A lot of people stay because of lingering attachment to the platform. As weird as it is, changing the branding subconsciously tells the human brain "This is a new platform" and that makes switching mentally easier.
You've been considering leaving Twitter for a while, and suddenly one morning the bird has flown and Twitter has left you instead.
I think it's also a clear signal that things are really never going to return to normal, it's only getting worse from here. Which is easy those of us on the outside to observe, but maybe slightly harder from the inside when you still have most of the community still intact and posting.
I think some of us also had hopes that the new CEO would put a leash on Musk and steer Twitter into calmer waters again, but this was just proof that Musk is still doing wtf he wants and the CEO is just there for show. So people have now abandoned their last bit of hope and therefore abandoned T...I mean X as well.
While I haven't been an active user in a longer time, I've still been a very active lurker until Musk took over. By now, I've only checked Twitter every now and then when bored, to see what happened (as I mostly used Twitter as some kind of news feeds for stuff I couldn't easily follow in any other way). But today I started migrating off completely - going through my follow list one by one and finding ways to follow those things (like local police, local town, local zoo, etc.) in other ways.
For some that means slower news, or only the most important news - which kinda sucks, as e.g. local police info were good to have in real time during major events or when there was some protest going on. For some this even means mailing lists, ugh.
And a few I couldn't replace at all, so I'll miss out on those news. Sucks, but hopefully those people/entities will provide their news feed through some better means sometime now.
wall of text to say puppet non-white male CEOs ride failing companies into ground and get blamed. yet they do it anyway. scroll finger hyperactive syndrome flare-up
If I had to guess, she's negotiated a rock solid contract with an exit package in mind. Either that, or she's an idiot because there is no fucking chance of being successful with Elon being Elon.
I think it’s spot on. It’s people who were already going through the stages of grief, were kinda stuck in “bargaining” (like: “nah, Twitter is not really dead, it’ll come back”), and the symbolism there about Twitter really being gone-gone fast-tracked them to depression/acceptance.
The stages of grief don't have to go in that order. People can be angry at Twitter and then jump to acceptance that its never going back. No fast tracking needed.
I was actually aware of that, which is why I wrote depression/acceptance, meaning they probably moved from bargaining to either one of those, thinking either of those 2 stages could prompt people to leave. By fast-tracking, I meant that moved happened faster than they would have if the rebranding hadn’t happened. It’s still a fascinating bit, I have known about the stages of grief for a while, but only learned recently (like, this year) that they didn’t have to happen in order.
They finally started to read the room and noticed the furniture they liked wasn't there and had been stolen. We've already figured out Musk's antics and that he's a deplorable human being. They're finally starting to open their eyes and pay attention, especially now that he's meddled with their toy.
When spez doubled down and Reddit imploded i moved to lemmy. I also discovered mastodon. But then i realized the reason i used twitter was to follow certain people/accounts none of which are on mastodon.
We had a reason to ditch Reddit, because they forced everyone off our beloved third party apps. But twitter didn't have this kind of meltdown. Im only a consumer on Twitter, and its still working fine. No reason to quit. The rate limit is dumb but it isn't the end of the world.
Couldn't agree more. I was a fail whale era twitter user. Wayyyyy early user. I ditched it a little bit before musk actually, but I still ended up seeing threads here and there because of Reddit.
Just today I landed on a Twitter thread, saw that x and it was like, strangely repulsing...I wanted to get the hell out of there asap
I've already had several non-tech people say something along the lines of "What the heck is this X thing on my phone?"
I gotta wonder how many other people are just impulse uninstalling something they don't recognize off their phone as well, since ol' Musky boi did this with basically zero user notice as well.
I had a similar thought. Non-techies are going to open up Twitter and see a different logo but it the text still says Twitter and think they're on a phishing site.
I think a good amount of it is also "the straw that broke the camel's back." Twitter users have been taking abuse after abuse. Like many others have stated, they use Twitter to follow specific people. If those people aren't on other platforms, then they're going to stay. But after a certain point, the cost becomes too high. Now the platform is rebranded and now it looks as alien as it's begun to feel. I think that's why so many are once again leaving. Before they could just ignore everything else going on and try to move on with their day. Not there's a big, fat X reminding them of how much they're starting to/already hate the platform now.
The logo change has brought out a new wave of articles and tweets about it, and people go "oh no that's right I'm on twitter! Well THIS is the final straw! Thank goodness there were all these hate articles and tweets that reminded me I was supposed to be angry!"
Also, many of the people who "jump ship" are right back on Twitter within a week. mastodon.social has an entire graveyard of celebrity accounts that haven't been posted to in months because the outraged celebrities just went back to twitter.
I'm happy for Mastodon (I run a fediverse instance and the more users there are the more chances of interesting people and the like), and some of those people do realize they like the vibe more and stay, and a lot of those bumps are significant for the platform. The thing is, we're talking a few hundred thousand, maybe a million accounts of 200 million daily active users on twitter.
Remember why Ray Kroc wanted McDonald's... because of the name/brand. Anybody could make a hamburger/shake shop or shack but he had to have the name because the name was a seller.
Nobody thinks X is cool other than Elon musk and him switching to it is another signifier of how uncool Twitter has become. Every little thing adds to the flow of traffic to the exit.
None of it was fine, people have been browsing for alternatives ever since Elon Musk took over.
At most, many hoped things would ultimately stay the same, which they definitely didn't. The biggest hurdle is that a lot of people there are waiting for their friends and favorite content creators to pick what place they will move to, and content creators are extra hesitant because they don't know if they will have as much following and reach as they used to. I see a bunch of smaller creators pretty much mourning their careers.
This will be one of the first "in your face" things that is immediately noticable by a finicky user base that only understands and associates value to popular brands. Musk just removed the popular and familiar brand that people are comfortable with, so why would those people stay?
Also how do they know it is a twitter exodus and not a Reddit or Threads exodus? I quit reddit entirely and I know many who have as well. It seems much more likely to be the case.
Yeah it makes no sense. I think the media is just out to trash Elon at every opportunity for any miniscule thing. He is somewhat of an outcast of the billionaires club in that he dies not appear to want to enslave humanity and deny the poors of their rights.
Plus I've read many comments from insiders before that every single company he runs is a terrible place to work for, in terms of overworking employees.
Serious question for you- why are you defending him? Like, the information demonstrating he's kind of stupid and a terrible person is so easily available to you. At this point you have to actively work to remain ignorant of it, and his history of trying to claim accomplishments that aren't his own. Why bother?
Yeah, I mean, who hasn't wanted to experiment with putting microchips into baboon skulls, or called someone a pedophile just because they hurt your feelings, or treats their workers like absolute trash? He's just a regular guy doing regular things and the media is using him as their whipping boy.
Transhumanism is a thing whether we like it or not, hopefully Elon will do it ethically. I don't care if he said mean things to somone, that is between him and the individual. Provide examples of him treating his employees like trash?
What are you on about? Every opportunity to trash him??? He can easily change his behaviour, he's a trash person so he doesn't. He absolutely wants to deny the poor their rights, look at how he treats the workers of twitter and how he spoke of those he fired. I truly don't know how you can be this blind unless it's willful. Get real
Twitter shrunk its staff by 3700, many of whom left of their own volition.
Examples of some companies that cut more jobs then Twitter that nobody seemed to givr a damn about:
Amazon 27k
Meta 21k
Accenture 19k
Alphabet 12k
Microsoft 10k
Salesforce 8k
Disney 7k
Dell 6.6k
I guess the people working at those companies just don't matter huh?
I don't see any other billionaires fighting for basic human rights like free speech other than Elon. He doesn't have a perfect track record on that count but it is better than the flat 0 of the rest of that clique.
Because you aren't worth it. You clearly ignore evidence being placed in front of your face so there isn't a point. Literally start googling about his management of twitter, all the evidence is there. But you won't
Ask people from India or Turkey what they think about Elon fighting for free speech. Especially after he said, "By “free speech”, I simply mean that which matches the law." Which means he's all in favor of what North Korea considers free speech.
You should really learn to separate claims with actions. Musk likes to claim he fights for free speech (well he used to, for some reason he hasn't really talked much about it lately), but he has not only done nothing in favour of them but actually opposed it during his ownership of twitter.
Also, I don't know what kinda gotcha you think you have with those layoff numbers. It is as if you think that people here just love all those other corporations and only hate Musk, when that is the opposite of the truth.
Wait, what? Have you ever heard of longtermism? "Your stupid peasants' suffering today matters little if we can take humanity to space^TM^. Don't hold back progress." If this is not enslaving humanity and shitting on the poor, I don't know what is.
