination, and I guess for that mastodon is not ideal. It really is best for dialogue and real connection…
@pvonhellermannn When you explain it that way, it really makes a lot of sense. This is one of those things that I had sensed but couldn’t really explain, and it has always frustrated me.
There are still several people who I notice use Mastodon regularly, but treat it like Twitter in the sense of using it as a dissemination tool. Every day they post cryptic one-liners apropos of nothing, as if their followers all know them personally and what they have been talking about lately in some other forum. When I can figure out what they are talking about I write chatty responses, they never star or +1 my reply, they never write back. They only ever respond to other high-profile users. Its like they are periodically shouting out into a room full of people and leaving before anyone can make eye contact with them.
So apparently this is totally normal behavior on Twitter/Bluesky/Threads and they carry it over to Mastodon expecting it to be the same.
@aral good question indeed, some people are looking for a fan club.
@aral
Personally, I want tacos. Since neither platform provides that, I'll take the fun, interesting, weird, and sometimes meaningful conversation here.
@guinnessduck @aral
That's easy. The answer is tacos. :-P
@aral the obsession with "engagement", "growth" and "reach", aside from the obvious capitalist nature of it, is an obsession with parasocially treating "followers" as social wealth, rather than humanbeings. You see these people on Bluesky posting all the time, rarely ever replying unless it benefits them one way or another (fan club, or replying to a "wealthier" person)
It is disgusting and unhealthy. Healthy social media starts with us only connecting with real people, not capitalist personas made to extract our attention.
@aral may I add that this might be an inevitable result of the design of microblogs at the moment that creates a hierarchy and unequal power dynamics between people. The "follow" paradigm is flawed by design.
@aral most of those people don’t reply to replies which drives me furious. They don’t look for meaningful conversation, they just want to be heard. This happens with some progressive people too. Some of them I unfollow, some of them I (sadly) just stick with
@aral it is what I like about here, is the fact we actually interact.
@aral I mean you can bridge your profile to bluesky and vice versa.
@aral The thing is, we've let corporate social media conflate "communication" & "broadcasting" as if they're the same thing, which is also why TikTok is referred to as social media, even though it absolutely isn't. This has turned social presence (often including IRL!) into a personal branding exercise & a lot of people aren't even aware of it - all they have is confused, unrealistic & mostly undesirable expectations, foisted upon them by someone else entirely against their interests...
@aral I am clearly in the lower percentile section of Dunbar's optimistic estimate of 150. 
I like Mastodon because I don't get reminded by every third post that 'BiG pRoBLeM' happened at 'location' on planet Earth.
I use other channels to get current affairs information - when I opt-in to searching for it.
@aral : people will come on Mastodon, have literally 10 times more interaction here than elsewhere then complain because "the number of followers on my profile is lower than the one I have on X even if 99% of those are bots and non-maintained account"
@aral Dunbar was full of shit. Neither mastodon nor bluesky are platforms which particularly encourage conversation, but bsky has more people and utilities to facilitate it than we do. Sharable custom feeds and quote posts are examples off the top of my head.
It's also a centralized platform, and while that has it's disadvantages, it also solves the problem we have here where an instance gets blocked by everyone and the admins just create a new instance at a new domain. Bigoted trolls regularly engage in harassment of folks who's profile shows they fit in some marginalized category. Effective moderation of this is basically impossible and inherent to decentralized platforms. It's not something you or I might see as white men, but I've seen some shocking screenshots from trans and particularly black mastodon users.
@scott @aral You seem to be suggesting that what we need is a boss where what I think we need is people who can think outside the box. Decentralisation means no one has to federate with anyone else AT ALL if that makes them safer. Being out in public and then saying all these nasties are after me because they've noticed me is linked. Having a boss does not solve problems, it passes them on and puts them out of your hands. "Effective moderation" starts with the account holder.
@Black_Flag @aral I'm not sure where you get that I think we need a boss... As far as I know all of that moderation work was done by users collaboratively. It just isn't as much of a cat and mouse game because there's only one platform to clean up, the fash can't keep rebuilding their capacity to attack you as well as they can here.
At least, that's what I've read others say. As I said, as a white man on a more or less single-user-instance, I don't personally encounter harassment, and have to work off the testimony of others. What I see people say on here is that flagship instances had an entrenched moderation culture that didn't take harassment seriously enough during the great twitter exodus (and still doesn't, but that was a crucial moment), and that while bsky official moderation has not been significantly better, there are more tools that users have access to and have used to collaboratively filter our harassment.
@scott My point is I don't understand what more tools people want than the ability to create their own instances, moderate them how they like, and federate, or not, with whom they want. Large instances with open sign up policies certainly don't help here. Taking things into your own hands does. A lot of the people I see complaining seem to also be people who expect someone else to solve their problems for them. If you want to be isolated from assholes then take steps to be so.
@aral they want a fan club, specifically one that they can monetize. It's all about the benjamin's.
@aral If you are a journalist (or think you are one, etc.) it makes sense. One of the main purposes of a journalist is to make stories heard. The size of the audience matters.
The potential amount of reach matters.
@aral @briankrebs THIS. I’m not here to get followers, I’m here to make friends.
@wendynather @aral Exactly. If I cared about followers, I would just pick up again on that other site.
@aral Agree Mastodon is quality over quantity, which facilitates more meaningful interactions.
@aral I had over 1200 followers on twitter, and I still miss some of the people I used to take to in there... But I just couldn't stay there (and that was 2 years ago, it only went downhill)
@aral also if those people were actually influential, they could basically go wherever they pleased and people would follow (as in: sign up, not just as in: tolerate their posts where they already spend their time anyway)
This what I hope more and more people come to realize: you don't need the world as a stage. You don't even want that, actually.
It is worthwhile to have a central channel for dissemination of information that the world does need to know, and ActivityPub absolutely can fulfill that purpose, but the influenzers are obsessed with notions of fame and fortune. That was *never* the purpose of social networks. Social media, yes, but not Networks.