After almost three months and until the move to social.heise, I managed the Mastodon-account of @heiseonline@social.heise.de (on mastodon.social) and published more than 1600 posts there, it is now largely automatic. Time for some insights and a few things I learned. Maybe some english-speaking accounts are interested as well? @spencerdailey@journa.host for example..

If I hadn't known how often the shared links were clicked, I'm sure the motivation wouldn't have gone that far, but #Mastodon doesn't make that analysis easy (of course). You simply can't see who comes to a page via Mastodon. That's why I only shared links with a URL parameter that can be used to see that (of course not traceable to individuals). This showed exciting things:
Already since November, the shared articles received almost as many visits via the Mastodon-account alone as via Twitter in total. This suggests that the numbers are comparable, although the Mastodon account has grown from 500 to around 40,000 followers in this period. On Twitter, @heiseonline@social.heise.de is followed by over 240,000 accounts. To be honest, #Twitter simply doesn't bring in many visits - contrary to what #ElonMusk, for example, seems to assume. We're talking about a few percent here.

I'll add a chart to prove this: Light blue are the entries via Twitter in total (!) and purple those exclusively (!) via the Mastodon-account to the articles shared there. The gap is not large. Both curves are rising slightly because more and more articles per day have landed on Mastodon. On Twitter, of course, many more articles were shared automatically from the official account in the beginning, but since a few days the number of shared posts is identical.

The engagement is also very revealing: While there was only one tweet from @heiseonline@social.heise.de in this (admittedly still quite young) year that was shared more than 50 times, the Mastodon account comes to over 30 posts with more than 50 boosts each. An impressive example in the screenshots attached and that was neither about Mastodon nor Twitter 😉 If you can still trust Twitter's search, only four tweets from #heiseonline were commented at least 10 times this year, at @heiseonline@social.heise.de there are much more comments.

The practice of re-sharing posts that have already been shared has been criticized from time to time. Because there are no #algorithms on Mastodon that resurface older posts, they are lost from view much more quickly. The fact that re-shared posts still attract interest has been seen in the numbers, sometimes "re-boosting" brought as many visits as the original post. If you don't want that, you can "Hide shared posts" on the profile page.

Because there is no search worthy of its name on #Mastodon, hashtags are really important. From the start, I have therefore tried to assign several per post, including #News (if it is a "news"). The results can't be measured, of course.

It's getting late, so thanks #DeepL😀