No, you're sealioning, this is a waste of time :/ he's at least as scummy as any other billionaire, like Zucky, Bezos, Gates, Thiel and all the other ones nobody hears about.
Why do you think the media goes so hard after Elon and we don't hear much or anything at all about the others? Why is there a rabid cult of anti muskers that try to denigrate him at every opportunity? What is their agenda? When someone is singled out it should make you reflect on the reason why. He is hardly the worst billionaire around yet he gets all the flak.
Why do you think the media goes so hard after Elon and we don’t hear much or anything at all about the others?
Because the others stay out of the spotlight. Musk deliberately shitposts and wants to be seen, so the media (and everyone else) sees him and reacts to that.
But if you take your time to actually acquaint yourself with matters, you will notice that the media and everyone else are also very busy criticising other corporations and other billionaires. It is just that Musk being the narcissist that he is, very much like Trump, deliberately create stories on a daily basis through his poor judgement and constant craving for exposure.
The media drooled all over him and carried him until he declared war on them. Look up news of him before 2020, there is hardly anything negative (and there should be, he's been manipulating stock and treating employees like shit, like the other Billionaires). When did the media say anything critical about hyperloop? You live by hype, you die by hype.
He doesn't need to enslave humanity, just his Mars colony. As far as money over rights are concerned, his 'free speech absolutist digital town square' sure does give a lot more privileges for those willing to pay.
Musk has openly stated his support for the Republicans and for right wing causes countless times during his twitter shitposting period. If anything he has more openly voiced support of enslavement of humanity and the denial of the rights of poors than most of his billionaire colleagues, who are mostly all too smart to voice those ideas anywhere in public.
Absolutely - though some people find it too bare bones. It's designed to be a bit of an anti-Twitter, after all.
Those looking for something more flashy might be interested in checking out, for example, Firefish. The Firefish site also includes a neat "Fediverse software comparison", which lists popular federated services and some of the features they currently have. Personally I prefer the stripped down approach of Mastodon, but reasonable people might disagree. :)
Oh, and there's also elk.zone, an online user interface for Mastodon that behaves a lot like Twitter. Similar to those "old lemmy" sites (like old.lemmy.world) in a way, but as an online app similar to wefwef.app.
Very interesting to read people's experiences, as I don't have any first hand experience. I've just seen enthusiastic content from users and figured it was a better fit for some people.
Might be a bit too much on the bleeding edge still - not entirely unlike kbin and Lemmy. Would you say that it's rough enough that you wouldn't currently recommend it to people?
Unfortunately, once you get enough money the system is designed to keep you wealthy no matter how much you fuck up.
Like, Trump has had multiple failed companies including casinos thay failed because he had them competeing with each other.
Yet while he's probably not a billionaire he still has the status of "wealthy" and managed to fail into the most powerful position in government.
Musk had more money, and therefore can fuck up way harder and still be fine. He could burn Twitter to the ground for all the effect it would have on him.
The reason is that they know people with money, and those people listen. For example, Musk only had to post about his attempt to buy Twitter in a groupchat, and he got Billions of Dollars from them to do it, unchecked. Regular people don't get their ear, and even if they do for some unfathomable reason, everything is checked meticulously.
The level of ineptitude is common, the combination of wealth and that much ineptitude, usually less so, given being able to afford the best education and advisers. So it takes a special sort of billionaire to be this inept.
While that's true, I think it's more that rich people tend to insulate themselves from actually driving direct actions most of the time, so we see their stupid decisions after they've filtered from the Board, to the CEO, to the VPs, to the directors, to the managers, and finally, to the workers that actually do things. Really stupid things filter slowly back up as impossible, or as they hit snags over weeks and months, so it takes a couple rounds for them to really mess things up. Not to mention people softening the edges as it passes through the chain to make it more reasonable.
Elon being front and center, and actually ramming things through is what makes this so uniquely inept. Normally we wouldn't know that all of these terrible ideas are straight from him, and blame could be shifted around to scape goats.
It's just the Dunning-Kruger effect at work, he thinks because he successfully ran a rocket manufacturing company to viability that he's definitely going to be able to run a social media company too.
Turns out the B2B style government contract model isn't exactly the same as B2C social media advertising model.
His initial wealth of 42 million dollars came from working on travel software. He used that wealth to become rich by founding x.com, a payments company that failed. How does a failing company lead to massive wealth you might ask? Well, that failing company merged with PayPal.com, and Musk was CEO of the merged company for about 6 months before he got fired. PayPal went on to be huge, so after he was fired he made his fortune on his shares. Next he invested money in Tesla, bought the title of "co founder" even though he wasn't, waited 7 years passively then noticed the company wasn't going anywhere, replaced an exec or two and then took credit for turning the company around. So yeah, maybe that's his end game? Make Twitter (now x.com) as bad as the old x.com so someone merges and gives him stocks and fires him again?
And yet, despite all that, this somehow still feels notably inept, even for a man whose primary goal in life, at the moment, appears to be demonstrating how thin his attachment to reality grows by the day.
It was on purpose. Its completely obvious the powerful right in America wanted Twitter gone. I bet it could have swung the overton window with how much influence it had.
At this point, I'm gonna say yes. Yes, he did do it on purpose. Why? The conspiracy theorist in me says it's to push people into Meta's Threads, building it up even more before it federates, in an attempt to kill the Fediverse like Google did with XMPP, because the Fediverse is the fastest growing bastion of corporate-influence-free speech on the Internet.
Yeah I've got a feeling this guy isn't a master of 6D chess, planning some far flung strategy 10 steps ahead. I think he just likes to shitpost and cause drama
I think this gives him credit where it isn't due 😂
Personally, I think he's just a magic blend of incompetent, arrogant, and in over his head. Large companies are slow moving for a reason and we're seeing why in real time.
Whether or not it’s on purpose, I think that Twitter was vulnerable to this outcome due to literally years of mismanagement. Dorsey hadn’t given a fuck for quite some time, and Twitter’s problems always grew faster than its solutions.
I still think if you look at his investors it spells out leaders who want Twitter not to be viable as a platform for coordinating democratic efforts. So yes, he did it deliberately.
The other stuff didn't bother people enough to leave, but rebranding? That's the step too far. Anyway Mastodon usage has fluctuated a good amount over the last few months so I don't think that's a good metric for people fleeing Twitter, or should I say X (what a terrible name).
Twitter's value was in its branding as the case with any ubiquitous product. There was zero reason to change it other than to further damage the entity. Fine with me Elon, go ahead and kill it, one more failed corporate driven media site. We don't need any of them.
Pretty sure both of those were for financial reasons (easier reporting requirements etc). As in, both Google and Facebook the companies still exist, it's just that they are now owned (along with other companies such as Waymo and Instagram etc) by Alphabet and Meta respectively.
Now? This isn’t Twitter anymore. It may look and feel like Twitter did yesterday, but this is the moment where people stop and look around and ask “What happened?”
I think this is the main thing. It's like, why draw so much attention to this thing that people liked fine before and which you want to mutate into some sort of hypermonetized cyberpunk dystopia omninetwork? Changing the name to something vague and edgelord is like a big giant sign that says, "REEVALUATE YOUR RELATIONSHIP WITH THIS APP RIGHT NOW!"
Oh God have you met people? When people talk about their tweeting, the neurochemical feedback mechanism is "oh wow you tweet?" It's filled with positive cultural context.
If that response becomes "wtf is twxing?" that entire zeitgeist just collapses and people will view the service with active repulsion. Like a toy they've grown their identity out of. Or a cringe dress they wore to their sibling's wedding.
Yeah and it especially doesn't make sense since the twitter apps - where most people use twitter - are still called twitter and still have the twitter logo. Nothing has changed, and even with a name change and logo change nothing is going to change. It's still twitter, and the people hate-tweeting that they're leaving are still going to stay, since they've been hate-tweeting that they're leaving since Musk bought the place lol.
What are the sources for this "user exodus"? Where are the stats, the numbers? It's just clickbait by people that want twitter to die.
I'm looking at this as “various little breaking points” some very trivial, but when taken as a whole, could break someone's tolerance, causing someone to be an eX-user.
At this point I am pretty convinced he's doing it on purpose. I don't quite understand why, except maybe as a weird flex. Or maybe the world's billionaires got together and decided to kill Twitter because they hate all the negative press? IDK, but the whole thing is just too surreal.
