gemini://gemini.sh0.xyz/log/2022-11-20_welcome_to_the

For any of you who aren't on Twitter (probably a lot of you), or aren't on Mastodon (maybe a few of you), or just don't keep up with anything in the way of social media (OK maybe a lot more of you), yesterday there was another mass exodus from Twitter due to the actions of it's new owner, Elon Musk. After doing a public poll, Musk reinstated former President Donald Trump's Twitter account. This cause outage on the platform and an increase in Mastodon posts of the nature...

A lot of vintage Mastodon users spent the next few hours responding to intro toots, answering questions, and following new members to help welcome them to the community. For a lot of the #TwitterRefugees this came as somewhat of a shock. A social media platform, run and maintained by the community, where people are welcoming and supportive to complete strangers. Quite shocking /s

For many of them this was their first introduction to the Fediverse. There were a lot of responses trying to explain that you pick an instances based on your interests, your view on their privacy and publishing policies. As many refugees followed a friend to a specific instance, picked from a list, or saw someone tweet they were leaving for mastodon.example.com, this part of the process was lost. They could always migrate to another instance, back up their settings and do the transition supported by fediverse services, that may be just too foreign of a concept.

What may have been a bigger shock was the fact that their feed was rather quiet compared to what it was over in Twitter. It was an interesting concept having two feeds, a local one for your instance and a global one that covers the majority of the Fediverse. At some point the concept of blocking cesspool instances may eventually come up. With so many new people its bound to happen.

What may have been a bigger shift in usage is how Mastodon users tend to Boost or "ReTweet" far more than just favorite. Being a federated service means that your experience may be completely different from the person next to you. I may have followers on a different instance who don't regularly see your posts. To get the word out, I Boost your post so that they can see what you're saying and potentially start following you. The fire hose that is the Global feed isn't easy to consume. With a million new members this week, its only going to get worse. Boosting those posts you like helps get everyone a wider following.

>Aside from the bandwidth issues, and that the global feed will be pure chaos, and probably a little more crap in your feeds...

>...is anyone else kinda stoked that a fediverse service is getting a little more legitimacy from the general public?

I think it will be interesting to see how Mastodon holds up. It has had a great following for a while, regularly getting new members. In the past week, however, there has been about a million new account made. The instance I use over at SDF is now up to 31k active users. Quite a high number for a BBS system that is often pretty quiet. They just recently had to do an upgrade to their servers to handle the change and increase in users.

During the exodus we were seeing images not loading, follows taking a while to register. Being a federated service means your local instance takes the load of your local users. If one instance was to crash it wouldn't take down everyone. The fault tolerance is built in. But the nature of federated services is that they are hosted, paid for and supported by the community and a few benevolent admins who find the labor worth it.

A lot of people take for granted that social media costs money. You sign up, don't hand over your CC, PayPal or CashApp, and away you go. For services like Facebook and Twitter you pay with ad views. But like @Lefty_Left_Left@mastodon.sdf.org said

For any of you new to Mastodon and are reading this, just remember how this service is provided. There are developers out there creating the Mastodon service, the mobile and desktop apps you use. There are admins who host and fund the instance you're on. They do it because they feel like free speech is important. So important that right now they are paying for it out of their own pockets.

If you like it here on Mastodon and want to keep free speech alive...and a place for all your #Caturday pictures, please support those who make it possible. Most of the apps websites have a link to "Buy me a coffee." If you dig around on the instance's website or post a question and someone local will respond with where to give a few bucks to keep the lights on.

For all you #TwitterRefugees welcome to Mastodon and the Fediverse. Enjoy your stay.

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A better test of the Fediverse