Depends what your purpose is. If you want to be a broadcaster, have a message to sell, then there's a larger audience. If you want to have good conversations, you don't need many people. Who talks to millions of people in a lively back and forth?
You want the right people such as experts and industry leaders. Those are on Twitter. If you want to hang with average Joes then you have a random Discord service, forums or anonymous people on Reddit. It's not the features that makes microblogs great.
I disagree that "the right people" are on Twitter. I will grant that Twitter has historically been the high water mark for having the largest number of those people in one place, and also that a disproportionate number of people who need broad public reach as an intrinsic part of their career will also be their (eg. celebrities and journalists).
But at the same time, being an expert, leader and overall interesting person is not synonymous with public reach, and there is a huge subset of interesting people that have never touched Twitter. There's also been a slow and steady descent in the level of discourse on Twitter to the point that it's widely regarded as a cesspool now, with many formerly active interesting people having abandoned it, and many others holding their nose to drop their broadcasts but not engaging in any discourse due to the amount of polarization and armies of angry partisan nobodies ready to dogpile on the slightest misplaced word.
Ultimately, the most interesting parts of Twitter as being a marketplace for ideas, public square, and open platform with diverse use cases that everyone was so excited about in 2008-2012 was eventually subverted by the financial incentives that VC investment demands. The result is a significant divergence between what constitutes an interesting idea and what will make you successful on Twitter. Therefore I thoroughly reject the idea of treating Twitter as any kind of baseline bar for contemporary human notability. I'd rank a large scale following there somewhere above reality TV star, and somewhere below traditionally published author.
You can either go hunt down very specific narrow spaces where perhaps some special people have gathered. Or you can go to the site where everyone who wants to be in public having interesting engaging discussions with smart people already are.
There's no comparison. This isn't about audiences nor number of users. It's about the ability for people to form connections. Twitter has been way better of a place to do that, to find & discover new connections to make, in a place everyone sharp already was at.
Everyone sharp was not on Twitter, there was always a majority that were not. Like I said, in terms of a single platform it was a high water mark, but it is incredible confirmation bias to claim that everyone sharp went to Twitter.
I would never say this for real, but in my head I've always asked, how smart can you be if you're turning your nose up at or not joining in the most interesting open active conversations in the world?
I agree that the majority of the world or even sharp people weren't actually there. But in effect, every other place for conversations was a drop in the bucket compared to Twitter's ocean. Finding some good inspiring informative people to follow, & look up other potentially interesting conversationalists as you go, and you'd be hella winning.
Twitter enabled following & expanding your network intelligently nearly infinitely. Every other place, you will be bound to whomever you can attract.
> how smart can you be if you're turning your nose up at or not joining in the most interesting open active conversations in the world?
Frankly, I tend towards the opposite view. How smart can you be if you spend any significant amount of time engaged in the worst platform for intelligent conversation on the internet?
Well, clearly there are plenty of smart people in either category, but we can objectively say there are a lot more smart people that don't use twitter than do.
There's a worldview that proritizes/heavily weighs cost, and there's another that prioritizes/heavily weights opportunity.
This continues to strike me as passing up on something amazing. Most issues with birdsite depend on where you tread. The forum itself is not exceptional but really people just make such mountains over little molehills. Just learn to unfollow & trust your own judgements. Focusing only on negatives is a "whether you believe you can or whether you believe you can't, you're right".
You don't have good conversations with those people on Twitter though. 99% tweets directed by unpopular account to popular are going into a black hole. It's not a "good conversation" where you write something with 1% chance of getting something back.
If I am interested to know what experts and industry leaders think, I can monitor their media (where by the way HN is wayyy better than Twitter, and I'm sure there is a better community for every industry), but for good conversations I'd probably head to a smaller group which can exist anywhere, Matrix, Discord, FB group, Whatsapp communities, Discourse, etc. If I have an industry leader who is also a friend, those places is probably where they are having the good conversations.
> It's not the features that makes microblogs great.
Agreed. It is organic interaction, which you get at the Fediverse. Much more so than on Twitter is my anecdotal observation. On Twitter you have to hone your messages in hope the algorithms make you 'go viral'. There are quite a few experts, academics, scientists and journalists migrating to the Fediverse. Increasingly some of the industry leaders too. I do not know if that is good for the dynamics. It is quite refreshing to have a social network where people don't try to become influencers.
> On Twitter you have to hone your messages in hope the algorithms make you 'go viral'.
On the contrary, algorithms are to a large extent irrelevant. You see what the people you follow tweet and retweet. No algorithms involved. What made Twitter special is rather that you can interact with anyone. You can live in the middle of nowhere and still share knowledge and network with the best in your field. Making a copy of the platform but removing the people, also removes the whole point of Twitter.
> It is organic interaction, which you get at the Fediverse. Much more so than on Twitter
Do you though? If you're unlucky with your instance of choice, there will be as much "organic interaction" as in an abandoned mining town.
Coupled with aversion to search this makes Mastodon "organic" only on large instances and/or only if you specifically know which people on which instances to follow.
No, you have to build your own network first. That's the main difference to Twitter, where the algorithm throws people at you (including the toxic ones to maximize engagement). It is more representative to real life that way. If you move to a new city you will have to give some effort to build a relationship network. By doing so it is likely also to be a more intimate and qualitative one, providing more value from the time you spend there.
It's trivially easy to move your profile and followers list to another instance, if you want to. But you aren't restricted to following users from your instance anyway. Follow one person you see boosted into your feed, look at who they follow and follow them. Rince and repeat.
It depends on the industry. The ones I'm following mainly are: infosec - almost every single follow I had is on mastodon, and gamedev - different people but there's still a big crowd.
Then there's "weird tech", which was already on mastodon. (Tube time, foone, etc.)
I would suggest most people don’t care about broadcasting or having a conversation. They want to get “important” information from people they’re familiar with (news services, celebrities, etc).
>If you want to have good conversations, you don't need many people.
I still need quite a few of them to have interesting follows. I'm following 180 accounts on Twitter but only 20 on Mastodon. And basically all of those on Mastodon are tech people.
Not that I really want to follow people on Mastodon anyways. I'm hoping that Bluesky is gonna become the go-to Twitter replacement once it opens up.
