For the people who have found homes on mastodon.art in the past 1-2 weeks, how have you found the engagement here, compared to the other social networking sites you might be on?
Are you finding that you have much more activity on your posts, even with far fewer followers, and a much smaller potential audience?
Have you had more art sales or donations since you've been here than what you usually have elsewhere?
The reason I made this post:
A lot of artists are understandably worried about giving up their bigger follower base on the other social media sites.
Now there's a huge thread of people saying how amazing it is here and how comparable, if not (most of the time) *much* better, the engagement is here.
You can link this thread (using https://mastodon.art/@Curator/109315296869081671) to any of your friends who are worried about moving over because of the loss of interaction. <3
@Curator One complained about the "forcedfully" use of CW, which i do not sincerely believe that is forced.
@AleF2050 Haha, no. Also using CWings actually gets you MORE views/boosts/engagement so it's like the opposite of censorship.
@Curator @AleF2050
...And that's puzzling to me. Aren't CWs a marker "you might NOT want to see this! So we hid it"?
The core principle on interacting with users, and gaining views, in any article about promotion I remember, was "every and any step user needs to do in order to see your content cuts your potential auditory in half"
I personally am very grateful Mastodon has the "unhide all CW posts automatically" option, else there would be a temptation to just scroll past any of the CW'd posts.
CW meta
@darth_biomech @Curator @AleF2050 The thing with that 'core principle' is that it assumes a "push-based environment", where people have to compete at getting their stuff in front of others. Twitter is such an environment, most places are (thanks capitalism), but fedi isn't!
Fedi instead has a consent-based culture, where it's about giving people control over what they interact with and, perhaps more importantly, *when* they do it. That's the main purpose that CWs serve here - it allows people to engage with things on their own terms, rather than basically "jumpscaring" them with it.
And a lot of people are perfectly okay with engaging on stuff that might under some circumstances even be distressing to them, as long as they get to choose when to do so. And so that means that CWs make your posts more accessible to people, instead of less!
CW meta
@joepie91 @Curator @AleF2050 This makes so much more sense now, thank you.