Fediverse

To increase engagement, I propose we have some idiots volunteer to respond to every scientific article and achievement on Mastodon with ridicule and skepticism.

I gave in to peer pressure and finally got Twitter right before shit completely hit the fan, even though I was already uncomfortable with it. I already had a Mastodon user, but not under my real name.

Then, during the exodus, I created a Mastodon user for academic use. This was a few months before defending my PhD in social sciences.

For a while, I was posting the same content on both platforms. On Twitter I am followed by a lot of people in my field, and many of them are still active. On Mastodon, there's like.. two active people specifically in my field.

Still, whenever I post anything both places, I have gotten more interactions on Mastodon than on Twitter. On Twitter a couple of people see it and boost, and they can be somewhat central in the field. But then it kind of deflates. On Mastodon, I get boosts from the ones there in the field, people in adjacent fields (for example the #rstats crowd), interested people from civil society, commentators, a real variety of people. Hell, the other day I was boosted by a folk singer I've been a fan of for years but that I didn't even know was on there.

Meanwhile, I occasionally check the temperature on Bluesky, and I bridge my posts there. Many in my field signed up while it was invite only. Some of them posted one or two posts back then. I haven't seen any actively since, and nobody from my field has followed my bridged account - but one R stats person has.

I guess they must be on Twitter still, if they are anywhere.

Anyway, point is, my field indeed failed to migrate. But I still achieve more by posting on Mastodon than on Twitter.

37% of them went so far as to get a mastodon account and mention it in their twitter profile, and then maybe one third of those put some substantial effort into making it work. That's ~90% who didn't bother. In the one small-ish academic field where I followed some of the new arrivals on mastodon when they got there, it very much appeared to me that the failure had nothing to do with the decentralized nature of the platform. It was simply that the small number who made the transition did not add up to enough to form a critical mass and get the discussion going. Some few of them did give it a good try.

The problem with comparing "engagement" across platforms is that it is never apples to apples. My experience on Mastodon has been that the engagement is lower in quantity, but much higher in quality. The number of meaningful and thoughtful engagements is much higher. The number of enduring connections is much higher.

If you want to interact with people who are seeking your exact content, if you want to build fidelity, if you want more meaningful comments and to build community, there is no better place I've found than Mastodon.

Social mass media favors "influencers" who create content that has broad appeal, but no depth or meaningful engagement, or else ragebait that attracts conflict and repetitive comments.

Reality for mastodon, I think, is that the "migration" is basically over, and has been for over a year now. The Brazilian move to BlueSky (and not mastodon) highlights it very well.

Recalibrating on what we want and can do with the fediverse, as well as how central we want the mastodon project to be, are the best things to do now.

For me, it seemed like Gargron didn't really know how to speak about the lack of a Brazilian migration to mastodon in favour of BlueSky, and handle a new moment of actually dropping in popularity or perceived relevance (having been the underdog then rising start for a while), which I take as a cue that being the dominant center of the fediverse isn't a natural fit for Gargron and his project, to the point where the fediverse may have just outgrown it.

So, random thoughts:

• I think de-emphasising mastodon as the fediverse's big player and surest means of gaining users is likely a good idea in the medium to long term. Replacing twitter for twitter users is now something others do substantially better: Threads and BlueSky. While I'm not sure Mastodon, or its decentralisation, offers anything particularly novel, different or attractive. If anything, its lack of compatibility with other fediverse platforms is likely a negative.
• More broadly, a focus on microblogging is best de-emphasised, for the same reasons as above. Conspicuously, mastodon is the only platform that's really trying to replicate twitter-style microblogging. Just about every other platform tries to go beyond it in some way.
• Instead, IMO, community building through richer and more flexible platforms is what the fediverse should focus on, in large part because it matches what the fediverse's decentralisation actually provides: control and ownership over your community.
  • Indeed, I think the fediverse needs to kinda wake up to what it really is. So much of the advocacy during the twitter migration was pushing the idea that the decentralisation doesn't really matter (and "it's just like email") and can be ignored for the most part.
  • In reality, it does matter and can't be easily ignored. And the world has more or less realised that, with mastodon (and the fediverse) now suffering from a branding issue.
  • So I say the way forward is to accept what decentralisation is and either add an additional layer to polish the UX, or lean into it and build on it rather than pretend this place is something else.
• By community building, I mean "flexible space creation" that likely translates to a range of relatively composable features, structures and content types and formats. Basically, stop rebuilding big-social style platforms, and build "humane spaces" that more or less comprise any/all of the formats of the existing platforms in a way that people can use however they want.
• Unfortunately, this is likely not trivial, at all, and would likely require better organisation amongst those contributing to the fediverse, and perhaps improvements to the protocol itself.

As for the threadiverse (lemmy, piefed, mbin, nodebb etc), it's always struck me that group based structures (EG, lemmy communities) seem to work better over federation. Account migration from instance to instance is simpler, in part because the user is not the central organisation. Which instance you're on doesn't really matter that much. Also, blocking a whole community seems a useful middle ground between blocking a user and defederating a whole instance at the instance level, and ditto with community level moderation which can operate over federation. Additionally, the little technical talk I've seen on the issue seems to indicate that moving a community from instance to another might actually be quite viable.

If true, then community building might be best started with the group based platforms. Maybe an ecosystem of formats that involves all of them other than microblogging might work well?? Perhaps user-based content could take on a different structure from what microblogging does ... perhaps something like what BlueSky does could be adapted to fuse user-based structures into group-based platforms like lemmy (IE, your content exists in a pod which you can own and which is portable, which is then sucked up into various public feeds depending on what permissions you provide)??

Things like private communities, group chats, blogs, wikis (and RSS feed management?) intuitively seem to me to pair well with group-based platforms and community building.

I have the same issue with Reddit, there's a middle size good quality subreddit about my specific job which is the best place on the internet to see news and discussions about it in one place. It helps me increase and test my knowledge a lot.

Hot take of the day: academia doesn't need social media.

Many people will always be obsessed with "engagement", and there's no saving them. They've been under the influence of big tech social media for too long, and it becomes an addiction.

The fediverse is an option to get away from this, but it certainly is not a cure. The only cure is the willingness to help yourself and change.

You know who else is obsessed with engagement? Clickbait authors