Impressions on App.net Four Months Later

This morning I got a comment on ADN from @mrfresh, thanking me for the article on the etiquette for App.net. I appreciated it, yet it made me ponder if those guidelines were still valid after exactly four months since the release of that post.

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I was a brand-new ADN user back in the day, recently benefited by the kindness of the community, which embraced me and made it feel like home. Not much has changed, at least among the groups I follow. Everybody is still extremely supportive and they have actually increased their efforts to help the community on the most recent boom and release of free-per-invitation accounts.

The ideology behind App.net hasn’t changed either. Its most valuable resource is still the people. As long as ADN has transformed in the past few months, I can quote myself on Twitter timelessly:

When was the last time you’ve made a friend on Twitter? Had a nice conversation? Twitter’s social interaction became as short as the tweets themselves over the years. Twitter became a place to follow specific brands and distribute content. ADN is all about the people.

If you joined App.net alone or with a single friend crazy enough to send you an invitation, keep in mind that App.net is more of a place to make new connections rather than interacting with those you bring from outside.

Even if I’m passionate about Global and recent features of Felix made it possible to filter the flux of posts somehow, I don’t have the same spare time as I did before. I follow 136 folks, that’s often more than enough to feed my hunger for new content, however, with new users joining us, how do I get in touch with them?

After a few weeks, I noticed that my stream was stagnated and what makes ADN so great is the feeling of meeting someone completely new and bedazzling cool. And I lost it. I couldn’t afford the time to navigate through Global to seek for new “feeders”. Actually, this whole situation made em also wonder why the limit to follow only 40 accounts as a free user and I understood. If you enjoy interacting on App.net, 40 is probably not enough because you still rely on Global to follow most trends. That’s when I found out about Patter, which is a service that introduce chat rooms, unnattached to the main Alpha streams most of the time. Since each room has a specific subject, it is easy to find the people you’re looking for because they will be talking about stuff you want to read about. So, please, join Patter, the best way to find who matches with you in App.net.

I still believe that reproducing content is not your goal as you START using ADN. Great content is always great content and should be shared, but if you start using it like a Twitter, you’ll soon join the 16.3% of posts sent through IFTTT and Buffer. And this is why I suggest you not to post content, it may hinder you to find out the distinction between ADN and Twitter by yourself. But, seriously, share stuff responsibly, as you should do anywhere. However, if you don’t take the time to create connections, who are you sharing to?

So if I could reorganize the guidelines previously created. I wouldn’t suggest you to forget about your brand, but to be yourself. Not to avoid posting content, but sharing responsibly. One thing that hasn’t changed at all is that you should engage into conversations. It is an open community, just reply, don’t be afraid of your opinion. When you reply to a comment, excited to make a new friend, the other side feels just the same way as soon as the mention notification pops up.