I asked around so-called influencers why they were not on #Mastodon . Here are the most common replies:
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mekka okereke :verified:replied to mekka okereke :verified: last edited by
I see a lot of replies of the form:
"You can make money on Mastodon! You just have to do A, B, and C! It works!"
And:
"We don't want influencers on Mastodon."
The thing I find funny about the "You can make money on Mastodon!" claim, is that it's almost always proclaimed by Mastodon dudes that don't make any money through their social media content, talking about people that do make money on their social media content. 0% experience, 100% confidence.
2/N
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mekka okereke :verified:replied to mekka okereke :verified: last edited by
The thing I like about the other replies, ("We don't want influencers on Mastodon!") is that at least it's honest? ️
People sit around and imagine what influencers are like, decide that they don't like these people as a group, and then say that they're happy those people are not here. In all sincerity, I respect that.
I feel the same way about "prank content" creators. I find the pranks annoying, dangerous, disrespectful, and unfunny.
3/N
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mekka okereke :verified:replied to mekka okereke :verified: last edited by
I don't think the good influencers are bad.
MKBHD is an influencer. He influences the tech and automotive industries. Back in the day, you used to have to see what Walt Mossberg thought of a new piece of tech. As a child, MKBHD changed the industry with just a camera, his voice, and his opinions.
A recent smartphone camera shootout:
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=VRoTOE3FqT0His first video:
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=9gk_rl3y_SUHis videos go viral.
He's not gaming the algorithm.
He's not selling hate.
4/N
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Anton 🏳️🌈 🇬🇷Pappas (he/him)replied to mekka okereke :verified: last edited by
@mekkaokereke I don't know if doing @nixCraft is a full-time-(paying) job but it seems to me that they are a a person making money on the Internet. It doesn't seem that that's their problem with influencers.
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mekka okereke :verified:replied to Anton 🏳️🌈 🇬🇷Pappas (he/him) last edited by
Minimum wage in NYC is $16/hr. At 52 weeks working 40 hrs a week, that's ~35K a year.
Is nixCraft making $35K a year on Mastodon? I hope so! But I doubt it. If they are, how are they doing that? What mechanism are they using to be paid for their labor and craftsmanship? Donations? Subscriptions?
(And $35K is not enough to cover the average 1 bedroom rent in NYC. Let alone pay for food, health insurance, clothes, and utilities).
People deserve to be paid for their labor.
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@nixCraft I can't tell what the goal of this post is. Do you want more people to come here? Or are you demonstrating why more people don't come here and celebrating that accomplishment?
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mekka okereke :verified:replied to mekka okereke :verified: last edited by
@molly0xfff is an influencer. Through sharp criticism, deep technical expertise, and a better understanding of the nature of humor and satire than most professional comedians, she influences US securities policy, the venture capital industry, large tech companies, and fintech consumers.
Web3 is Going Just Great
A timeline recording only some of the many disasters happening in crypto, decentralized finance, NFTs, and other blockchain-based projects.
(www.web3isgoinggreat.com)
She did a better job than tech journalism or the FTC/SEC at mitigating the financial damage of crypto.
She doesn't game the system to go viral.
She doesn't sell hate.
5/N
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mekka okereke :verified:replied to mekka okereke :verified: last edited by
Molly White and MKBHD deserve to be paid for their labor. The world is a better place because their criticisms and influence exist.
They should be able to earn a living on Mastodon.
If they can't, then it makes sense for them to exist online in other places too.
Confusion about the distinction between paying for labor, real commerce, and capitalism, leads many on Mastodon to reflexively hate anything or anyone that makes money. I think this is a self-defeating view.
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April The Pink ⋆☾╶⃝⃤☽⋆replied to mekka okereke :verified: last edited by@mekkaokereke @nixCraft oh yes you can make money here, the issue is that its not the way how asocial media monetizes, here, the users decide to spend money, users here dont get ad revenue.
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Trey Roadyreplied to mekka okereke :verified: last edited by
@mekkaokereke @nixCraft Can we just admit that social media's appeal comes from the success of creators?
We get caught up in the creator/consumer dichotomy, but when someone makes something I love and it's shared with everyone? When the person creating it is empowered to make more of it? Stardew Valley, Critical Role, and Supergiant Games come to mind.Social media should be a multiplier for creators, and yes, that has a commercial aspect because everyone has bills.
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@mekkaokereke @nixCraft Large, shared experiences are huge.
When someone decides to stand-up to horrible people, when they need to organize to feed their community, hell, when they're amazing at making their breakfast into a cartoon face every morning, the sense of a shared culture is important.
Granted: that's been hijacked and the virality of it has been turned into a cancer. Maybe through a desire for that acknowledgement and visibility, when our own community connections are so thin?
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mekka okereke :verified:replied to April The Pink ⋆☾╶⃝⃤☽⋆ last edited by
I've seen authors get roasted on here for promoting their own books.
I've seen server admins get insulted for suggesting moving to a subscription model rather than a donation model.
I haven't seen many (any?) examples of people being financially successful on Mastodon with a "here's how I did it!" tutorial with real numbers. I just see vague hand-wavings about "It's totally possible!" but when I ask for concrete examples, it gets real quiet. ️
mekka okereke :verified: (@[email protected])
@[email protected] @[email protected] Minimum wage in NYC is $16/hr. At 52 weeks working 40 hrs a week, that's ~35K a year. Is nixCraft making $35K a year on Mastodon? I hope so! But I doubt it. If they are, how are they doing that? What mechanism are they using to be paid for their labor and craftsmanship? Donations? Subscriptions? (And $35K is not enough to cover the average 1 bedroom rent in NYC. Let alone pay for food, health insurance, clothes, and utilities). People deserve to be paid for their labor.
Hachyderm.io (hachyderm.io)
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@mekkaokereke @nixCraft Honestly, our disdain for "influencers" comes from the hacking of our attention economy model: producing content of little value optimized to drag attention and make us feel in ways that are focused on driving use to consume.
There's a difference between buying something because you love it and buying something to repair your sense of self.
If we made a better model, I doubt we'd mind if all the small scale, fun, thoughtful content were also profitable.
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Michael W Lucas¹ :flan_mail:replied to mekka okereke :verified: last edited by
@mekkaokereke @nixCraft @molly0xfff
I dropped Twitter. FB is useless. I have no network on threads or bsky.
My Kickstarter for my last book was promoted only here, and was insanely successful.
You CAN make money on the fedi, through building a network built on sincerity and humor and self-awareness and generally not being a jerk.
Tradesmen like me existed for centuries before capitalism, and we will exist after it (hopefully) dies.
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mekka okereke :verified:replied to Trey Roady last edited by
Honestly, I don't think that's the major part of it. I think there's a lot of confused anti-capitalism, and a lot of misogyny. Many self-described nerds are viciously cruel and exclusionary.️
There's a weird inversion that I observed as both an athlete and a kid that focuses on academics (jock and nerd): Nerds are meaner, more misogynistic, more exclusionary, more disdainful of women and their interests than jocks, and it wasn't remotely close.
mekka okereke :verified: (@[email protected])
@[email protected] Possible? But again, that wasn't my personal observation growing up. My observation was that young boys and girls that cared about fashion, cared about other young boys and girls that cared about fashion, and didn't go out of their way to disparage the kids that didn't as much. They just didn't talk about them. But the way that nerdy kids talked about women and girls in particular that cared about fashion, was disturbingly misogynistic and dehumanizing.
Hachyderm.io (hachyderm.io)
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@notmybackdoorbug @nixCraft this isn’t like email. Point to me where you go to one email website and it presents a bunch of emails servers to join
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I would say the exact opposite. The first three are the valid reasons, the last one is the easiest one to solve: just run their own instance, on their own domain, and keep control of your own online presence.
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Emelia 👸🏻replied to mekka okereke :verified: last edited by [email protected]
@mekkaokereke @april @nixCraft I'm fairly financially successful with monetization on Mastodon, and do publish figures (but it's been a while since I've written an updated article)
YTD I've made €7,713.27 in gross revenue from the community, or between €500-1500 a month. That's across 3 channels, excluding GitHub Sponsors.
Last year was €8,497.03 from supporters, averaging €40 per transaction.
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Emelia 👸🏻replied to Emelia 👸🏻 last edited by [email protected]
@mekkaokereke @april @nixCraft
This year between freelance work, grants, and community support, I'm on track to make €68,000 or there about. (really depends on how far I progress through the FediMod FIRES grant from NLNet.
€68,000 is what I need to cover all my expenses, afaik.