The first two days

A quick update on how the first couple of days have gone, in terms of getting the word out about ooh.directory: far more visitors than expected, far more new blog submissions than hoped for, and an interesting comparison between the effects of Twitter and Mastodon.

Visitors and links

I don’t have detailed figures (because I chose not to install any analytics on the site) but we had over 160,000 unique visitors over the first 36 hours. A lot more than I expected. It’s a good job I set up a CDN – where that figure comes from – for the first time in my life.

I assume a lot of visitors came via Hacker News, which I understand is very popular, and where this post was top of the front page for several hours on Wednesday (thanks to Adrian for posting it). Among other places there were items at Boing Boing, Waxy, Web Curios and, for appropriately old-skool cred, MetaFilter.

The queue

One consequence of all this attention is that far more blogs were submitted to the site than I expected. I kept a bunch of links back so that I could keep adding new blogs over the early days but I guess that wasn’t necessary.

There are now about the same number of blogs in the queue (868) as there are live on the site so it will take some time to get through them. This is partly because there’s only so much time in the day but also because I want to give anyone subscribed to the Recently Addd Blogs feed – or frequently visiting the front page – a chance to glance at new additions without being swamped.

Twitter vs Mastodon

I found the differences in engagement between my posts on Twitter and Mastodon interesting, given the recent sudden shift by many people in my circles over to the latter.

For context, on Twitter my personal account had around 2,800 followers, and my Mastodon account about 300. I posted the same thing to both of my accounts, linking to this site and the new dedicated @OohDirectory accounts on Twitter and on Mastodon.

My tweet currently has 70 retweets and 189 likes, while the Mastodon toot has 157 boosts and 179 favourites. The first day, the tweet was lagging a long way behind the toot in likes/favourites, although it obviously caught up.

The @OohDirectory accounts now have 100 followers on Twitter and 338 followers on Mastodon.

Clearly this comparison is dependent on who follows me, the kinds of people a site like this appeals to, etc. But, having been lurking on what was, for me, a very quiet Mastodon for a few years, it’s amazing how quickly things have shifted if you want to reach people. Or a certain kind of person (one of exceptional taste, obviously).