Decentralized Social Media Is the Only Alternative to the Tech Oligarchy
The TikTok ban and Donald Trump's rise to power show how fragile our social media accounts are. We must normalize and invest in decentralized social media.
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The thing about Mastodon for influencers is... you don't even have to leave Twitter. Just post to both.
If enough people get into that habit, it makes the transition much easier for everyone.
Twitter is very friendly to influencers because it automatically boosts popular posts and hashtags. Mastodon doesn't by design, so they're gonna have a much, much harder time there.
That's an okay decision to take, but it makes it hard to grow the network because there's a lower financial incentive.
Mastodon doesn't by design, so they're gonna have a much, much harder time there.
In theory, yes. But what early switching folks are reporting is that the total impressions are much lower on Mastodon, but the total engagement is much higher, for the same effort.
Which is confusing unless we factor in what we know about Twitter farming bot account on purpose to create an inflated appearance of success.
Of course, there's still the matter of Twitter genuinely has orders of magnitude more users. So as an either/or proposition, no way does it, yet, make sense to ditch Twitter for Mastodon.
But for the value-to-reach ratio, with the same effort applied to both, anyway, Mastodon is actually already a better value than Twitter.
All that to say, yeah, Twitter is better, purely due to the user base, and Mastodon's algorithm actually treats creators better. Which we kind of already knew, as it was created by people fed up with Twitters abusive algorithms.
Mastodon doesn't by design
There is a trending section, and it does boost popular tags based on user interaction. It doesn't shovel crap into personal feeds like traditional social media, but it's not entirely lacking discovery features either.
Trending section often unusable and basically only rewards the majority (a.k.a Western fediverse).
If you host instance for non-English language for local communities, trending will quickly populated with Western/US-centric conversation and news.
Please tell me how I can keep posting to twitter after I was banned for being a journalist?
My point was for people who are scared to leave Twitter. They don't have to. They can just dip their toes in while still holding their Elon-themed blanket.
I understand that often you can't just drop the platform where all the engagement is when your job is to promote something. However, you can still enable people who do want to make the switch.
Make another account
That one got banned too. I can't even signup for a lot of these services. I get banned before I even make a post.
You need to use a different device and IP address. IP addresses are a dead giveaway for someone trying to create a second account, and even with a different address, browsers are easy to reliably fingerprint.
The reason for using an entirely different device* is to prevent advertising crap baked into your software from sending Twitter or other platforms any unique advertising ID associated with one of your old, banned IP addresses.
*With careful setup, a virtual machine with a dedicated VLAN and internet connection would work.
Honestly, if you're going to do both, do bluesky and mastodon. Bluesky isn't properly decentralised the way mastodon is, but a lot of influential people are there. Also it's way better than twitter was.