It is surreal that a single capitalist can be motivated to take down a monolith like Twitter. Yeah I'm convinced it's intentional. Funny when I first heard he bought Twitter for the price he paid my initial thought was he's buying it to kill it, but then I thought nobody would waste that kind of money on a personal vendetta. I guess Elon is just that crazy.
That's not terribly surprising, given that both of those groups rely most heavily on network effects: the very point of such accounts requires being where their audience is, especially brands. Those kinds of accounts will move en masse only when most everyone else has already done so
Also, we do have some influencers here - namely a few Linux youtubers, and technology connections. Basically it's those that you would somewhat expect to have a presence on a budding social network like mastodon.
Wasnt aware technology connections was on masto. Admittedly I dont use my mastodon all that much, becuase I dont really much enjoy the microblogging formula as much as a more forum like system like I could get from reddit and now lemmy, but the only youtuber Im familiar with that Ive been able to find there thus far has been NotJustBikes.
Yeah I meant more in it's own instance vs here. But what I'm saying is even if I do I won't get the breaking news content I want because the journalists are not switching over
They're not going to go to mastodon, but there have already been a pretty big exodus to Threads. I have a feeling that's going to be the thing - twitter is going to die slowly mostly in favor of Threads, meanwhile Mastodon and the fediverse will probably continue being a minor player for a while.
Bluesky just barely hit a million users is still invite only and is largely in a beta state, and though I'm not on it, everyone I know says it's a zombie platform and they'd rather be on Mastodon for nerd shit or Threads for normie shit. Threads has over 100m users already. The numbers alone make Bluesky not really worth mentioning, and effectively Threads killed it within the first day. Dorsey has also shown a track record of having no idea what he's doing. Probably half of the things people think about with Twitter come from the community. @mentions, rt, the term "tweet", etc. The twitter app was developed by a third party and bought.
As much as Zuckerberg sucks, Meta actually runs like a real company with adults at the helm. Dorsey's already fucking up bluesky not learning anything from his time at twitter and not making moderation a priority. Brands are already embracing Threads over Twitter and Bluesky because they don't want their ads showing up next to porn and nazis.
Oh, and as for GDPR, Meta has already stated they plan for a later launch, and again since it's a company of (sociopathic?) adults, they'll actually get it done, but it's already effectively over.
Meta has already been hit with antitrust by the EU. Even if they later get around the fact they're breaking GDPR by datasharing all the instagram accounts (which is where the inflated number of users comes from) they can not get around the Digital Markets Act coming into effect next year which carries a fine of 10% of all global revenue for actions like this.
Oh I think they'll do, just to not miss the train, and then they'll find a "smart" way to "destroy" federation and get people on their side... But we'll see...
I haven't really seen anyone leave twitter for threads, just post the same thing to both. Also noticing a few accounts I have on both actually posting on Threads asking others if their user engagement has dropped significantly. Google trends etc all show that Threads has dropped off a cliff after the initial surge in downloads.
Hopefully this means there are accounts on Mastodon actually worth interacting with. Like 99.9999% of posts on Mastodon are literally just about Mastodon, or stupid tech shit I don't care about.
Use the hashtag and follow people you find interesting. Your feed will improve as you curate it to your liking. It’s on you. There is no algorithm feeding you.
Yes and no. For example, I work in pest control and mostly lurked twitter for pest control content, as a lot of experts in that field used twitter exclusively and never bothered with facebook, instagram, reddit, discord, or any other networking site.
There is absolutely no pest control content from those experts on Mastodon at this time. Niche, I know, but its a concrete example about how not every base is covered on Mastodon (yet).
Its silly to blame people for not flocking there when there is a demonstrable lack of content.
Made a mastodon account but most people's I know don't use it, so yeah. Might be why I'm using Lemmy more. Topics are usually more interesting than individual people.
There are no people I find interesting. I cannot stress this enough, Mastodon has absolutely jack shit for content. A hashtag with relevancy to me might have two posts, EVER, both from dead accounts.
It is a barren wasteland. I am very much tired of people assuming I want to be spoonfed content when I just want there to be any content at all.
I mostly just used Twitter to keep updated on various indie games/artists/authors/content creators. I'd imagine they would go to Threads or Tiktok's new thing before giving Mastadon a shot, and some of them have.
I don't want to be a downer; Mastadon would be my favorite Twitter alternative with how it functions, but in its present state Mastadon just doesn't work for my use case. I think for now I just have to phase Twitter-likes out of my life unless I'm willing to bite the bullet on putting up with meta or 𝕏.
I'm trying, lol. Just followed a bunch of accounts on Mastodon in an attempt to make my homepage more interesting. Loving Lemmy, but while I don't necessarily want the absolute deluge of bullshit like reddit has, for my taste the fediverse still has a lot of growing to do (and I hope it gets there!)
You always get a boost when Elon does something stupid but I'm not seeing anything unusual about this one.. 'soaring' is relative. Usual is 500-1000 an hour and we're currently at 1500.
I think people get excited because hypothetically, growth should accelerate. The more people are using mastadon, the more mastadon becomes a viable alternative to shitter
Mastodon is great, I like it way more than lemmy. TBH its the only federated social I think is actually doing really well, way more users but still a small town vibe. People posting art or pics of their gardens or linux posts. Better moderation overall. It's very gay and I love it.
What was Musk's logic? Was there any? It's like he ruined the reputation of Twitter and decided to try a restart under a new name but it's predictably failing.
step 1: spend billions buying an extremely recognizable brand
step 2: rebrand it
I actually can't believe he is going forward with this. Twitter achieved the goal of becoming a verb, "tweeting". Companies kill for that, and he's just throwing it away? all the mindshare and recognition? for what?
Plus how do you even make a new verb? Doesn’t even work in the slightest. “Oh hey did you see my recent X?” … “oh man the other day Steph X’d something hilarious “ …. Lol nope doesn’t work.
I’m convinced that Musk and Huffman are hanging out smoking pot and taking dmt, stroking each other till orgasm whispering in each other’s ear how great their plans are.
people also left AOL once they realized tf'n browser works without a monthly sub. wrote WordPress after geocities sucked so bad. tech baby boomers? so 2k
Ironically the two are only half way competing with each other. There's two buckets of twitter peeps:
A) People who keep up with specific people, reducing day by day.
B) The for you page peeps. The vast majority of people I know on Twitter including myself are there for the algorithm feeding us memes and content. Specifically the 2016-2021 algorithm.
Considering mastodon doesn't have any form of FYP/For you it's really only competing for bucket A which in my experience has reduced by an incredible amount in the past few years and continues to reduce and makes it useless to a large majority of twitter users.
Unfortunately or fortunately twitters algorithm also sucks now so there's a pretty big market gap here.
When I did use twitter it was for being the fastest way to get news on events developing in real time. George Floyd protests, J6 coup attempt, start of war in Ukraine, etc. And not just national/world news but also local news. I don't really that type of use fits in to your two buckets and unfortunately I don't think Mastodon is quite there yet to fulfill this type of thing either, but I definitely think it could with more time and more users. Fuck the influencers and people looking for 'content' imo, when people are going to Mastodon with breaking news is when we'll know twitter is completely dead.
Definitely true, totally forgot about breaking events in my original comment. I would say it still lands in bucket B as it's algorithmically fed at least in my experience as I don't follow many news sources directly, it just finds its way into my feed via the algorithm.
when people are going to Mastodon with breaking news is when we'll know twitter is completely dead.
I would assume the real surges would be in bluesky and threads. Out of the frying pan and into the other frying pan.
People don't really understand Mastodon and federation (nor do I blame them for that), but those details are now much, much less in your face than they were when Elon bought Twitter. Mastodon's reliability and usefulness has also improved a lot since Elon bought Twitter. Nothing else works quite like sending a few hundred thousand people your way to stress test your product (and some of them are even nice enough to give money, too!)
Another article I read theorized that Threads launching might have increased the awareness of ActivityPub and softened peoples resistance to the "Mastodon is too hard, not worth trying to figure out" messaging in the media. Who knows though, and there's probably not a single answer anyway.
I honestly can't tell if it's just a collective expiration date for a culture of wealthy incompetence, or if someone's been manipulating powerful idiots, but it almost feels like there's a coordinated effort to stir an abandonment of corporate platforms.
These platforms can be used to organize protests and things like that. It isn't like nobody would have a reason to want something like Twitter gone. There are the conspiracy theories that Musk was paid by the Saudis or whoever to take it down. Is that likely? Honestly the guy seems like a self centered twat, if not a full blown narcissist, and I can't picture him putting on a public spectacle like this intentionally for show because he is making himself look incredibly stupid but I've been wrong before.
