As Twitter continues to experience issues (ideological and technical), people will be looking for a place to go. Would you support instances purchasing small ad campaigns on Twitter to let users know about mastodon as an alternative?
I’d love to read more about your opinion in the comments, too!
@cd24
I think it could be useful, but you would have to take care to make sure that it was doing more harm to Twitter than it was paying Elon money. I think getting eyes on Mastodon is always a good idea, if there really are people on Twitter who don't know about it, but let's also make sure that you're leading them to a good pipeline for signing up, because that was a major problem when the diaspora first started.
In general, try to see if you can target the ads towards people who don't already have mastodon accounts, and figure out the pain points these people have so you can address them directly in the ad. Expect to be shut down at some point, simply because we know Elon doesn't like when people advertise competitors on Twitter.
Getting people thinking about Mastodon is a good thing, I think. (It does have some risks.) But I can't condone giving any money to Twitter, and even if they did allow you to purchase the advertising, it wouldn't surprise me at all if they made sure almost no one actually saw it.
To be clear, this isn’t an active exploration by SFBA - I’m just curious. FYI official exploration and polls will come from @announcements or @moderators.
I think this could have really interesting implications for @spreadmastodon too, since I could see a huge benefit to a turnkey landing page that can be somewhat customized for each instance which has a really clean onboarding experience. It would require some theming, copy, and account suggestions support - so it wouldn’t be trivial.
@cd24 Would the birdsite even allow such ads? Didn't they block out-links to Masto and Substack etc, and supposedly banned you adding your Masto handle to your bio? (they don't seem to be enforcing the latter)
@seancorfield probably, but I am mostly interested in seeing how people feel about using a bad service to evacuate people from it - entirely theoretical, because you’re right it’s unlikely they’d allow it.
@cd24@seancorfield I guess I got hung up on sending money some place that you think people need to be evacuated from. Although I guess maybe in principle I am a bit pragmatic if I thought it would work? (not that I'm quite seeing it working even if the ads were allowed).
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