Why twitter beats mastodon

Mastodon is the HackerNews version of Twitter. Only technical people navigate to the site, and even less contribute.

One of Twitter’s downsides is it is an echo chamber with zero-bar for entry. It’s designed to draw engagement out from every single user. From the follower counts, retweets, likes and impressions - literally everything encourages maximum engagement.

This can breed interactions akin to the child who seeks attention from their parents but doesn’t care if its good or bad attention.

But, you can bypass all this stuff through curation, muting, blocking and ignoring. Between stimulus and response lies the freedom to choose your on way - it’s you who chooses to engage or enrage.

Some will say the Mastodon is the answer here. I strongly disagree. It is a walled garden that you build yourself. You design your own cage based on the thoughts and feelings you like. I thought Twitter was an echo chamber and then I found Mastodon.

There is limited discovery of new ideas. Very few reasons to expand your own horizons. And a corpus of mostly one-sided political and societal views. Tech Twitter is a vacuum but the majority of new Tooters are either leaving because they’re following the latest trend, or disagree with the current leadership.

To the last point, that’s a valid reason. But now you’re just attracting a whole bunch of folks who look different but think alike. Hardly an environment to generate discourse with anything more than thinly veiled like-a-ship seeking behaviour.

Couple all of this with the overall difficulty in finding a server, an app to use and the finding good folks to follow (who are often disparately spread across several servers) its a steep hill to climb. For the tech crowd it’s a badge of honour that you figured it all out. For the sports, educational, political, societal, environmental and the list goes on, others who don’t have the inclination, time or prowess to figure it all out? Well too bad dummy! iTs NoT ThAT hArD :sponge_bob_meme:

My parents can get on Twitter. They won’t make it to Mastodon in this lifetime.

But maybe that’s what the new tooters kind of want - a walled garden to call their own.

Tags:

#rant #mastodon #twitter