If it was just Musk, it would be a lot easier to chalk up to one idiot. But with so many idiots acting in concert? That sounds like somebody's in their ears. Probably without them realizing it.
No. You might see a Mastodon user if they reply to a comment, but even that way round is not easy to do.
Kbin makes it easier to access Mastodon content while still having access to Lemmy content too... But to discover Mastodon content you are probably best making a true Mastodon account.
You'll find different parts of the fediverse have a different focus and feel with varying levels of compatibility depending how much the core focus overlaps.
I'm curious why this recent trend isn't visible in Google Trends? I watched the November exodus unfold in real time there. This time not a glimmer of activity
I completely understand why people would be drawn to Mastodon as an alternative to Twitter. The platform's decision to prioritize white supremacy and far-right extremism was a major factor in alienating many users who found themselves unwelcome on the platform. As a result, Mastodon has benefited from the backlash against Twitter's actions, but it's clear that there are still plenty of people seeking an alternative social media network that doesn't condone hate speech and bigotry.
In addition to the issues you mentioned, I believe that the rise of Mastodon can also be attributed to the increased awareness around the importance of protecting marginalized communities online. It's no secret that Twitter's failure to address harassment and abuse has pushed many users away, leaving them feeling unsafe and unprotected. Mastodon offers a space where individuals can share their thoughts and ideas without fear of being targeted by trolls and other online troublemakers.
Ultimately, while both platforms continue to experience fluctuations in user numbers, it seems likely that Mastodon will continue to grow as long as it remains dedicated to providing a safe and inclusive environment for all. White supremacy is not welcome here, and we must hold ourselves accountable for ensuring that this message is heard loud and clear. Thank you!
Is there actually any evidence whatsoever of the rebranding that hasn't even fully happened yet is causing a "user exodus"? Why would people leave because it's renamed and has a different logo?
The issue is brand brand loyalty. My younger siblings was looking for his Twitter app earlier and was like, "where is Twitter... Oh wait I forgot it's an X now."
I keep trying to twitter and :( not liking it and i want Mastodon but :( not liking it (likely for similar reasons) and my tumblr is my zero effort and is well and alive longer than anything else ever was.
Yeah the main difference is that there is no echo-chamber algorithm serving content in the way we're used to with more corporate social media. It's up to you to discover what you like and build your feed
I've found the trick or to follow hashtags rather than people. But it's a balancing act, sometimes you'll find your stream gets flooded with one topic so you need to refine what you are following.
Great for the fediverse but also weird reason to jump ship. All the other bullshit was fine, but "whoa they changed the logo now I'm out"?
A lot of people stay because of lingering attachment to the platform. As weird as it is, changing the branding subconsciously tells the human brain "This is a new platform" and that makes switching mentally easier.
You've been considering leaving Twitter for a while, and suddenly one morning the bird has flown and Twitter has left you instead.
I think it's also a clear signal that things are really never going to return to normal, it's only getting worse from here. Which is easy those of us on the outside to observe, but maybe slightly harder from the inside when you still have most of the community still intact and posting.
I think some of us also had hopes that the new CEO would put a leash on Musk and steer Twitter into calmer waters again, but this was just proof that Musk is still doing wtf he wants and the CEO is just there for show. So people have now abandoned their last bit of hope and therefore abandoned T...I mean X as well.
While I haven't been an active user in a longer time, I've still been a very active lurker until Musk took over. By now, I've only checked Twitter every now and then when bored, to see what happened (as I mostly used Twitter as some kind of news feeds for stuff I couldn't easily follow in any other way). But today I started migrating off completely - going through my follow list one by one and finding ways to follow those things (like local police, local town, local zoo, etc.) in other ways.
For some that means slower news, or only the most important news - which kinda sucks, as e.g. local police info were good to have in real time during major events or when there was some protest going on. For some this even means mailing lists, ugh.
And a few I couldn't replace at all, so I'll miss out on those news. Sucks, but hopefully those people/entities will provide their news feed through some better means sometime now.
The CEO is there to fail: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glass_cliff
wall of text to say puppet non-white male CEOs ride failing companies into ground and get blamed. yet they do it anyway. scroll finger hyperactive syndrome flare-up
If I had to guess, she's negotiated a rock solid contract with an exit package in mind. Either that, or she's an idiot because there is no fucking chance of being successful with Elon being Elon.
I think it’s spot on. It’s people who were already going through the stages of grief, were kinda stuck in “bargaining” (like: “nah, Twitter is not really dead, it’ll come back”), and the symbolism there about Twitter really being gone-gone fast-tracked them to depression/acceptance.
The stages of grief don't have to go in that order. People can be angry at Twitter and then jump to acceptance that its never going back. No fast tracking needed.
I was actually aware of that, which is why I wrote depression/acceptance, meaning they probably moved from bargaining to either one of those, thinking either of those 2 stages could prompt people to leave. By fast-tracking, I meant that moved happened faster than they would have if the rebranding hadn’t happened. It’s still a fascinating bit, I have known about the stages of grief for a while, but only learned recently (like, this year) that they didn’t have to happen in order.
Yeah, I think that’s probably more accurate than what I was thinking, and that leaving belongs to acceptance rather than depression.
They finally started to read the room and noticed the furniture they liked wasn't there and had been stolen. We've already figured out Musk's antics and that he's a deplorable human being. They're finally starting to open their eyes and pay attention, especially now that he's meddled with their toy.
When spez doubled down and Reddit imploded i moved to lemmy. I also discovered mastodon. But then i realized the reason i used twitter was to follow certain people/accounts none of which are on mastodon.
We had a reason to ditch Reddit, because they forced everyone off our beloved third party apps. But twitter didn't have this kind of meltdown. Im only a consumer on Twitter, and its still working fine. No reason to quit. The rate limit is dumb but it isn't the end of the world.
some dignity might be enough reason to leave it
Couldn't agree more. I was a fail whale era twitter user. Wayyyyy early user. I ditched it a little bit before musk actually, but I still ended up seeing threads here and there because of Reddit.
Just today I landed on a Twitter thread, saw that x and it was like, strangely repulsing...I wanted to get the hell out of there asap
Elon rate limits tweets
Elon changes the logo
I've already had several non-tech people say something along the lines of "What the heck is this X thing on my phone?"
I gotta wonder how many other people are just impulse uninstalling something they don't recognize off their phone as well, since ol' Musky boi did this with basically zero user notice as well.
I had a similar thought. Non-techies are going to open up Twitter and see a different logo but it the text still says Twitter and think they're on a phishing site.
Bass pro shops social media > Twitter/X
The blue bird was the last thing they had left
I think a good amount of it is also "the straw that broke the camel's back." Twitter users have been taking abuse after abuse. Like many others have stated, they use Twitter to follow specific people. If those people aren't on other platforms, then they're going to stay. But after a certain point, the cost becomes too high. Now the platform is rebranded and now it looks as alien as it's begun to feel. I think that's why so many are once again leaving. Before they could just ignore everything else going on and try to move on with their day. Not there's a big, fat X reminding them of how much they're starting to/already hate the platform now.
Renaming Twitter to 𝕏 is probably the straw that break the camel's back to those people.
I'd like to think it's people finally realizing "Holy shit he IS an idiot" but that might be too optimistic
Because tweeting and being on Twitter is culturally relevant. Twxing and being on =..,,,/''''°°X°°""/,,,...= is sad and cringe.
People run away from things which are sad and cringe.
Threads would like to have a word
I kinda like the name "Threads" but X sounds like something 12 year old me came up with
No one goes around saying they're on twitter and that they tweet. People aren't going to leave in any great numbers because it's now called X.
The logo change has brought out a new wave of articles and tweets about it, and people go "oh no that's right I'm on twitter! Well THIS is the final straw! Thank goodness there were all these hate articles and tweets that reminded me I was supposed to be angry!"
Also, many of the people who "jump ship" are right back on Twitter within a week. mastodon.social has an entire graveyard of celebrity accounts that haven't been posted to in months because the outraged celebrities just went back to twitter.
I'm happy for Mastodon (I run a fediverse instance and the more users there are the more chances of interesting people and the like), and some of those people do realize they like the vibe more and stay, and a lot of those bumps are significant for the platform. The thing is, we're talking a few hundred thousand, maybe a million accounts of 200 million daily active users on twitter.
Remember why Ray Kroc wanted McDonald's... because of the name/brand. Anybody could make a hamburger/shake shop or shack but he had to have the name because the name was a seller.
