Try to have at least some followers before posting your best content on Mastodon and the Fediverse

If you’re looking for a long list of tips on how to make your account and posts more visible, please click here see the guide to increasing your visibility.

If you’re deciding on a posting schedule, it’s a good idea to wait until you have at least some followers from other servers before you publish your most interesting stuff. Even a handful of followers will give your posts much more visibility across the Fediverse, as you only need one follower from a server to make your posts visible to that entire server. You can find out more about this in the guide to what servers can see.

Due to the way the Fediverse currently works, if you publish a post while you still have zero followers, that post will probably not be visible to anyone except people on your server. If someone is the first person to follow you from their server, they will see your posts from that moment onwards, but there’s generally no backfilling to show them your previous posts.

Once you have one person from a server following you, everyone on that server will be able to see all your future posts from that moment onwards. Even tiny amounts of followers make a big difference to visibility, they are always much better than zero followers.

How should I handle posting stuff?

Build up a following and gradually add a steady stream of interesting posts. Don’t do massive dumps of content before you have any followers.

This applies especially to people who run PeerTube accounts, which often start out with massive uploads of video archives that no one on other servers can see because no one has followed the account yet. They would get a lot more views if they upload the archive gradually as they build up a following.

Is there ANY way to make posts visible to everyone even if I have no followers?

On Mastodon, the only way to make posts visible to absolutely everyone who ever looks at your profile is to pin the posts on your profile. Pinned posts are backfilled and will become visible to anyone who follows you. You can pin up to five posts at once, and they will all be backfilled. You can also reply to pinned posts, and the replies will be backfilled too.

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