People with large Twitter followings dismissing Mastodon has made me think about Seth Godin‘s permission marketing question, “Would they miss you if you were gone?” His point is that sometimes you fill a category without being distinctive. A restaurant at the airport has a captive audience, so it doesn’t need to be great. Just fine. You’re hungry, you get a sandwich. It benefits from being generic or loud. However, if that restaurant moved a block away from your house, you’d never go there.

No one goes to the airport to eat.

Twitter, through its algorithm and desire for engagement, pushes these generic accounts that represent a specific point of view.

If you aren’t forced to look at them and react, do you really care about them? Is one left-wing or right-wing outrage account that much better than another?

How many times do you need to see a stupid editorial from the NYTs that no one would have read if everyone weren’t tweeting about it? Or a quote tweet of a horrible opinion that you’d rather not see.

The reason they don’t want to leave is that it will prove that no one will miss them when they have to provide community and thoughtfulness.

There is power in the realization that you don’t need to have an opinion about everything.