Nobody thinks X is cool other than Elon musk and him switching to it is another signifier of how uncool Twitter has become. Every little thing adds to the flow of traffic to the exit.
It's like watching an episode of Beavis and Butt-Head where every single decision they make is a bad decision. And it's hilarious.
people do weird things
None of it was fine, people have been browsing for alternatives ever since Elon Musk took over.
At most, many hoped things would ultimately stay the same, which they definitely didn't. The biggest hurdle is that a lot of people there are waiting for their friends and favorite content creators to pick what place they will move to, and content creators are extra hesitant because they don't know if they will have as much following and reach as they used to. I see a bunch of smaller creators pretty much mourning their careers.
This will be one of the first "in your face" things that is immediately noticable by a finicky user base that only understands and associates value to popular brands. Musk just removed the popular and familiar brand that people are comfortable with, so why would those people stay?
Made a mastodon account yesterday mainly out of curiosity. Never been to Twitter.
So they might be counting just me lol
And probably won't matter much.
This user surge will probably go crawling right back in a week or two.
Every surge will retain more people as every surge brings more content.
That's true. I just don't expect this one to be quite so consequential as the others.
Yeah, if moving to Threads wasn't enough to hold people there, I doubt Mastodon will be able to hold them either.
People really love their cute animal logos I guess, #whatcanyoudo?
Also how do they know it is a twitter exodus and not a Reddit or Threads exodus? I quit reddit entirely and I know many who have as well. It seems much more likely to be the case.
I get your point, but Twitter is more analogous to Mastadon than to Lemmy.
@PeleSpirit
Let me help you visualize that
@BlackRose @const_void @BitingChaos
Yeah it makes no sense. I think the media is just out to trash Elon at every opportunity for any miniscule thing. He is somewhat of an outcast of the billionaires club in that he dies not appear to want to enslave humanity and deny the poors of their rights.
Yea he just settles for treating his employees with no respect and firing them on a whim without their owed severance pay.
Cite examples?
Here's one big example of unpaid severance pay: https://www.reuters.com/legal/twitter-again-sued-over-severance-pay-bias-during-layoffs-2023-07-18/
Plus I've read many comments from insiders before that every single company he runs is a terrible place to work for, in terms of overworking employees.
I mean... take your pick on who he hasn't paid, there are pleeeeenty of examples out there. He even lost the ability to engage in arbitration over the unpaid severance because he didn't pay the mediators lmfao. https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-d&q=twitter+unpaid+bills
Serious question for you- why are you defending him? Like, the information demonstrating he's kind of stupid and a terrible person is so easily available to you. At this point you have to actively work to remain ignorant of it, and his history of trying to claim accomplishments that aren't his own. Why bother?
Yeah, I mean, who hasn't wanted to experiment with putting microchips into baboon skulls, or called someone a pedophile just because they hurt your feelings, or treats their workers like absolute trash? He's just a regular guy doing regular things and the media is using him as their whipping boy.
Transhumanism is a thing whether we like it or not, hopefully Elon will do it ethically. I don't care if he said mean things to somone, that is between him and the individual. Provide examples of him treating his employees like trash?
Someone fairly recently wrote a very long article about it., but it is only the first drop in the ocean of stories google comes up with about how bad an employer he is.
What are you on about? Every opportunity to trash him??? He can easily change his behaviour, he's a trash person so he doesn't. He absolutely wants to deny the poor their rights, look at how he treats the workers of twitter and how he spoke of those he fired. I truly don't know how you can be this blind unless it's willful. Get real
Twitter shrunk its staff by 3700, many of whom left of their own volition. Examples of some companies that cut more jobs then Twitter that nobody seemed to givr a damn about: Amazon 27k Meta 21k Accenture 19k Alphabet 12k Microsoft 10k Salesforce 8k Disney 7k Dell 6.6k
I guess the people working at those companies just don't matter huh?
I don't see any other billionaires fighting for basic human rights like free speech other than Elon. He doesn't have a perfect track record on that count but it is better than the flat 0 of the rest of that clique.
HAHAHAHAHA you cannot be serious? Yes freeze peach warrior Elon. Get. Fucking. Real.
Great contribution, gold star.
Because you aren't worth it. You clearly ignore evidence being placed in front of your face so there isn't a point. Literally start googling about his management of twitter, all the evidence is there. But you won't
Ask people from India or Turkey what they think about Elon fighting for free speech. Especially after he said, "By “free speech”, I simply mean that which matches the law." Which means he's all in favor of what North Korea considers free speech.
You should really learn to separate claims with actions. Musk likes to claim he fights for free speech (well he used to, for some reason he hasn't really talked much about it lately), but he has not only done nothing in favour of them but actually opposed it during his ownership of twitter.
Also, I don't know what kinda gotcha you think you have with those layoff numbers. It is as if you think that people here just love all those other corporations and only hate Musk, when that is the opposite of the truth.
Wait, what? Have you ever heard of longtermism? "Your stupid peasants' suffering today matters little if we can take humanity to space^TM^. Don't hold back progress." If this is not enslaving humanity and shitting on the poor, I don't know what is.
What are you even talking about? Care to elavorate? How is he making anyone suffer?
No, you're sealioning, this is a waste of time :/ he's at least as scummy as any other billionaire, like Zucky, Bezos, Gates, Thiel and all the other ones nobody hears about.
Why do you think the media goes so hard after Elon and we don't hear much or anything at all about the others? Why is there a rabid cult of anti muskers that try to denigrate him at every opportunity? What is their agenda? When someone is singled out it should make you reflect on the reason why. He is hardly the worst billionaire around yet he gets all the flak.
Because the others stay out of the spotlight. Musk deliberately shitposts and wants to be seen, so the media (and everyone else) sees him and reacts to that.
But if you take your time to actually acquaint yourself with matters, you will notice that the media and everyone else are also very busy criticising other corporations and other billionaires. It is just that Musk being the narcissist that he is, very much like Trump, deliberately create stories on a daily basis through his poor judgement and constant craving for exposure.
The media drooled all over him and carried him until he declared war on them. Look up news of him before 2020, there is hardly anything negative (and there should be, he's been manipulating stock and treating employees like shit, like the other Billionaires). When did the media say anything critical about hyperloop? You live by hype, you die by hype.
He doesn't need to enslave humanity, just his Mars colony. As far as money over rights are concerned, his 'free speech absolutist digital town square' sure does give a lot more privileges for those willing to pay.
Musk has openly stated his support for the Republicans and for right wing causes countless times during his twitter shitposting period. If anything he has more openly voiced support of enslavement of humanity and the denial of the rights of poors than most of his billionaire colleagues, who are mostly all too smart to voice those ideas anywhere in public.
Mastodon has become super stable. It is the place to go.
Absolutely - though some people find it too bare bones. It's designed to be a bit of an anti-Twitter, after all.
Those looking for something more flashy might be interested in checking out, for example, Firefish. The Firefish site also includes a neat "Fediverse software comparison", which lists popular federated services and some of the features they currently have. Personally I prefer the stripped down approach of Mastodon, but reasonable people might disagree. :)
Oh, and there's also elk.zone, an online user interface for Mastodon that behaves a lot like Twitter. Similar to those "old lemmy" sites (like old.lemmy.world) in a way, but as an online app similar to wefwef.app.
Is Firefish the same thing as Calckey?
I created a Calckey account a couple of weeks ago but it was basically a weird Mastodon with even fewer people from what I could tell.
Yes, Calckey updated and rebranded (?) as FireFish. https://joinfediverse.wiki/What_is_Firefish%3F
Important to note, the fewer people should not significantly restrict your experience. Everything is part of the same network.
Good point. I did follow a few accounts I already follow on Mastodon. But then I thought "I have a Mastodon account already... Why am I doing this?"
And the Emojis instead of starring a post was throwing me off.
edit: I see there is a star online now. Maybe it was just the Kimis app that was weird.
The apps have definitely been the biggest thing holding me back. Kaiteki seems perfect but also broken on my phone right now :/
Very interesting to read people's experiences, as I don't have any first hand experience. I've just seen enthusiastic content from users and figured it was a better fit for some people.
Might be a bit too much on the bleeding edge still - not entirely unlike kbin and Lemmy. Would you say that it's rough enough that you wouldn't currently recommend it to people?
No they had it righ….oooh, i see what you did there.
𝕏odus
Yes, 'X' odus
Movement of Jah people
Oh yeah
Great game
It amazes me how badly these billionares are at running businesses.
