Does choice of server affect the reach of your posts?

[contrapunctus@fe.disroot.org]

Does choice of server affect the reach of your posts? (Assuming you use the same hashtags.)

Obviously you don't want to be posting from a server that's blocked by vast swathes of the network.

But are there any other factors?

#FediHelp #ActivityPub

[evan@cosocial.ca]

@contrapunctus yes; if you want to reach a lot people, get a lot of followers.

[contrapunctus@fe.disroot.org]

@evan@cosocial.ca 😐

[evehaswords@toot.cat]

@contrapunctus If you're on a server that gets followed by people across a wide swath of the fediverse, your posts will go out to all the servers that have someone who follows someone on your server.

Provided you're not blocked by the admin on their side.

That means the best "reach" is on the biggest servers.

There are ways to get around that, though. Using tags that are followed by a tagpush.app account will get your posts boosted to servers that otherwise might not see it.

Probably the best way to improve your visibility without moving servers (assuming your server is a factor) is to get followers from a lot of different servers.

[contrapunctus@fe.disroot.org]

@EveHasWords@toot.cat Thanks, that's actually what I was suspecting! 😀 And thanks for the tagpush.app suggestion too, I hadn't thought of that.

[rimu@piefed.social]

Yes.

If no one on, say, mastodon.social is following you then none of your posts will show up in the global timeline there or in searches or in hashtags.

Also if you have few followers your posts will receive few boosts so hardly anyone will follow you.

So we end up with a handful of wildly popular accounts dominating the conversations which mostly happen on the big instances. Centralised power. Bad.

The threadiverse solves this. People don't follow other people, they join communities and it's their membership that determines where the federation traffic goes. So nearly every instance has all the conversation and everyone is on an equal footing.