Recently, I had a post go somewhat viral (at least for my standards). The post currently has around 4,200 boosts and 3,700 favorites.

The last time this happened was a couple of years ago. And this time it was different. In many interesting ways.

So let’s go through some of the most noteworthy findings:

• It just worked. Last time, the website had problems with the number of notifications. But this time? No issues. All apps I used were okay with the notifications, nothing got noticeably slower. No errors, no crashes.
• No weird/spam replies. I still have some stomach ache when I think about the fact that moderation in Mastodon is on the shoulders of mostly unpaid people, but it works amazing. When I got these boost numbers on other platforms, the post would be flooded with spam, scams, and crypto bros. But not on Mastodon. Thank you to all the hardworking people for this ❤️.
• No Nazis. This is especially remarkable. It was a post about Nazi Germany. And zero Nazi replies. Keep up the good work, folks ✊.
• Grouping of notifications helped. This was added not too long ago, and I could already see how much it improved my life in this situation. Otherwise, I would not have been able to handle the number of messages coming in.
• It came in waves. With algorithm-based social media, your post usually either kicks off immediately, stays active for a couple of days and dies off. Or does nothing whatsoever. Mastodon does not have that. All interactions happen organically. For that reason, you see waves of notifications. Occasionally, a post gets traction days or weeks after you post it. A person boosts it and starts another round of interactions with the post. This is charming and shows the power of a non-algorithmic timeline. The message stays alive longer.
• I gained around 200 followers. That’s a nice number. Higher than I expected with that number of boosts. Thank you for following me 🥰.

Luckily, I had no bad experiences with this post. But In the future, I really would love to be able to restrict interactions. I would love to be able to easily ban a reply to be attached to my post. Or limit who can interact with it. I know there is work going on about this for a while now. And it’s hard to do correctly, but please implement that this year.