@damon It doesn't help that Mastodon itself is largely a bubble.

Some 70% of all Fediverse users are on Mastodon. But it seems like that within Mastodon itself, at least 95% of all posts originate from Mastodon. Maybe even more.

There are several reasons for this.

First of all, other projects don't federate with Mastodon that much.

Misskey is huge in East Asia, especially Japan. And Japanese Misskey users who hardly know English or not at all won't be interested in connecting with Western Mastodon users, so a large chunk of the second-biggest free project in the Fediverse is out of the equation.

Lemmy is the third-biggest, but Lemmy federates with Mastodon only barely so, also because Lemmy is all about discussion groups and enclosed conversations, both of which Mastodon simply doesn't support. Lemmy users can't follow Mastodon users because Lemmy users can't follow users, full stop. And Mastodon users have to wrap their minds around how to federate with Lemmy. It isn't as straight-forward as communication within Mastodon. And so they simply don't.

Other examples include Hubzilla and (streams) channels having ActivityPub off on purpose to keep ignorant and obnoxious Mastodon users out.

But this goes the other way as well. Mastodon can be outright hostile to non-Mastodon users. Why? Because they don't behave like what Mastodon users are used to from Mastodon and, by extent, partly also Twitter. And they have joined the Fediverse in expectation of something that's one big distributed but homogenous Twitter clone. Anything that deviates from that may be disturbing.

There are Mastodon users who, upon seeing a post with over 500 characters, and be it in the federated timeline, block the poster. This alone cuts into the reach of everything that isn't Mastodon. Not few wish for a switch with which they can permanently filter out all posts with over 500 characters.

Others may block everyone who uses text formatting. Either it simply goes on their nerves. Or they can't imagine that it's even possible to format text in the Fediverse because they can't do that on Mastodon, so they think it's all some Unicode trickery. And as this Unicode trickery is not accessible and inclusive because it irritates screen readers, they deem whoever uses text formatting ableist and therefore blockworthy.

Then there's the issue of content warnings. They must be provided the Mastodon way, or you risk being blocked. However, not everything out there provides a) the right text field with b) the right label on it. Non-Mastodon projects may still label the summary field a summary field instead of a CW field like Mastodon does.

Friendica, for example, has done away with that text field entirely and users BBcode tags instead. Hubzilla doesn't provide any means of adding a summary/a Mastodon CW to a reply. And both have had their own way of adding CWs since long before there was Mastodon which their own users consider vastly superior to Mastodon's way.

In general, boosts are very important on Mastodon. I'd say that most activity on Mastodon is boosts because they're so easy to do on a phone without a hardware keyboard. Your reach on Mastodon depends on boosts.

But if you don't play exactly along Mastodon's written and unwritten rules, and if you don't adhere to the "Fediquette" which is entirely defined by only Mastodon users and geared towards only Mastodon's features (or lack thereof), you're boosted far less.

If you post more than 500 characters at once, it takes a lot for your post to get boosted.

If you post an image without alt-text, the post will be boosted dramatically less because not exactly few Mastodon users refuse to boost image posts without alt-text. You may even be muted or blocked for not providing alt-text. But alt-text only is a thing on Mastodon, and hardly anyone provides it outside Mastodon.

In general, anything that deviates from the standards defined by vanilla Mastodon will cut into your visibility on Mastodon deeply.

CC: @Hiker

#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #Fediverse #Mastodon #NotOnlyMastodon #AltText #AltTextMeta #CWAltTextMeta #CW #CWs #CWMeta #ContentWarning #ContentWarnings #ContentWarningMeta #Fediquette