These days I just hit the mark of 1500 followers on my photography account @hikingdude@mastodon.social on Mastodon.
That’s really – great, satisfying, surprising. Choose whatever you want. For an influencer on other platforms (the Entertainment media) this might not be a lot. But.. Wait…
To put it into relation: I’m active on Instagram and tried Twitter / X a couple of years ago. The Twitter algorithm never liked me. My posts hardly ever got more than 200 views, let’s not even talk about interactions. I did some “algorithm hacking” and hardly got over 1800 followers. Well not really genuine followers obviously, also it was just more tedious labor than fun and the view count didn’t even increase, the little bit of interaction was a lot of engagement farming and some few nice ones. And well the moral aspect of the platform “recently” .. Let’s not start that topic.
On Instagram I’m stuck at around 1100 followers since ages. The platform favours… not my content, obviously. But there are a couple of nice people that I got to know – even in real life!! But the level of interaction is.. Not too high. And that means: not too much fun either.
Coming to Mastodon: I signed up because I was in favour of an independent network. It was a gamble as I heard so often that “there’s nobody there” or that it only has “x amount of monthly active users”. But Twitter already thought me: it’s totally irrelevant how many users do NOT see me. – I just started posting what I liked. My measure of success was the joy of genuine interaction. And regarding that it was a massive success!
I’m active whenever I want and interact with everything I’m in favour of. I enjoy the freedom and I express and share what I want. And obviously I’ve found my niche! I’ve found a set of great people with whome I interact more often and obviously some others find that interesting as well.
A while ago I also dropped my email newsletter. The subscriber count was super low and it wasn’t worth any additional labor. Instead, I connected the blog to the Fediverse and got 10x more subscribers there compared to the email subscribers.
Coming back to the original question: Is it worth joining Mastodon?
For me: absolutely! 100% Maybe – even I mention subscriber numbers above (well because it’s important for a lot of people) – it’s about the independence and the fun of interaction.
And I didn’t even mention that there won’t be ADs in my timeline, that there is no VC involved who wants a positive ROI at some time, that noone is selling my data, that I can easily configure that my old posts are being deleted, that the ecosystem isn’t closed but open, that people don’t even need an account to follow …