@untitaker No, i don't use search for this.

And it hasn't really been vague posting.

I've posted about making search available. I tagged mastoadmin and fediadmin in those posts.

No one responded. I got hate DMs and some people dog piled me on discord, so i left the discord to cool off.

I use search to find science stuff. To find news from nasa. To find people 3dprinting things, to find local austin folks talking. Read my post history, I don't use it for anything else..

so why judge people on misinterprations vs reading their history? i don't hid i work in the open, i blog about stuff and i used to post on the #60daysto100k tag but stopped after the dogpiling event that i kept private because i didn't want to dogpile..

not sure why i'm explaining this to anyone anyway.. this is the absurd thing about mastodon if you ask me... justify yourself based on one random post, not your history of 1500+ posts making complete sense. lol

#60daysto100k

We certainly won't be hitting the 100k goal in 60 days. Bummer.

We've seen a slight uptick in people returning - we got as low as 12% returning users during holidays, but now we're up to 20+ percent so that's a good uptick. Holding steady and slow organic growth.

Seems like adding advanced search made some people come back and stick around, but it also apparently made some enemies.

I'll be stopping the updates on this hashtag and want to thank everyone who followed along.

I love our #universeodon users, so I'll keep updates for everyone updated in that tag.

:hearthands:

#60daysto100k Disruption week ;)

This week one of our providers decided that our image traffic was too high so instead of contacting us to remediate, they decided to replace the images with a violation warning. (They didn't care that animated images are saved as mp4... even though mp4 is an industry standard)

Since it was such a huge user disruption, we quickly moved to Fastly to serve CDN traffic over the weekend (Kids birthday weekend, I couldn't spend weekend hacking away on tech). Fastly costs a *lot* of money so it was just a stop gap. (we do love fastly, nothing against them!)

@zach and myself put our brains together and came up with an edge/cache node strategy and we've successfully launched POPS across America and we're expanding to EU and Oceana.

This should keep image/video/cached assets fast around the globe and allow us some cool flexibility with embracing other fediverse tools such as Image and video streaming 👍

Disrupted but not ;)

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@supernovae

huh, trouble with Cloudflare?

#universeodon #60daysto100k

#universeodon - quick update, our CDN is blocking videos so we've bypassed that for now and we're moving to another. Videos may be a tad slower (which animated gifs are videos) but the errors should go away quickly here.

Thanks for your patience and sorry about the annoying error. We're disappointed in the circumstances that caused this and may write up the "what the" in our next #60daysto100k update.

Upwards and on wards as I say :hearthands:

@Deus @feditips @FediGarden There has been zero evidence that large user instances are controlling anything nor that the future looks gloomy.

Quite the opposite.

Hold instances accountable - all of them. I expect that, but please, can we stop spreading FUD about things that are more personal beefs with how one views the future as they want it project that future vs the reality that big instances do have a place and if they're doing a good job removing friction to onboarding and adoption they're helpful to the fediverse at large.

Instance admins should be collaborating on growth, sharing success stories, promoting their instances, or sharing how to improve growth/promotion and what works and what doesn't work. I share this on my #60daysto100k hashtag, and no one participates publicly, yet privately a lot of instance admins who run small instances will tell me I'm doing it wrong.

I don't get it - we seem hellbent on shooting off our own feet ;)

We are sad to hear the news that mstdn.party and mstdn.plus admin hasn't been around (we hope that they are safe and sound) and we welcome all members to join us at universeodon.com

A little bit about us - I tend to work in the open, you will see me post under #universeodon hashtag as well as our strategy/work in the open hashtag #60daysto100k.

We're incorporated in the state of Texas and working in the open on our long-term strategy (as always, feedback appreciated).

We're excited about the future of mastodon and even through some growing pains and hiccups have a positive outlook on the future and think that it is great that the tools/platform allow migrations so we can help/be of assistance in times like this.

Please don't hesitate to DM me if you have any questions/concerns.

Come and join us as we explore the #fediverse ;)

Transfer guide:

https://fedi.tips/how-to-use-mastodon-and-the-fediverse-basic-tips/#TransferringYourMastodonAccountToAnotherServer

https://universeodon.com

@knova i talk about it frequently on #60daysto100k

An interesting thread (and series of threads with the hashtag #60daysto100k) by the admin of Universodon @supernovae on growing Mastodon.

This one is about advertising. One really interesting fact here: Twitter spends 100 million on advertising, and Facebook 10 _billion_.

Is advertising #Mastodon likely to work? Should it be done?

https://universeodon.com/@supernovae

#fediverse

An interesting thread (and series of threads with the hashtag #60daysto100k) by the admin of Universodon @supernovae on growing Mastodon.

This one is about advertising. One really interesting fact here: Twitter spends 100 million on advertising, and Facebook 10 _billion_.

Is advertising Mastodon likely to work? Should it be done?

https://universeodon.com/@supernovae

#60daysto100k - Promotion - how can you grow in the face of strong headwinds?

I did some research on marketing spend. Did you know that in 2021 Twitter spent almost two hundred million on marketing activities and FB spent over 10 BILLION on marketing activities?

That's a lot of spend for eyeballs we won't ever get close to matching (and I don't think we should)

I ran some more tests on Google Content Ads and Microsoft Content Ads and the results were abysmal. By results, I mean, no results. Both Google and Microsoft said they sent 1000s of clicks, but i only see maybe 100 humans finish loading a simple web page and only about ten people spent 7 seconds looking at anything. After asking some questions and going down the "this can't be real" rabbit hole, I discovered there are entire 3rd party services created just to block bots and manage blocklists for Google and MS advertising. How can these be so big yet so terrible? And why do you need a third party service?

