Mastodon: Show Analytics somewhere

[sirjamesgray]

Twitter Analytics has cute little sparklines and highly useful stats. This could be useful in convincing people to switch over from twitter. (as it could indicate higher engagement rates, but also also Mastodon audience reach isn't subject to the centralized censoring sometimes seen on twitter)

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• [x] I searched or browsed the repo’s other issues to ensure this is not a duplicate.
• [ ] This bug happens on a tagged release and not on master (If you're a user, don't worry about this).

[mkljczk]

It’s hard to make this kind of statistics on decentralized platform. But stats like graph showing engagement (replies, saves and boosts) and how many instances received this toot would be great.

[Gargron]

I'm not gonna lie, I like pretty sparklines - but this could have repercussions on the atmosphere of Mastodon. Is it going to push people to perform to increase their metrics?

[deltaray]

+1 At least for now you could keep track of the data even if you don't make it available. Then if you decide to show it later then everyone will have a lot of nice historical data.

[colomar]

Is it going to push people to perform to increase their metrics?

If you don't want people to care about increasing their numbers, you'd have have to remove any sort of feedback.
Currently people can see how many boosts and likes a toot has, so they care about those numbers (I do, at least).
Showing them in a nicer overview doesn't automatically make people care about numbers who haven't cared before, it just makes them more accessible for those who do anyway.

I can understand that Mastodon doesn't want to attract "social media managers" from commercial brands, whose bonus depends on the metrics they generate.
But even people who volunteer to handle Mastodon accounts for activist movements care about numbers. They invest a lot of time into their volunteer work, and so naturally they want to see if their messages actually reach people.

On commercial social media, they use all kinds of metrics, such as what time of day is most effective to post statuses, what type of content reaches most people, how important images are for catching people's interest, etc.

I want to get my fellow activists to shift their social media activity from commercial social media to the fediverse, because I find it ridiculous to happily lock themselves into corporate walled gardens to push messages promoting system change.
But if I do convince them to take the leap, they will want to have access to those statistics as well, because they don't have the time to "fly blind".

So any statistics would help convincing people to come over to the good side. No additional data would need to be collected, just presenting what's already available to users anyway - but in an aggregated format - would be fine.