How is Mastodon working for creators? Well, this particular creator thinks it’s going quite well! My Kickstarter campaign that finished out yesterday at nearly $170K had about 9% tracked from Mastodon, and it’s possible it was twice that when figuring some browsers/firewalls suppress referrals and adding people who signed up for my announcement email list by hearing about it on Mastodon. This chart shows all tracked social media, 17.5% by dollar volume of the total, broken down by site.
The EU is planning to block Amazon’s acquisition of iRobot, maker of Roomba vacuum cleaners, because Amazon will put them at the top of search results on its site.
This effectively bans Amazon from buying any company that makes things you can buy online.
iRobot is struggling as a company amid declining sales and has been losing money each quarter since 2021. The company is failing and Amazon is saving it.
@carnage4life There’s obviously also the issue of Amazon already knowing where you live, what products you buy, what you’re discussing/searching/listening to in your household, and who enters and leaves your house at what times including facial recognition.
With ‘smart’ vacuum cleaners they also acquire an accurate floorplan of your house.
It’s probably not part of the European Commission’s argument in this case, but it should be.
I’m researching Mastodon accounts with huge follower numbers and looking for help.
In the US George Takei has over 400000 followers, in Germany Eugen Rochko has over 300000 and Jan Böhmermann nearly 200000, in the UK Stephen Fry has over 100000.
Know any other big accounts? Any over 500K? Any in #Asia? Who's big in #France, or #Spain, or #Italy, or #Argentina? Who is the most followed woman? Did most of them take their followers from Twitter?
Germany’s Antidiscrimination Agency has announced it will no longer maintain a presence on X, the platform owned by billionaire Elon Musk due to “the enormous increase in trans and queer hostility, racism, misogyny, anti-Semitism and other misanthropic content."
"In our opinion, X is no longer an acceptable environment for the profile of a public body.”
Twitter made a new ad for the platform that features a phone scrolling through Twitter. They ended up pulling it and remaking it after people noticed it contained a tweet mocking Elon for trying to blame Twitter's advertiser exodus on the jews. The second version of the ad, which is still online, contains a tweet about creampieing a rotisserie chicken.
More Germans would travel by train but it's too expensive.
While some people prefer this mode of transport, experts have said that reducing tax breaks for airlines and subsidies was needed to make it more affordable.
“It doesn’t make sense if you look at the goals," train travel analyst Bernhard Knierim told Euronews.
"You should subsidise the mode of transport that you want more of, not the one you actually want to reduce."
@NatureMC@TheEuropeanNetwork I think the crux is that the Deutschlandticket is only for local and regional travel, and planes could never compete there anyway.
I believe the article talks about longer distances, hence the reference to using the train for holidays, where planes outcompete trains on cost. Partially because planes are subsidised.
Austria's former Chancellor Sebastian Kurz has been charged with making false statements to a parliamentary inquiry into alleged corruption in his first government, which collapsed in a scandal in 2019.
An indictment was filed at the state court in Vienna, the prosecutors' office that investigates corruption cases said in a statement.
The court said Kurz will go on trial on 18 October.
@rodhilton I wonder if this period, when the old search engines are ruining their performance with LLM nonsense, is the ideal moment for an alternative search engine to cut through.
I’ve started using https://Qwant.com more often as they are sometimes better than Google or Bing.
I'm so excited to share Mastopoet, a tool made by @raikas that allows you to capture Mastodon posts as beautiful images and share them across the Internet. This makes posts much more eye-catching in other social medias for instance. :bunhdheart:
@rolle@raikas That’s funny, just this morning I was thinking that Mastodon should come with its own built-in screenshot tool.
Not because it’s the only way to share stuff outside the walled garden (as with most other networks) but because sometimes a screenshot is all you need. Instant, in your face, fleeting, occasionally beautiful.
I see plenty of Twitter screenshots on Instagram without finding that a limitation.
@coachtony I have been collecting these anecdotes (yes, anecdotes do not make data) to get a sense of difference in engagement levels and it’s quite big.
It appears you need about ten times as many followers on #Twitter as on #Mastodon for the same level of #engagement (share, like, comment).
I believe that’s partially because many ‘followers’ you may have on Twitter have left years ago.
Caveat: some of this is based on observations prior to the blue tick amplification.
@baldur A lot has been said about the supposed decline in RSS/Atom feeds but I would argue that, because WordPress produces RSS and Atom by default, there have never been as many feeds available as there are today. Often even without the site owner knowing about them.
Photographers and artists rejoice—just like in the official iOS and Android apps, pictures are no longer cropped to 16:9 on the web version of Mastodon. Link previews have also gotten a face lift, and will now show both the article date and author when available.
@Gargron Will link previews support WebP and AVIF?
That’s becoming a bigger issue by the day as more sites choose to use those image formats for og:image and the Mastodon server doesn’t understand those.
@timkmak I would definitely add #Ukraine, #WarInUkraine and possibly a few more in your profile, that helps people find your account and not just your posts.
@aral@jan I have, at times, wondered whether it doesn’t make to have specialised Mastodon server software for specialised use cases (publishers just wishing to publish their material, single person instances, bots) instead of having them use the Mastodon reference server that’s full of stuff they’d never need.
@jasongreen@aral@jan I believe I saw some discussion about the Sidekiq process being not as efficient as it could be (it was written in quieter times and when accounts had far fewer followers).
I’ve also seen some talk about that Sidekiq could benefit from being rewritten in another language (perhaps making to make better use of concurrency?).
Obviously, Sidekiq improvements would benefit all servers, not just single account ones.
Question. If a media organisation wants to host a single-user (or perhaps a handful of own users, one per topic) instance mainly to publish to the #Fediverse (mostly #Mastodon and #Pixelfed in practice), what is then the best server software?
A full Mastodon server might be a bit overkill, is #Akkoma or #Pleroma a lighter solution for this particular use case?
The server would have to make posts that are both fully Mastodon and Pixelfed compatible (so include CW’s, image alt texts etc.)
@kris Great. And can that produce posts that are, at the surface, indistinguishable from a Mastodon or Pixelfed post, complete with compatible CWs etc?
@kris It’s just that I believe the ActivityPub protocol doesn’t natively support Content Warnings (yet) and so Mastodon has put it into another field that other servers may interpret differently (or some such).
@Em0nM4stodon Probably not what you’re looking for but I like @themaninquotes It’s essentially posting quotes from his colleagues about our former Prime Minister Boris Johnson.