Like im an engineer and Not in my wildest dreams could I have destoyed a company like Twitter faster than musk.
Like Did he do it on purpose?
It HAS to be on purpose. Nobody can get to billionaire levels of wealth and be completely inept, right? RIGHT?
Begin rich makes one feel infallible. Thinking one's self to be infallible leads to these kinds of decisions.
It's probably worse when one has convinced himself one's suceess so far was 100% personal skill, rather than 90% luck and 10% skill.
Unfortunately, once you get enough money the system is designed to keep you wealthy no matter how much you fuck up.
Like, Trump has had multiple failed companies including casinos thay failed because he had them competeing with each other.
Yet while he's probably not a billionaire he still has the status of "wealthy" and managed to fail into the most powerful position in government.
Musk had more money, and therefore can fuck up way harder and still be fine. He could burn Twitter to the ground for all the effect it would have on him.
The reason is that they know people with money, and those people listen. For example, Musk only had to post about his attempt to buy Twitter in a groupchat, and he got Billions of Dollars from them to do it, unchecked. Regular people don't get their ear, and even if they do for some unfathomable reason, everything is checked meticulously.
Lol i just cant imagine that level of ineptitude.
Am I living in a simulation?
The level of ineptitude is common, the combination of wealth and that much ineptitude, usually less so, given being able to afford the best education and advisers. So it takes a special sort of billionaire to be this inept.
While that's true, I think it's more that rich people tend to insulate themselves from actually driving direct actions most of the time, so we see their stupid decisions after they've filtered from the Board, to the CEO, to the VPs, to the directors, to the managers, and finally, to the workers that actually do things. Really stupid things filter slowly back up as impossible, or as they hit snags over weeks and months, so it takes a couple rounds for them to really mess things up. Not to mention people softening the edges as it passes through the chain to make it more reasonable.
Elon being front and center, and actually ramming things through is what makes this so uniquely inept. Normally we wouldn't know that all of these terrible ideas are straight from him, and blame could be shifted around to scape goats.
Agreed.
It's just the Dunning-Kruger effect at work, he thinks because he successfully ran a rocket manufacturing company to viability that he's definitely going to be able to run a social media company too.
Turns out the B2B style government contract model isn't exactly the same as B2C social media advertising model.
I'd argue that it's Drunning-Kruger plus being surrounded by stupid yes-men that agree with everything you say or do
Do we know for sure? He could just be so arrogant he doesn't acknowledge advice.
His initial wealth of 42 million dollars came from working on travel software. He used that wealth to become rich by founding x.com, a payments company that failed. How does a failing company lead to massive wealth you might ask? Well, that failing company merged with PayPal.com, and Musk was CEO of the merged company for about 6 months before he got fired. PayPal went on to be huge, so after he was fired he made his fortune on his shares. Next he invested money in Tesla, bought the title of "co founder" even though he wasn't, waited 7 years passively then noticed the company wasn't going anywhere, replaced an exec or two and then took credit for turning the company around. So yeah, maybe that's his end game? Make Twitter (now x.com) as bad as the old x.com so someone merges and gives him stocks and fires him again?
And yet, despite all that, this somehow still feels notably inept, even for a man whose primary goal in life, at the moment, appears to be demonstrating how thin his attachment to reality grows by the day.
Yup, he's an inept piece of garbage that made it to the top by chance.
Sounds like it's time to re-watch Glass Onion. Elon Musk is Miles Bron.
It was on purpose. Its completely obvious the powerful right in America wanted Twitter gone. I bet it could have swung the overton window with how much influence it had.
At this point, I'm gonna say yes. Yes, he did do it on purpose. Why? The conspiracy theorist in me says it's to push people into Meta's Threads, building it up even more before it federates, in an attempt to kill the Fediverse like Google did with XMPP, because the Fediverse is the fastest growing bastion of corporate-influence-free speech on the Internet.
Or he's just an idiot. 🤷♀️
“Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by yadda yadda…”
Yeah I've got a feeling this guy isn't a master of 6D chess, planning some far flung strategy 10 steps ahead. I think he just likes to shitpost and cause drama
Maybe that second one tho.
I think this gives him credit where it isn't due 😂
Personally, I think he's just a magic blend of incompetent, arrogant, and in over his head. Large companies are slow moving for a reason and we're seeing why in real time.
I know this is the Case. I am just amazed at how incompetent he is.
I'm mean if there were an incompetent olympics he would win silver (the highest possible medal).
Whether or not it’s on purpose, I think that Twitter was vulnerable to this outcome due to literally years of mismanagement. Dorsey hadn’t given a fuck for quite some time, and Twitter’s problems always grew faster than its solutions.
It's like he has a bet that he had to destroy Twitter but he wasn't allowed to just shut it down or kick everyone off.
Every move has been bad. It has to be on purpose. Is this how billionaires get their kicks?
The investors were the kind of people that don't want the kind of on the ground, quick fact reporting that happened during uprisings and the like.
It can't be a coincidence. They're tanking the most popular tool for getting quick communication out.
And at precisely the same time reddit goes down the shitter too. And threads. So many "coincidences."
If this is a Brewster’s Millions situation, and he just has to lose $44 billion dollars in a year, I’m voting we let the writers stay on strike.
I still think if you look at his investors it spells out leaders who want Twitter not to be viable as a platform for coordinating democratic efforts. So yes, he did it deliberately.
The other stuff didn't bother people enough to leave, but rebranding? That's the step too far. Anyway Mastodon usage has fluctuated a good amount over the last few months so I don't think that's a good metric for people fleeing Twitter, or should I say X (what a terrible name).
Twitter's value was in its branding as the case with any ubiquitous product. There was zero reason to change it other than to further damage the entity. Fine with me Elon, go ahead and kill it, one more failed corporate driven media site. We don't need any of them.
Could be the straw that broke the camel's back.
I actually hate rebranding by itself too. I see a totally new name as just trying to escape their bad name, likely earned by their previous misdeeds.
alphabet
meta
Fucking allergies, geez.
Pretty sure both of those were for financial reasons (easier reporting requirements etc). As in, both Google and Facebook the companies still exist, it's just that they are now owned (along with other companies such as Waymo and Instagram etc) by Alphabet and Meta respectively.
Yeah, I really don't get why people would care much about branding. It's everything leading up to that that's starting to wear people out.
I think this is the main thing. It's like, why draw so much attention to this thing that people liked fine before and which you want to mutate into some sort of hypermonetized cyberpunk dystopia omninetwork? Changing the name to something vague and edgelord is like a big giant sign that says, "REEVALUATE YOUR RELATIONSHIP WITH THIS APP RIGHT NOW!"
It's also the most noticeable for the common user. You can ignore an entire logo change (one that sucks by the way)
Oh God have you met people? When people talk about their tweeting, the neurochemical feedback mechanism is "oh wow you tweet?" It's filled with positive cultural context.
If that response becomes "wtf is twxing?" that entire zeitgeist just collapses and people will view the service with active repulsion. Like a toy they've grown their identity out of. Or a cringe dress they wore to their sibling's wedding.
Yeah and it especially doesn't make sense since the twitter apps - where most people use twitter - are still called twitter and still have the twitter logo. Nothing has changed, and even with a name change and logo change nothing is going to change. It's still twitter, and the people hate-tweeting that they're leaving are still going to stay, since they've been hate-tweeting that they're leaving since Musk bought the place lol.
What are the sources for this "user exodus"? Where are the stats, the numbers? It's just clickbait by people that want twitter to die.
Everybody has a breaking point, right? This could have been the breaking point for many people.
I'm looking at this as “various little breaking points” some very trivial, but when taken as a whole, could break someone's tolerance, causing someone to be an eX-user.
Something that literally makes no difference, like a name change?
There's a reason McDonald's isn't called Kroc's.
If McDonald’s changed their name it works make no difference at this stage.
I don't think you understand how important branding is.
https://klintmarketing.com/35-rebranding-fails/
I do, but it’s irrelevant when a company has 500 million users.
Those examples I showed you are companies the size of Twitter. It affected sales in a major way. Many of them had to walk it back.
No difference to you. If indeed people left because of that then it made a difference by definition.
At this point I am pretty convinced he's doing it on purpose. I don't quite understand why, except maybe as a weird flex. Or maybe the world's billionaires got together and decided to kill Twitter because they hate all the negative press? IDK, but the whole thing is just too surreal.
It is surreal that a single capitalist can be motivated to take down a monolith like Twitter. Yeah I'm convinced it's intentional. Funny when I first heard he bought Twitter for the price he paid my initial thought was he's buying it to kill it, but then I thought nobody would waste that kind of money on a personal vendetta. I guess Elon is just that crazy.
