Josh Marshall thread about Mastodon

[BootinUp]

Joshua Marshall
@[e-mail]
So two questions I have about the Mastodon migration. We're about to learn how much highly watched accounts drive Twitter's broader audience. Here's what I mean. I am stunned at how many people I know have already set up Mastodon accounts in the last 48 hrs. Like it seems like almost everyone I know has set one up. Probably I'm not going to notice a lot who haven't yet. I'm mainly reacting to how many I see. But still, it's a huge number.

2/ The people I'm talking about tend to be very high follower accounts - at least in the news/politics space. But on their own they account for a minuscule number of accounts. A few hundred people. Totally meaningless in terms of Twitters scale. So we're about to see whether it just doesn't matter at all, or whether that small number of high profile accounts pulls over a big chunk of audience or whether no one cares and it's just a few hundred people talking to each other. I don't know.

3/ The other issue is journo/news/politics Twitter is just one thing and not terribly large. I'm always fascinated by how many Twitters there are. Virology twitter, History Twitter, Black Twitter, Tech Twitter, Comics Twitter. There are whole ecosystems of Twitter. And I have zero idea whether anything comparable is happening in those ecosystems. I'm curious to find out the answers to both.

4/ Realize I didn't properly explain the three options about a) It's just all the people I know congregating here but that's it. No broader migration. b) migration of high profile accounts spurs mass migration. c) high profile accounts migrate, no one cares and high profile accounts return to Twitter to a chorus of sad trombones.

https://mastodon.social/@[e-mail]/109302596609948247

[muriel_volestrangler]

1. Problem no. 1: links to Mastodon don't survive the DU processing

The '@' throws the DU software off. I suspect that even if that was fixed, we wouldn't get Mastodon fossils (or whatever they're called) appearing embedded on DU, which is an attraction of Twitter for many (though not all - some people don't see that, and object to people using tweets without repeating the text).

[BootinUp]

2. You might be ahead of me. I only started lookng at this.

But I don't think these issues you mention are surprising at this stage of the evolution.

[johnp3907]

3. Took me a few seconds to realize this wasn't about what I thought it was about.