People who claim there is no engagement on Mastodon have never posted a photo of a really cute cat and it shows.

sybren@fosstodon.org

@lemay even without a cat picture I see more engagement here than on BlueSky!

giuseppebilotta@fediscience.org

@lemay I'm not ashamed to confess I've been thinking about adding cat photos to posts where I talk about science because my single most successful post is a random one of a cat on a chat. I expected it to be liked because, I mean, Fediverse and cats of course it's going to make numbers, but I never expected it to get spread so much!

aj@gts.sadauskas.id.au

@anne_twain @yakkoj @lemay I get the impression that there's people (especially folks who have a mainstream media presence) who have basically treated Facebook, X/Twitter, and Instagram as broadcast channels.

They've taken their follower counts to heart, without considering that the number might be inflated by nearly 20 years of dead accounts, bots, scammers, spammers, and duplicates.

They've mastered the art of writing hot takes and rage bait that will get picked up by an algorithm. (This is distinct from information their followers would actually want to share of engage with.)

They don't engage with people by replying to other people's posts or responding to people who reply to their posts.

They don't share of like anyone else's posts.

Then they try the same crap here.

And it predictably falls flat.

Now personally, I've found people on Masto are *more* likely to share engaging, insightful, informative, or funny posts.

But only if they're posts of value, as opposed to algorithm-bait.