The Saudis personal vendetta...
Twitter is an important tool for social uprisings and the Saudis are just one of many that would like to see it gone.
I'd take that with many grains of salt, brands and influencers aren't moving and neither are their followers
That's not terribly surprising, given that both of those groups rely most heavily on network effects: the very point of such accounts requires being where their audience is, especially brands. Those kinds of accounts will move en masse only when most everyone else has already done so
Also, we do have some influencers here - namely a few Linux youtubers, and technology connections. Basically it's those that you would somewhat expect to have a presence on a budding social network like mastodon.
I see George Takei and Neil Gaiman post on there :)
Wasnt aware technology connections was on masto. Admittedly I dont use my mastodon all that much, becuase I dont really much enjoy the microblogging formula as much as a more forum like system like I could get from reddit and now lemmy, but the only youtuber Im familiar with that Ive been able to find there thus far has been NotJustBikes.
Exactly, no one cares until Mr beast or Beyonce moves and they aren't going to mastodon haha
I would like more of a sports presence here tho and unfortunately sports beat writers I followed on Twitter aren't coming here
Why did you have to do it every week?
Yeah I meant more in it's own instance vs here. But what I'm saying is even if I do I won't get the breaking news content I want because the journalists are not switching over
Yeah. Apparently called fanaticus.social
Found it on https://join-lemmy.org/instances
There are some bots on Mastodon that mirror tweets from sports reporters that I'd followed on Twitter.
It's annoying that's you can't respond to things like mailbag questions, but I can still get breaking news, NFL training camp reports, etc.
If they do, it will be because we've reached an arbitrary critical mass. Think, mastodon has 2.1M active users now, twitter has 230M active users.
Mastodon will be considered viable at roughly the same number of users that caused the media to think of twitter as "mainstream"
I'm thinking at least 20M users, 10x what mastodon has now.
They're not going to go to mastodon, but there have already been a pretty big exodus to Threads. I have a feeling that's going to be the thing - twitter is going to die slowly mostly in favor of Threads, meanwhile Mastodon and the fediverse will probably continue being a minor player for a while.
Threads will kill nothing for as long as it remains unavailable in Europe due to breaking GDPR.
Bluesky is more likely, particularly given its Twitter's former ceo building it.
Bluesky just barely hit a million users is still invite only and is largely in a beta state, and though I'm not on it, everyone I know says it's a zombie platform and they'd rather be on Mastodon for nerd shit or Threads for normie shit. Threads has over 100m users already. The numbers alone make Bluesky not really worth mentioning, and effectively Threads killed it within the first day. Dorsey has also shown a track record of having no idea what he's doing. Probably half of the things people think about with Twitter come from the community. @mentions, rt, the term "tweet", etc. The twitter app was developed by a third party and bought.
As much as Zuckerberg sucks, Meta actually runs like a real company with adults at the helm. Dorsey's already fucking up bluesky not learning anything from his time at twitter and not making moderation a priority. Brands are already embracing Threads over Twitter and Bluesky because they don't want their ads showing up next to porn and nazis.
Oh, and as for GDPR, Meta has already stated they plan for a later launch, and again since it's a company of (sociopathic?) adults, they'll actually get it done, but it's already effectively over.
Meta has already been hit with antitrust by the EU. Even if they later get around the fact they're breaking GDPR by datasharing all the instagram accounts (which is where the inflated number of users comes from) they can not get around the Digital Markets Act coming into effect next year which carries a fine of 10% of all global revenue for actions like this.
It's been stated that Meta intends to federate Threads with Mastodon eventually, so either will ultimately be viable.
I have zero faith that will happen. I don't think they anticipated how well threads would be adopted and that saying they'd federate was just a hedge.
I bet they'll pull a https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend,_and_extinguish
I'm sure that's what they want. A free and open platform that doesn't rely on advertising and isn't there to make a profit? Kill it!
A few instances will likely federate with threads, but probably not the interesting ones...
I think the implication was that Threads will not actually federate
Oh I think they'll do, just to not miss the train, and then they'll find a "smart" way to "destroy" federation and get people on their side... But we'll see...
I haven't really seen anyone leave twitter for threads, just post the same thing to both. Also noticing a few accounts I have on both actually posting on Threads asking others if their user engagement has dropped significantly. Google trends etc all show that Threads has dropped off a cliff after the initial surge in downloads.
That seems like good news for Mastodon
chronological forums are still the best form of online community :/
First!
You can have your feed in chronological order on twitter
Edit: Sorry I meant on X. You can stop downvoting now. Geez..
This is a good thing! Corporate social media is a bad thing.
Hopefully this means there are accounts on Mastodon actually worth interacting with. Like 99.9999% of posts on Mastodon are literally just about Mastodon, or stupid tech shit I don't care about.
Use the hashtag and follow people you find interesting. Your feed will improve as you curate it to your liking. It’s on you. There is no algorithm feeding you.
Yes and no. For example, I work in pest control and mostly lurked twitter for pest control content, as a lot of experts in that field used twitter exclusively and never bothered with facebook, instagram, reddit, discord, or any other networking site.
There is absolutely no pest control content from those experts on Mastodon at this time. Niche, I know, but its a concrete example about how not every base is covered on Mastodon (yet).
Its silly to blame people for not flocking there when there is a demonstrable lack of content.
Made a mastodon account but most people's I know don't use it, so yeah. Might be why I'm using Lemmy more. Topics are usually more interesting than individual people.
Mmmm say it again
There are no people I find interesting. I cannot stress this enough, Mastodon has absolutely jack shit for content. A hashtag with relevancy to me might have two posts, EVER, both from dead accounts.
It is a barren wasteland. I am very much tired of people assuming I want to be spoonfed content when I just want there to be any content at all.
I mostly just used Twitter to keep updated on various indie games/artists/authors/content creators. I'd imagine they would go to Threads or Tiktok's new thing before giving Mastadon a shot, and some of them have.
I don't want to be a downer; Mastadon would be my favorite Twitter alternative with how it functions, but in its present state Mastadon just doesn't work for my use case. I think for now I just have to phase Twitter-likes out of my life unless I'm willing to bite the bullet on putting up with meta or 𝕏.
The tech community moved to Mastodon in mass. I follow tech and cannot keep up with the feed.
It's really good. Twitter doesn't need to lose for Mastodon to win. But, also, Twitter is probably about to lose.
I thought Twitter rebranded to 69Boobies420 ?!
You mean 69Boobies420Hitlerdidnothingwrong#Jewspiracy#Libsgetrekked
That's Elon's new screen name. You're getting the two confused.
Nice
69
Lol
Nice
Nice
I never used Twitter, but I'm enjoying Mastodon + Lemmy!
I'm trying, lol. Just followed a bunch of accounts on Mastodon in an attempt to make my homepage more interesting. Loving Lemmy, but while I don't necessarily want the absolute deluge of bullshit like reddit has, for my taste the fediverse still has a lot of growing to do (and I hope it gets there!)
Same thing for me over here, trying to subscribe to enough communities to make my home feed custom enough, but if I'm bored, test c/all
You always get a boost when Elon does something stupid but I'm not seeing anything unusual about this one.. 'soaring' is relative. Usual is 500-1000 an hour and we're currently at 1500.
https://mastodon.social/@mastodonusercount/110774139508082609
I think people get excited because hypothetically, growth should accelerate. The more people are using mastadon, the more mastadon becomes a viable alternative to shitter
Shitter is actually a nice mastodon (former twitter) client! :D
Oh shit, here we go again!
Mastodon, Lemmy & kbin 😊👍
Yep loving all three!
I am there now and testing out the waters
Report back. Are the waters safe?
How long do we give them to reply before we presume them lost, and the waters dangerous?
4 hours. They're dead.
8 hours now.
11 hours. His oxygen tanks are empty for about an hour. We should call his wife.
Mastodon is great, I like it way more than lemmy. TBH its the only federated social I think is actually doing really well, way more users but still a small town vibe. People posting art or pics of their gardens or linux posts. Better moderation overall. It's very gay and I love it.
Yes, they are.
Something like 30% of posts are CSA. So not a very safe environment.
They are very safe, and more reliable than Lemmy in general.
Please post a video. It will be an Xvideo. Xhamster will not be happy about this...
What was Musk's logic? Was there any? It's like he ruined the reputation of Twitter and decided to try a restart under a new name but it's predictably failing.
