In the Postgres community the adoption of Mastodon has been significant. Curious whether Mastodon replaced the bird site with the "elephant" site, and how people use the platform, we asked members of the community a few questions. Inspired by the answers we shared tools and insights that could turn the platform in one of networking and support for the Postgres community like maybe Twitter once was, at PGDay Lowlands earlier this month.
Who is we? Andy Piper, Developer Relations Lead at Mastodon, helped me write this 5-minute lightning talk.
We don’t want the cesspit of hate back, but it is kinda quiet…
Now what follows is not proper scientific by any means but cross referenced with conversations had in the "hallway track" at conferences, it does seem to accurately represent the state of affairs.
- Most moved to Mastodon when you-know-who took over Twitter, entirely or not. Reason cited platform toxicity and chaos.
- Yall are on LinkedIn for professional reasons, and hold on to Facebook/Instagram for maintaining family connections and old friendships.
- Using Mastodon the reason you cite is to stay in touch with the tech community in general, and the Postgres community in specific.
- Some commonly used servers include fosstodon.org, mastodon.online, and hachyderm.io
- While you read almost daily, you post a lot less frequently...
Why?
- Not enough (perceived) engagement, "not enough in my feed"
- "I'd like greater support from orgs/companies, it's not a serious platform yet"
- Lack of an organized topic stream
- The distributed nature of Mastodon and other fediverse platforms is too complicated: "I don't know where to go"
Blockers to Mastodon adoption
The Postgres community is not known as one to switch approach or tools overnight - we’ve stuck to mailing lists and big hairy releases, whatever your feels about that. Yet, the adoption of Mastodon has been remarkable.
Oh, and Mastodon admins are Postgres users! I’ll share a link in the Resources bit that goes into how the blog author used pg_repack to delete dead rows, and reclaim disk space for his server.
Discovery remains a blocker, as well as for folks using social media professionally like I do: analytics and scheduling tools.
- Hashtags can be followed on Mastodon, which oddly is a little known feature
- Lists are useful but, unlike on the bird site, they are specific to you / cannot be subscribed to. And you have to follow users before you can add them to lists. You can export a list to a json file for import elsewhere.
- From Mastodon, you can follow users on Threads if they have turned on Fediverse sharing, which is not available in the EU at the moment.
- You can also follow users on Bluesky if they are using BridgyFed. As of end of August 2024, Threads users can see reactions and responses from Fediverse users, but not mention or reply back (it's a step-by-step integration).
Tool tips!
- Good apps for mobile include Ivory and Ice Cubes for iOS, Tusky on Android.
- For scheduling you can use Buffer, which is great news for me since I was already using Buffer. Other tools are beginning to add this feature too, e.g. MixPost.
- Fediwall is a media wall application made for Mastodon, like in the olden days you had Twitter walls at conferences. Fediwall allows you to follow hashtags or accounts and show the most recent posts in a self-updating, screen filling grid layout. You can configure Fediwall using a json file e.g. a json file hosted as a GitHub gist. Key thing here is to find a range of Mastodon instances to search from since search is local to an instance.
- For metrics both Analytodon and Mastometrics work well.
I’m happy we’ve moved to a much healthier platform, now let’s make it a lively one too.
Resources
- Overview of Mastodon apps and tooling: https://joinmastodon.org/apps
- "Clearing up the Mastodon Database using pg_repack" by Michael Thomas: https://blog.thms.uk/2024/01/pg-repack-mastodon
- Andy’s excellent blog on all things Fediverse: https://andypiper.co.uk/tag/fediverse/
- The PostgreSQL Social Telegram group I used to share the survey: https://t.me/+Fodd5AvfOX82MGE8
Top comments (0)