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#60daysto100k

No major update - but lots of conversation on search - so I decided to write some thoughts down on it here:

https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/issues/23323

There is room for improvement, and I hope we can make some rapid "quality of life" improvements without sacrificing the safety we want to preserve.

* I'd like "#hiking" and "hiking" to be a similar search - seems easy enough. It shouldn't give different results IMHO
* I think hashtagging a post should make it searchable via that hashtag too - it's already discoverable by clicking on it - make it discoverable in search too.
* We should add synonyms as part of discovery to help people discover new hashtags to search for or follow

This would preserve an ability to talk about "Topic" without topic being searchable (dogpiling) while allow those who hashtag their #topic would be searchable and discoverable.

#mastodon #search #fediverse #mastoadmins

#60daysto100k - The Podcast

I had a blast getting to have an appearance on the @godpod - Would love it if you all gave it a listen. :hearthands:

We chatted a lot about Mastodon 🦣 , Freedom of Speech, choosing a Server, the basics of how things work and so much more. Give it a listen and let me know what you think!

Be sure to subscribe to future updates as I hope to be back in a few months to give an updated status of the universe err fediverse :)

#podcast #mastodon #twittermigration #elonmusk #twitter #universeodon #godpod

https://thegodpodcast.com/god-talks-to-mastodon-admin-byron-miller-about-massive-twitter-migration-thanks-to-elon-musk/

#60daysto100k - Midweek Update

We've been trending upwards of closer to 150+ users a day vs our normal 40 with some spikes in between. I attribute this to lots of interest in Ivory and them being so nice to recommend us on their twitter announcement. Thank you Tapbots!

We fixed some lingering issues where users may have had missing images or seen weird XML error 500 type messages on avatars. Our storage provider and our CDN had some caching quirks, and both have been fixed. We ran cache purges to make sure no errors were cached, and no bad files were still referenced. Thank you to everyone who sent us posts/links for reference so we could work with our vendors to resolve this.

Interesting week for "system gremlins" poking and prodding in unique ways - but we hope to come out stronger each time.

Speaking of coming out stronger, we're working on supporting multiple regions and will be making that a topic du jour over the next few days.

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#60daysto100k - Commerce

Quick and to the point. Mastodon supports commerce and we're excited to welcome commerce here while sustaining a healthy, safe, and friendly community not full of spam.

I've revised & updated our "Doing business on Mastodon" post here: https://medium.com/@sn2006gy/doing-business-on-mastodon-47fb7e37d174

Feedback is appreciated.

#mastodon #business #marketing #socialmedia #socialmarketing #commerce

#60daysto100k - Sunday Edition

Late one today, I went out with friends to enjoy the nice weather and some local wines at a winery. Highly recommend supporting local vineyards if you enjoy wine ;)

As for mastodon - today's discussions seemed largely centered around user experience and user interface.

I'm curious - what works and what doesn't work and how can we better share the how/why things may be different here vs anywhere else?

For example, I take hashtags for granted. I just assume their use because I've used them in many tools before, but some people don't understand this concept. How do we bridge what they're designed to do in mastodon to the experiences they may have elsewhere or create a better understanding of the "how/why"?

Do people want the utility of free search more than the function of #hashtag discoverability as opt in? Is that the real UX issue here?

What about the main menu options of mastodon - are these understood?

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#60daysto100k - Weekend Edition

Short update for the Saturday - Mastodon 4.1.0 release candidate is running smooth - one bug with the moderation interface has been reported up and a known issue with 2 letter tlds from upstream rails project - but otherwise smooth sailing.

New user registrations are hovering around 40-42 a day and have been all week. Interesting that it is that consistent. Oddly consistent :) 42, the answer to the universe, eh?

We've seen an uptick in business accounts joining. I'm excited to see this - firm believer that we need something that works for people to be able to work/play/have fun and have great balance/respect in how businesses and people communicate and collaborate. If you see any abuse here, you know how to find me :)

Next week, I'll be on the @godpod - i'll be sure to share the podcast when done - really looking forward to it.

I hope you're enjoying your weekend!

@LucyWildboots @paulomalley @DismalShadow We'll update our /about page to reflect the larger character limit as well as have links to other fediverse tools we launch. I typically tag a lot of announcements/updates with #universeodon and i also do daily updates with our #60daysto100k but that's more talking about challenges, ways to grow and collaborate with instances.

#60daysto100k - Day 5 - Fri-Yay!

Yay New Mastodon Release! - What's new in 4.1.0 - Some highlights of user features we think you will enjoy.

* Add listing of followed hashtags - Click on the hamburger menu next to your name on the web interface and select "Followed Hashtags" for a UI to manage Hashtags you may have followed. (Screenshot attached)
* Add support for editing media description and focus point of already-sent posts - Ever want to edit description or change the focus area on a gif you uploaded because the default view is off? This allows you to fix that.
* Add left and right margins to emoji - Sometimes emoji were a little squished - this makes them fit a bit better! 👏
* Ensure exact match is the first result in hashtag searches - better sorting on exact match!
* Change account search to return followed accounts first - better sorting on people search
* 12-hour polls - shorter polls!

More details:
https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/releases/tag/v4.1.0rc1

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#60daysto100k Day 4 - Promoting & Growing your Instance

This is the challenge of all challenges - how do you get people to join? How do you have them stick around and grow through the learning curve? What does success mean? I'll tell you a little bit about what I'm looking for and experimenting with - and I'd love to hear what other admins are doing.

Promotion - What are ways to grow and build a community? Is word of mouth all we have or all we can have?

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