Authentic Connections Don’t Appear Out Of Thin Air
1000 Followers Milestone On Mastodon
Reaching Your Milestones On Mastodon & Medium
I joined Mastodon in November of 2022 during the great Twitter migration. Elon Musk had fired most of the workers in the company and had begun allowing fascist and extremally racist accounts back onto his platform. Coming from a technology background, I understood how the fediverse worked, so all I needed to do was set up an account and start posting.
Within three months, I have over 1000 followers, and I’m absolutely floored. I wanted to take a deeper dive into how this happened and my history with social media so that I can better explain how Mastodon has changed my social media experience and expectations.
How It Started
The first item for business when opening a Mastodon account is picking an instance. Naturally, I wanted the most prominent network possible to make the most connections, so I chose mastodon. social. However, with over 900k users, getting buried in the local timeline was inevitable.
You see, on Twitter, I had never gained more than 120 followers, and that was on my ‘patrickstewart’ account (yes, that’s my real name), where everyone mistook me for the actor. Even on my ‘patrickbstewart’ handle, I gained only 55 followers. This is likely due to one reason: the algorithm. When your account is on Twitter long enough, you’re bound to make a few people unhappy who turn around and report you. If you’re reported too often, the algorithm evaluates your posts as unimportant, known as “shadow banning.” If you’re shadow-banned, only your followers and maybe a few others will ever see your tweets, and there’s no way to know that it has happened other than not gaining a following.
Enter the fediverse (0 followers)
The best part about Mastodon is it doesn’t use an algorithm. Individual users can still block you (or entire servers, for that matter), but if you post something and people boost it, it will be shown to their followers. It’s as simple as that! No recommended posts and no gaming of the system. If it’s good, it goes forward; if it’s terrible, it dies with your followers.
To be successful on Mastodon, you have to engage, however. You can’t just rely on some magical code to bring your content to everyone. Do you want people to respond to you? Then you must respond to them first. Do you want people to follow you? Then you must follow them first.
Being proactive works not only in business but in social media too! Especially when you’re on your own. So, starting with 0 followers and 0 posts, I set out to be who I am.
The first few weeks (~300 followers)
When I started on Mastodon, it felt like every other social network I had previously used, as I had very few interactions and followers. But then, something started to change. The more I posted and commented, the more of the same people responded to me and boosted my posts. They weren’t bots of half-naked women; they were real people who had to read and push buttons because they liked what I wrote.
Early on, I was lucky that I already knew what I wanted to share. I have a few years of learning about Taoism, and I wanted to tell my stories to help bring that mindset and ideology to others. This is, admittedly, a terribly small niche. I only know of one other Taoism community, and I felt that trying to pull from that group would be seen as stealing or riding the owner’s coattails. So I set out on my own instead.
As my follower count grew from being friendly, it was time to start telling my stories. I paid for a web hosting provider and began to write the most enduring stories from my life and the lessons I had learned. Then I began to share my passion stories on Mastodon. The results were surprising!
For the first time in my life, people read my writing and commented how much they enjoyed it!
The statement above seems too basic and simple, but it made a huge emotional impact. I had written years earlier, but no one cared. My online journals, while therapeutic, hadn’t been seen by anyone, and my personal paper journals are just a mess of emotions. Yes, that is still helpful mentally and is excellent writing practice, but I wanted to share my stories, not just keep them written down in a book on my shelve.
I wanted to help others grow and learn. I even published an eBook of poetry in 2012, which has only been downloaded twenty times in eleven years. Gaining just a few hundred followers in such a short amount of time was mind-blowing! How did anyone care now? What was happening?
Changing Servers (~450 followers)
By January, I was ready to start my own Mastodon instance. Adding my brand name to the server instance, I could rally a community of western Taoists or at least philosophically like-minded people around it. Or so I thought. While I continued gaining followers with my articles, the instance only attracted two new members in 6 weeks, costing me $20 monthly.
Not happy with those returns, I moved instances again in mid-February. But learning my lesson from mastodon. social, I picked a medium-sized instance I enjoyed and where a few new online friends were; universeodon.com. With that, I saw a tremendous boost in followers and engagements. Not only were there enough people to gain followers, but there weren’t too many people to have my posts completely drowned out. A perfect fit!
Final Push (~800 followers)
I began the final push in my new home server and moved my stories from my personal website (patrickstewart.net) to Medium. I changed the name to TheTaoistOnline to match the domain name I had bought for my now-dead Mastodon instance. Next, I imported most of my smaller articles and stories but left some more prominent and older stories. This allowed me to repost links into Mastodon and share those with new followers.
Of course, I also wanted to build my readership here too. Medium has become a wonderful place in such a short amount of time. I’ve read excellent articles, met new friends, and joined wonderful writing communities.
Medium makes me feel comfortable putting my emotions on the screen and not afraid I’ll be judged.
After nearly 90 days, over 1100 Mastodon posts on three different instances, over two dozen articles written, and joining multiple online communities, I reached the four-digit milestone for the first time on any platform! So, I created a cute animation and, to celebrate, I shared the milestone with my Mastodon followers. But since I also love my Medium family, I wanted to share it with you too!
Conclusion
Over the last few months, I’ve made amazing friends, built strong online connections, and enjoyed social media again. I used to think I wasn’t good enough or talented enough for anyone to care about me online. I thought my stories weren’t thrilling or unique, so why bother? I felt that my opinions weren’t valid or that maybe all of my education and studying wasn’t enough.
And some would tell me that having 1000+ Mastodon followers doesn’t mean anything when the whole point of the fediverse is to make direct connections. That might be partially true, and I might be too emotionally broken from 40 years of life, but when I look at how many people each account follows, it’s not that many.
Yes, a few hundred here or there, and sometimes over 1000 on rare occasions, but not many. So, I take comfort in knowing that, at least on Mastodon and now on Medium, my hard work at being friendly, thoughtful, and encouraging has finally found a home.
If you want to support more of Patrick’s writing, please see his Patreon, Buy Him A Coffee, or purchase his books.
