The Toot the Word survey has the goal to help improve the WordPress-related Mastodon instances and Mastodon as a meeting place for the WordPress Community in general. It helps the WordPress Commnity on Mastodon to learn about the needs and challenges of its members.
The Toot the Word Survey 2023 was conducted by the admins of five WordPress-oriented Mastodon instances:
- @danielauener - wptoots.social
- @javiercasares - wpmastodon.es
- @praetorverlag - wp-social.net
- @simon - dewp.space
- @nathan - wpbuilds.social
The original announcement post on Mastodon was boosted 89 times and favored 45 times resulting in 208 anonymous answers.
The survey was mentioned several times on Mastodon, both from the accounts of the conductors of the study and other Mastodon users. Sarah Gooding even mentioned the survey in a WPTavern article on March 2, 2023 and folowed up with an article about the results on March 10, 2023.
The Survey revealed trends for the WordPress Community on Mastodon that are described and analysed in the Toot the Word 2023 - Survey learnings document. The key findings also are summarized in the following list.
- Overall it seems that there is an active and stable WordPress community on Mastodon, which uses the network frequently. Mastodon is seen as an important channel for the WordPress community by a large majority of the participants, coming from all areas of the WordPress community and often key community members.
- The majority of participants of the study report that Mastodon is moderately important to very important to their WordPress-related social media activity. The quality of WordPress conversations on Mastodon is at least the same, but in many cases better than on other social networks.
- Nearly all participants of the survey expect Mastodon to have some kind of influence on the WordPress community in the future, a majority thinks Mastodon will be very influential or extremely influential. Most of the participants want to see more WordPress content and community discussions on Mastodon in the future.
- Generally, users on WordPress-oriented instances state that the communication with the community on Mastodon is important to their WordPress-related social media activity. They also are working with the community, or state that they are WordPress Community influencers, more often than users on common instances.
- Both the quality of conversation and the amount of WordPress community key members (rating themselves as important to the WordPress community) seem to be higher in WordPress-related instances. That might indicate that interactions in WordPress-oriented instances are more relevant to the WordPress Community than in common instances.
- Momentarily the community is widespread over a range of instances and only a smaller group of the participants in WordPress-oriented instances. That makes it difficult to target a specific audience (e.g. a certain field of work) by choosing a WordPress-oriented instance, which might change in the future when other advantages drive more community members to these instances.
Below you find a linked CSV-file with the raw-data from the survey. Feel free to use it for your own analysis, but please mention this repo and the survey as the origin of the data. A ping on Mastodon to the conducting admins of the survey would be appreciated.
toot-the-word-survey-2023.raw.csv.
The data was analysed with the OpenRefine tool. A projectfile to import for your own analysis is available here: