As Twitter destroys its brand by renaming itself X, Mastodon user numbers are again soaring | TechCrunch
It's not just lemmy that's benefiting from Elon Musk.
https://techcrunch.com/2023/07/24/as-twitter-destroys-its-brand-by-renaming-itself-x-mastodon-usage-numbers-are-again-soaring/Open linkView original on lemmy.world2614
Comments335
I'm sure there were a huge swath of people who used Twitter and didn't care at all about Musk one way or the other.
Then he rebranded and threw his ego and control in everyone's face. And all the people who like Twitter IN SPITE of Elon were now forced to acknowledge that their Twitter is gone.
Just like over at reddit now, the latest move has alienated the people who really cared about the platform itself. If they rebranded to "Spez's World", though, a lot of the people who didn't give a shit before would suddenly be ready to bail.
Lmao "Spez's world" will be so funny though
or "spezzit"
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/reddit-ceo-edits-user-comments_n_5839cf32e4b000af95ee5b68 https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/spaz
https://idioms.thefreedictionary.com/spazz+out
He has so thoroughly ruined Twitter that you can't help but wonder if that was his goal from the outset.
Narcissists like him would never seek failure intentionally.
You've obviously never played a board game with a narcissist. Flipping over the table and calling everyone, including the game they themselves purchased, cheaters is a totally expected move.
They're not doing that to lose. They're doing that because they already lost.
I GUESS YOU'RE RIGHT, LIKE YOU ALWAYS HAVE TO BE!
- Knocks phone over -
Fucking cheaters
Musk 'lost' when he had to spend the $44 billion. I can totally believe that he's burning Twitter out of spite from having to buy it.
That is quite fitting
It’s just like Michael from The Office. You see he isn’t doing things on purpose to sabotage everyone, but he can’t control it, he needs the attention and the self worship.
Thanks for this analogy, it’s going to help me see the world in a funnier light.
To what end, though? The man blew 44b on a site that apparently was only worth 5-10b, and that was before he ran it into the ground. He also destroyed his reputation and the mystique as "genius entrepreneur" which the world can now clearly see he never was.
I can't think of a single net positive. I think it's an age old tale with people with too much money: he fell victim to an over inflated ego and too many yes men aiming to please. He started to believe he really was brilliant.
Sad thing is the man has so much money he still can't fail, personally. He'll have destroyed Twitter and even more people will lose their jobs. And autocrats around the world will be pleased. Musk will just shrug, tell himself it wasn't his fault, "it was the libs" or something, and move on.
Eta: the only winners here, as per usual, are the shareholders.
44b sounds like a lot of money (it is!), but his net worth right now is 219b after this fiasco. At this point it's just a score between rich assholes who got the bigger number.
You could take 200b away from his evaluation and he could still retire on a yacht and not work a single day in the next 100 years. Same for his children and his children's children.
So yeah, "bad" financial investment, but it might be worth for him to kill one of the biggest platforms where he was called out for his bullshit.
Totally valid point.
To be fair, Elon doesn’t all have that money in cash. Also, like half of the Twitter buyout was made possible with a loan where he used his a Tesla stocks for like half of the operations as collateral.
Although I agree that he’s far from being broke, this can become a pretty bad financial decision to Elon.
Thing is, now ALL the platforms are calling out his BS. I don't think he would have sold his golden boy reputation for any price, given the choice
Chop one head off...
That 44b had to be paid in real cash, not just the current theoretical value of the sum of his shares. He sold quite a lot of Tesla shares afaik to banks to give them a “small loan”.
Lol, "real cash", look it up what he actually did. He took a loan in the name of Twitter, so he didn't even use his own money. Pretty much financing half of the deal with the theoretical value of the company he just bought. And he took in extra money from Saudi investors, it's not all his money.
There was never a 44b "real cash" transaction.
Foil hat time. Twitter was at one point a huge communications platform. People got news and opinions on daily happening almost immediately. He has successfully purchased that platform and destroyed the faith people had in it, in time for some of the most controversial events in recent history.
I mean, sure, assuming he doesn't mind paying for that with 44 billion of his own dollar bucks, the devaluation of his other companies and the evaporation of his personal reputation.
