"Don't tell people to leave Twitter/X.

Oliphantom Menace

"Don't tell people to leave Twitter/X. It makes them not want to come here."

Repeat what you just said back to yourself, but more slowly this time.

Come on, this is foundational. Telling them to leave makes them want to stay even more? What does telling them to stay do, then? This is one of these things that seems profound, but is in actuality completely nonsensical.

Oliphantom Menace

I agree with other arguments on this topic, like first you've got to be a person people want to follow in the first place, and there has to be enough of those folks for the general public to take an interest, and if those people are annoying assholes, people aren't going to want to come "here."

But "here" is so many things to so many people, and audiences don't all intersect due to follows and federation so what seems to be 'everywhere' to you might be 'nowhere' to someone else.

It's why I prefer thinking of things in terms of islands, archipelagos, or just "networks" in general, and island networks let you codify what "here" actually means.

I think we need to shift platforms a bit to something a bit more agile and less costly, like GoToSocial, to make instances more scalable and affordable and easy to run for others as well as having several built-in privacy and security features. People would tend to think more of these things as islands rather than platforms or a single contiguous place.

I think backend-agnostic client tools like Phanpy and Elk and Semaphore, along with the variety of Mastodon API-supporting mobile apps (most of which support GTS, too) will help it to feel like a more contiguous place, but this isn't the place for "everyone", because it's a network of intersecting venn diagrams of audiences.

So lecturing people "here" to "do a thing" I'm never sure where "here" is or who I'm actually talking to, beyond my own followers.