I don’t really have anything enlightening to say about Elon Musk kicking journalists off Twitter, except that it’s not really surprising. He seems to be rocking from one crisis to another. Has the Twitter Terms of Service been changed to, “Don’t hurt Elon’s feelings”?
CNN journalist, Donie O’Sullivan shared an interview on his Mastodon account about it, which of course you can’t share on Twitter.
Anyway, I can see from here that there are thousands of people opening new Mastodon accounts every hour since that happened. I jumped ship in early November when he fired half the staff in the company. Two weeks later, a quarter of a million people joined Mastodon in one day. This surge in new users is nowhere near that big. While Twitter, the website, didn’t collapse within days, I still think it’s only a matter of time. Take a look at Twitter is Going Great to get a quick feel for how badly it’s going great. It appears they haven’t updated yet with the latest news, but I’m sure it’s only a matter of time.
Tumblr is another website benefiting from the exodus, but they can handle it. As Matt said in a recent interview,
Particularly in the last month or so, we have seen some huge waves and droves of users. Fluent celebrities like Ryan Reynolds, Lynda Carter, and Halsey are coming over or coming back. It has been a fun time to be on Tumblr. I tell the team that fortune favors the prepared. There are also a lot of other places people could go, but we are ready for the waves. We can handle 200,000 to 300,000 sign ups a day. We can handle what’s happening.
Matt Mullenweg
Before this influx of new people joining, my Mastodon feed was definitely quieter than it was a few weeks before. Early mornings are always quiet because I mostly follow Irish people, but the local feed was quiet with minutes going by between posts. That all changed today. My “Elon Musk” filter hardly had to do any work in the last week until today, but it’s working hard now!
It started with Eugen Rochko asking “What a thing to wake up to”. Then we found out that Twitter had banned sharing Mastodon links on their site. What is ridiculous is that Twitter is massively bigger than the entire Fediverse. How can Elon feel threatened by such a small alternative website network? As Dave Winer said, “There’s a story to tell about this, and it isn’t over yet.”
If you do join Mastodon today, here are a few things you should do:
- Add an avatar.
- Write an introduction post or fill in your bio.
- Write a couple of posts and pin them to your profile. When people from other instances (other servers) see your profile, they’ll see the pinned posts. They won’t see any other posts if you’re not friends with anyone on the remote instance.
- Look up some hashtags. The WordPress hashtag is busy. You can follow hashtags too!
- Add .rss to any Mastodon URL to get an rss feed. Add the feed to your blog. Look at the sidebar of this blog for an example.
- Boost liberally. There’s no algorithm so that’s how posts go viral.
- I’m there as @donncha – say hi!
Consider adding your blog to the Fediverse, but in my experience, I prefer to share things from my own personal account. It’s much easier to chat with others that way.
