So, this was a little experiment. I mean, I really was undecided on whether to order food or just toast some bread, but I thought I'd have fun with it. So, I asked for suggestions!
Here, and on Twitter, and on Mastodon, and on Hive.
Now, let's be clear, this was in no way a fair or scentific test. I've been on Twitter for far too long. Mastodon is the new one I've spent the most time on apart from Twitter. Cohost and Hive; I've literally posted once before on each of them, and both of those was a meta-post about the current situation. I'm also following, and more importantly followed by, far fewer people on any of the latter 3 than I am on Twitter (and I don't really have a big following there). I'm also linked with more people that I know in real life on Twitter than any ot the others, and that means more likilihood of people up and online at the times I post.
One other little difference was that, on the other sites, I ran this as a poll. Here, I was instead inviting comment; I don't know if there's a built-in way to run polls on Cohost, but if there was, I couldn't find it.
Here and on Hive, no response. Which, again, completely not surprising; I'm a nobody here, followed by nobody, with no real engagement with other accounts. (I also didn't add any tags, which probably mattered more here on Cohost than anywhere else.)
I got 4 poll responses on Twitter which, honestly, for me, is pretty high for a one hour poll. I don't tend to get much engagement there, regularly get no response even to things which, I assure you, were comedy gold, no I'm not going to give examples, don't you trust me, why don't you trust me? (Slightly notably, all 4 responses voted for the McMuffin. Twitter users like to encourage indulgement, apparently.)
Interestingly, the biggest response was on Mastodon. 7 votes, and a comment! I have roughly 30% the followers on Mastodon as on Twitter, but I got roughly double the responses. While I have spent some time actually using Mastodon, it's not much, and especially not in recent months; maybe 5 posts earlier this month, and before that, nothing since April. (Also, the vote was a 4/3 split in favour of the McMuffin there. A split vote on a decentralised platform - quite symbolic.)
This is pure speculation, but I have a feeling there's a demographic difference at play here. Twitter is used globally, sure, but it definitely feels like the user base tends more towards the US, while Mastodon feels like it tends more towards European. Also, for all the hate Mastodon gets for... <gestures vaguely at a combination of reasonable and absurd things people mention>... It feels an awful lot like the people that are there want to be. The way Twitter users talk about the platform, in my experience, make it seem like an obligation. Mastodon users just seem to want to find people to talk to.
But hey, y'know what? When it came to putting my thoughts about this down in text, this is where I came. The biggest flaw of microblogging sites in general, and especially on Twitter, is that people expect to get nuanced takes, despite there not being enough room to give them. It's unreasonable to expect complex ideas to be summarised in 280 (or even 500) characters, and yet it's an expectation people have, which is why so many people spend so much time having to clarify that, no, when they said they like pancakes, that did not in fact mean they hate waffles.
Cohost has room to stretch. I don't need to edit this to an arbitrary character limit. And that feels so freeing.