Marcus Hutchins on Mastodon:
What I missed about Mastodon was its very different culture. Ad-driven social media platforms are willing to tolerate monumental volumes of abusive users. They’ve discovered the same thing the Mainstream Media did: negative emotions grip people’s attention harder than positive ones. Hate and fear drives engagement, and engagement drives ad impressions.
More here.
I have been on Mastodon for a few weeks now, and wow, what a breath of fresh air. I’m only syndicating to Twitter (and have been for a while, as you might have noticed) while I’m active and engaged on Masto. I know this is breaking my POSSE stance so much that I’ve set up my own Masto instance so I could own my content over there like I do with this website. I never switched from fosstodon (which is an instance I like a lot), though. I’ll wait a little bit and then decide on the move.
What impresses me is the atmosphere and overall level of engagement on Masto. I have 2.1k followers on Twitter and just a little over 100 on Masto, and yet, the Masto feed is so much richer and more interesting, and the interaction level is incomparable. The Masto vibe these days reminds me of Twitter when I joined back in 2009. Better yet, of the old BBS days, or Usenet. Hopefully, it will last, and, for the reasons outlined by Marcus’ post above (mandatory read, IMHO), I am confident it will.