Thanks!

I don’t generally like the Twitter model and rarely use it, but I will say that one thing that it does do well, better than the Reddit/Threadiverse model, is very rapidly assembling information about a specific, temporary topic.

Like, the Reddit model is about letting a community assemble over time and letting people find their way there and moderators be chosen and all that. That works quite well for a lot of things, and lets people with expertise in the field arise and all that.

But let’s say that there’s a huge natural disaster and people are putting up video clips from their cell phones and stuff like that. They can coalesce around a hashtag or a couple of hashtags pretty quickly. Relevant material from people who have had no contact with each other and maybe no time to assemble a community or anything gets drawn together. Other users retweeting content help highlight it. The topic probably won’t be active for long. It can be really useful for a rapid setup and teardown scenario.

Of course, that’s really mostly following a hashtag, rather than a particular user…

I also dislike the “short comment” model that Twitter uses (though over the years, the comment length has been increased and workarounds added), but one thing that it does help with is to help deal with inexperienced users unfamiliar with quoting etiquette. In email or in traditional forum systems, it’s conventional to quote a bit of relevant text before responding to it. This requires knowing syntax for doing so and when it’s appropriate. Twitter deals with that by forcing everything to be broken up into bite-size chunks as a property of the system, so someone responding to something is forced to respond to only the relevant bit. I think that that probably helps make Twitter more-approachable.

Your browser likely has a “reader view”. In Firefox, by default, this can be toggled via clicking the little page icon in the URL bar. Remote styles won’t be applied in that.

nobody

I’m somebody!

I don’t use Mastodon, but I don’t know if it’s possible to do this particular combination:

without owning a domain

users on the local server should still be able to follow accounts on other Mastodon servers

Like, a client that supports having accounts on multiple Mastodon servers would work. Then they have a local account, and they have an unrelated account elsewhere on another Mastodon server and follow people using that, so that the “following” has nothing to do with your local server.

But if you want federated behavior, where a user connects to your server and has their account there tell the local Mastodon server to pull down posts from another users somewhere out on another Mastodon server, you might need to have a certificate on your server that other servers recognize as valid, which in practice would mean one signed by a public CA.

I don’t know for certain whether this is actually necessary, but I could believe that it is.

In terms of users, it’ll be Mastodon, the Twitter-alike.

goes looking for numbers

This doesn’t indicate whether “active users” is monthly active users (MAU), which is probably the most-common metric for social media, but based on this:

https://mastodon-analytics.com/

There are presently about 750k “active users” on Mastodon.

EDIT: Oh, fediverse.observer does have statistics, and says that theirs are MAU.

According to that, they’re at 912k MAU, so maybe that active user count above is something like weekly active.

https://mastodon.fediverse.observer/stats

Here on the Threadiverse:

Lemmy has about 50k MAU.

https://lemmy.fediverse.observer/stats

Piefed about 6k MAU:

https://piefed.fediverse.observer/stats

And Mbin about 900 MAU:

https://mbin.fediverse.observer/stats