In a sign of the growth of Mastodon in the midst of the continuing drama at Twitter, Techmeme, the news site I use the most to keep up on tech news, has started to highlight Mastodon posts in addition to the way the site highlights tweets. In fact, in an interesting bit of prioritization, the site puts Mastodon posts first before tweets.
If you go to Techmeme.com now, you can see the Mastodon sections for some articles that are discussed on Mastodon. It’s actually an interesting view into what groups of people have moved from Twitter to Mastodon.
For example, at the moment when I am writing this article, the top of Techmeme has 9+ stories all around cryptocurrencies, the FTX debacle, and the latest news of more bankruptcies and other issues. There are no Mastodon sections but this makes sense as most of “crypto twitter” seems to be sticking with Twitter right now… or trying to look at other “web3” social media.
However, when you get past all the cryptocurrency stuff, the next current article is about LastPass and has a large Mastodon section… because a substantial amount of the Twitter “infosec” / security community has moved to Mastodon.
Other articles such as the one I show in the image above have a more balanced mixture of Mastodon posts and tweets. (Although seeing the prevalence of “@geoffreyfowler”, I’m guessing he is cross posting between Mastodon and Twitter and Techmeme’s algorithm has picked up both.) Another example shows the Mastodon posts and tweets combined in a single block (at the time I’m writing this).
It’s great to see this recognition of the growth of Mastodon’s usage. It’s also great because it shows to all the readers of Techmeme who are NOT yet on Mastodon that there *are* conversations happening on Mastodon. Perhaps this may cause some others to try it out!
Techmeme is, of course, on Mastodon themselves. You can follow them at https://techhub.social/@Techmeme (or search for "@techmeme@techhub.social” in your Mastodon account).
P.S. As a daily reader of Techmeme, I noticed this change when it was happening, but I must give a tip of the hat to Will Oremus who was the first I saw posting about this change on Mastodon.
