what’s the margin of error?
what is their standard deviation?
I would imagine 1% change would be pretty hard to not attribute to noise… give me stats!!
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Not surprising, the content algorithm is optimized for usage whales, just like pay to play games. But a platform optimized for addictive content - memes, outrage and celebrities is not a place for news, corporate or government communications. No one was reading newspapers on CD radio back in the 70s either.
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You beat me to it!
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I have at least two. Thinking I may just start over again.
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I think that’s the interesting thing about the “email” analogy. People usually cite it as a story of “so therefore it’s obvious and natural” but forgetting that the story of email was a slooooow adoption with nerds leading the pack and everyone else saying “why would I do this, why would I go to the trouble, who am I going to email?” Sure, having an email account with your job and/or school is automatic now, but that didn’t exist for a long time, and still doesn’t for Mastadon. There also is hardly an equivalent to AOL, Hotmail, Gmail, Yahoo, etc… for the general purpose free, simple, personal accounts (particularly with Mastadon.social actively trying to rate limit)
I would venture to say that hurdles are less tech savviness or intelligence, but rather social / existential. The meaning of selecting a server hasn’t been clearly defined. Is it a community, an identity or just a tool / service provider? That makes it a much tougher decision prone to analysis paralysis and abandonment.
As @gracchus and others have consistently said, if the email analogy is to truly manifest, more organizations need to be running servers and inviting users in a meaningful way, so that server selection can be more obvious and intuitive.
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And the thing is, NPR left quite a while ago. I’m sure media outlets leaving after Elno shitted up media links are going to see even smaller drops in traffic. What was interesting is that even at its height, Twitter was only responsible for 2% of NPR’s traffic. I know they say they’re not just in it for the traffic, but other entities are, and this is really proving that Xitter (and likely other social media) just aren’t worth the kind of resources invested in them by various entities - at all.
And if they’re just staying around to cut down on misinformation, well… that’s a lost cause, as recent events have proven.
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That’s how I’ve been reading it
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The email analogy doesn’t necessarily mean “therefore obvious”, but it does mean “therefore somewhat familiar”, like any analogy. It should reduce the cognitive load.
As with email, it may take a while to catch on, and organizations have to be convinced of the need to create/host their own service points, which could be a hard sell. I fully expect that we’ll have Gmail/AOL/Yahoos as the ecosystem builds on itself and hits critical mass in different communities of interest. Many people will get an account through school or work, or perhaps through their local government. There’s a lot of room for diversity, which is a strength as well as a source of confusion.
Threads is (probably) going to speak ActivityPub, so there’s a chance most people will have an entrypoint there.
Also, bear in mind that it’s WAY more than just Mastodon. Lemmy, Firefish, and kbin all speak ActivityPub. Wordpress already speaks it, as does Drupal (with a plugin). It’s pretty interesting and there’s a lot of innovation happening.
Mastodon is kinda like Firefox - one way of accessing the network of compatible HTTP services. You’re not stuck with it.
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Why does a server have to have a meaning? Why select an ‘interest group’? Aren’t there just ‘general purpose’ servers where your interests or whether the server selection means something simply do not matter?
Most of them are pretty generic, really. You don’t need to be a particular community to be on eg mstdn.ca, any of the big ones pretty much.
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I just went and logged onto my Mastodon account, set up in 2021 and haven’t been back since. I subscribed to all the NPR feeds.
I’m on the Federated timeline! Whee!
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NPR’s example demonstrates that Musk either doesn’t know how to run a social media platform, or is trying to destroy it.
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AIUI the original generic server is mastodon.social
If we can’t remember that, we can always try mastodon.org and mastodon.com but both of those are something else 
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People need to stop recommending a replacement for Twitter, Arsebook, whatever. It’s over. Done. They have all failed us. Anything replacing that thing will inevitably fail us.
I’m mostly a Mastodon’t but the literal best thing about it is that it isn’t a replacement for Twitter.
That era is done.
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That’s exactly why I haven’t joined Mastodon after a year of thinking about it and several tries.
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i link to boing-boing , often , instead of an original source ?
sort of , this comment section of boing is a social media ?
if , as i often do , one squints ?
There are two reasons, really.
- The server will have its own timeline. I chose muenchen.social so most of those on the “local” timeline live in Munich, like I do.
- Whoever set up the server made some choices, mostly a which bad actors to ban, the balance between liberal and protective, and so on. I honestly find mine restrictive, too anti-porn.
That’s why it’s nice that Mastodon as a network protocol was designed around packing up and moving elsewhere if the one you’re on enshittifies, or you outgrow it, or want another local group, and so on.
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