The perfect plan
step 1: spend billions buying an extremely recognizable brand
step 2: rebrand it
I actually can't believe he is going forward with this. Twitter achieved the goal of becoming a verb, "tweeting". Companies kill for that, and he's just throwing it away? all the mindshare and recognition? for what?
Plus how do you even make a new verb? Doesn’t even work in the slightest. “Oh hey did you see my recent X?” … “oh man the other day Steph X’d something hilarious “ …. Lol nope doesn’t work.
I'm going to x out of this...
wait...that doesn't work...
I'm going to hit the x to delete...no.
x to exit?
I'm stuck too. lol
I’m convinced that Musk and Huffman are hanging out smoking pot and taking dmt, stroking each other till orgasm whispering in each other’s ear how great their plans are.
He's going to buy two more platforms and call one S and the other E
so XSE?
people also left AOL once they realized tf'n browser works without a monthly sub. wrote WordPress after geocities sucked so bad. tech baby boomers? so 2k
Ironically the two are only half way competing with each other. There's two buckets of twitter peeps:
A) People who keep up with specific people, reducing day by day.
B) The for you page peeps. The vast majority of people I know on Twitter including myself are there for the algorithm feeding us memes and content. Specifically the 2016-2021 algorithm.
Considering mastodon doesn't have any form of FYP/For you it's really only competing for bucket A which in my experience has reduced by an incredible amount in the past few years and continues to reduce and makes it useless to a large majority of twitter users.
Unfortunately or fortunately twitters algorithm also sucks now so there's a pretty big market gap here.
When I did use twitter it was for being the fastest way to get news on events developing in real time. George Floyd protests, J6 coup attempt, start of war in Ukraine, etc. And not just national/world news but also local news. I don't really that type of use fits in to your two buckets and unfortunately I don't think Mastodon is quite there yet to fulfill this type of thing either, but I definitely think it could with more time and more users. Fuck the influencers and people looking for 'content' imo, when people are going to Mastodon with breaking news is when we'll know twitter is completely dead.
Definitely true, totally forgot about breaking events in my original comment. I would say it still lands in bucket B as it's algorithmically fed at least in my experience as I don't follow many news sources directly, it just finds its way into my feed via the algorithm.
Absolutely great point
Fast, but inefficient.
Real time breaking news has an extremely low signal-to-noise ratio. It's mostly FUD and mis or dis information.
The Mastodon app has a "for you" section if you go to search and swipe from posts>hashtags>news>local>for you. You have to look for it though.
It should be “User x-odus.”
Brexxit? Rexxit? How about Xxit?
His master mind move will be revealed any moment now! The great plan unfolds in front of our eyes!
It's like watching a car crash in slow motion.
I wonder if Elon takes a massive hit before coming up with these ideas
Get them onto kbin.social. we can always use some extra mates! 🦙
Damn, elon's really leaning into that edgelord dystopian faceless corporation aesthetic huh
I would assume the real surges would be in bluesky and threads. Out of the frying pan and into the other frying pan.
People don't really understand Mastodon and federation (nor do I blame them for that), but those details are now much, much less in your face than they were when Elon bought Twitter. Mastodon's reliability and usefulness has also improved a lot since Elon bought Twitter. Nothing else works quite like sending a few hundred thousand people your way to stress test your product (and some of them are even nice enough to give money, too!)
Another article I read theorized that Threads launching might have increased the awareness of ActivityPub and softened peoples resistance to the "Mastodon is too hard, not worth trying to figure out" messaging in the media. Who knows though, and there's probably not a single answer anyway.
Nobody is using Bluesky. It's dead now that Threads is here and Tiktok is coming out with their own thing.
Mmm...which flavor of privacy invasion would you like?
I honestly can't tell if it's just a collective expiration date for a culture of wealthy incompetence, or if someone's been manipulating powerful idiots, but it almost feels like there's a coordinated effort to stir an abandonment of corporate platforms.
These platforms can be used to organize protests and things like that. It isn't like nobody would have a reason to want something like Twitter gone. There are the conspiracy theories that Musk was paid by the Saudis or whoever to take it down. Is that likely? Honestly the guy seems like a self centered twat, if not a full blown narcissist, and I can't picture him putting on a public spectacle like this intentionally for show because he is making himself look incredibly stupid but I've been wrong before.
If it was just Musk, it would be a lot easier to chalk up to one idiot. But with so many idiots acting in concert? That sounds like somebody's in their ears. Probably without them realizing it.
Esketit fediverse let’s gooooo
Good to see. X marks the death
Nice.
Can we use our lemmy logon for mastodon?
No. You might see a Mastodon user if they reply to a comment, but even that way round is not easy to do.
Kbin makes it easier to access Mastodon content while still having access to Lemmy content too... But to discover Mastodon content you are probably best making a true Mastodon account.
You'll find different parts of the fediverse have a different focus and feel with varying levels of compatibility depending how much the core focus overlaps.
Not yet. But you can use a kbin account and set up a feed for your lemmy and mastodon instances.
I'm curious why this recent trend isn't visible in Google Trends? I watched the November exodus unfold in real time there. This time not a glimmer of activity
[email protected]
https://mastodon-analytics.com/ did not update for some days, but today there are 2.1M active users
I completely understand why people would be drawn to Mastodon as an alternative to Twitter. The platform's decision to prioritize white supremacy and far-right extremism was a major factor in alienating many users who found themselves unwelcome on the platform. As a result, Mastodon has benefited from the backlash against Twitter's actions, but it's clear that there are still plenty of people seeking an alternative social media network that doesn't condone hate speech and bigotry.
In addition to the issues you mentioned, I believe that the rise of Mastodon can also be attributed to the increased awareness around the importance of protecting marginalized communities online. It's no secret that Twitter's failure to address harassment and abuse has pushed many users away, leaving them feeling unsafe and unprotected. Mastodon offers a space where individuals can share their thoughts and ideas without fear of being targeted by trolls and other online troublemakers.
Ultimately, while both platforms continue to experience fluctuations in user numbers, it seems likely that Mastodon will continue to grow as long as it remains dedicated to providing a safe and inclusive environment for all. White supremacy is not welcome here, and we must hold ourselves accountable for ensuring that this message is heard loud and clear. Thank you!
can we take bets on what a “tweet” will be called now? my bets on “chi” (pronounced kai)
Again??! Fine. Let me go fetch my No.2 pencil.
Is there actually any evidence whatsoever of the rebranding that hasn't even fully happened yet is causing a "user exodus"? Why would people leave because it's renamed and has a different logo?
I closed two old accounts when I heard about it, including a business account. I don't want to be on the "X" app.
That makes no sense. You want to be on twitter but not twitter with a new name?
Nobody said I wanted to be on Twitter. I just said I had two neglected accounts that I deleted when I learned of the dumb change.
Ok so someone that didn't use twitter is leaving twitter after they remembered they have a twitter account they don't use. Cool.
Doing my part! 👍
Twitter has so many people on it that Elon sneezing is going to create a spike in new mastodon users
The issue is brand brand loyalty. My younger siblings was looking for his Twitter app earlier and was like, "where is Twitter... Oh wait I forgot it's an X now."
That's strange since it's still called twitter on both the iOS and Google Play stores lol
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.twitter.android&pli=1
https://apps.apple.com/au/app/twitter/id333903271
Sounds like you're making up stories lol. Neither of them have updated their logo or name.
I really want to like Mastodon. I just find it a lot of work, and Twitter has always been my low-zero effort social media platform.
Then stay on board the sinking ship, since you lack the courage to hop out.
Do you think this is how you get people to make the move?
If not, why make this comment in the first place?
Thanks for the permission. I'm glad I've got you to help me in my hour of need.
I keep trying to twitter and :( not liking it and i want Mastodon but :( not liking it (likely for similar reasons) and my tumblr is my zero effort and is well and alive longer than anything else ever was.
you do you.
The problem with Mastodon is that I couldn't make any sense of it. 😂
It's really not all that different from Twitter in terms of the interface.
Not in terms of the interface, but I couldn't get the timeline to not be a complete mess of all sorts of topics.
You have to follow hashtags. That sorts things out. Or at least it does for me.
I'll have to make a new account and give it a go.
Yeah the main difference is that there is no echo-chamber algorithm serving content in the way we're used to with more corporate social media. It's up to you to discover what you like and build your feed
I've found the trick or to follow hashtags rather than people. But it's a balancing act, sometimes you'll find your stream gets flooded with one topic so you need to refine what you are following.
What's the problem? Like signing up or finding people?