Which is where my conspiracy theory falls apart. It mainly rests on fact that most of these decisions seem deliberate. Even an idiot by this point might start worrying about the loss of money. As much as he has, 40bil is considerable.
It is most definitely his money. He is using his real source of wealth, Tesla stock, as collateral to secure the loans. $44 billion worth of Tesla stock. And when you sell off a huge amount, as would happen in the case of the collateral being seized, it would tank the rest of his wealth which is mostly in non-collateralized (as far as we know, in relation to Twitter) Tesla stock. Investors knowing that $44 billion of Tesla stock will be liquidated--even if slowly--by creditors would make prices tank.
Elon's rich. Like all rich people, he is inherently immoral and opportunistic, holding no allegiance to his species nor country of residence ("world citizens" are a blight yet most countries still let them buy citizenship--that's true class solidarity while they get us fighting over stupid shit like transgender Chess Grandmasters). I have a feel that you are correct in that he's been earning money from the Saudis and Murdochs and many others. But the main source of his wealth is still in the market. A source which he pumped up with market manipulation because the SEC is a captured entity run exclusively for the benefit of the parasites at the top.
But it feels like arguing around the edges a bit. Elon is just not good at this. He has failed upward his entire life which is why he had to buy his way into basically every successful enterprise he is credited for. Rich people, especially nepo babies like Elon, don't succeed because they are better. They succeed because the upper class ensures that their class succeeds, because the alternative is the working class becoming their peers. And they can't have that.
Considering that most of the market was stupidly overpriced, if you had 100b of worth in overpriced stock, and you had to choose between spending it or waiting for it to lose value over the next few months, what would you do?
IMO Mush was trying to run a simple pump and dump scheme with Twitter stock. You know, make some statements about ho he's going to buy it at a massively inflated price, sell all the stock during the uptick and then suddenly find some issue with the sale and leave. However, during the "make some statements" phase he managed to make some legally binding statements and Twitter and their lawyers held him to them.
So there's no agenda or plan really, just a larger version of the Dogecoin pump and dumps that Mush has done in the past. It's just this time rather than some crypto rubes he tried running it on a company with lots of lawyers and it blew up in his face.
Agreed, very plausible scenario. It played out that way as well, right up to the part where his lawyers told him "you legally can't actually walk away from this deal".
To reduce the ability of the 99% to interact with each other on a basis that results in change of the 1% methodology.
The people running this nation and the rest of the world absolutely do not want us getting together and figuring out how to make change effectively. I'm pretty sure it's why they keep ruining all of the social networks, we can't unite if there's not a platform for us to do so on..
Take any of the top 3 social platforms, then have a look at their total number of users. If we were going to go unite, that shit probably would have happened by now. Instead we post memes about billionaires.
Elon jet tracker has way less of a following now.
True, but it popped up on other platforms, effectively defederating. And you probably jest, but if not: 44b is a lot more than the 5k he initially offered the guy to take it down.
Elon is a narcissistic idiot, but that's all he is. He bought the same crap his own PR team was peddling a few years ago, figured he didn't need his PR team because he was so great (according to propaganda they spread), and went on to confidently make idiotic decisions because of course the real life Tony Stark can make no mistakes
Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.
Honestly even if the executive wanted to crash Twitter on purpose I'm not sure they could have done as good as Musk.
He's carefully destroying the brand, the infrastructure, the finances and the credibility of Twitter.
You can't be too quick because then people would take about for maybe a month and move over.
No it had to be slow and painful so everyone start to really hate it.
I wonder if his goal isn't for Twitter to be successful. I'm wondering if political influence will help to get cushty deals or legislative changes favourable to Tesla or SpaceX.
Why worry about losing $30bn from one hand when you gain $100bn in another?
Actually the number of Twitter users increased
Really?!? That's surprising.
If it's active users increased I'd be surprised, but if it's not I wouldn't be, most people probably don't delete accounts when they stop using them
Those are all the flies attracted to shit.
Is this migration already called xit? Because it should..
Xodus
tweXit
tweXit does have a nice ring to it. Made me laugh 😂
Not sure which I like more. I think I'll use both.
Xitting the Xitter (shit-ter)
Xatter (shat-ter)
It’s not the rebrand that’s killing Twitter. Elon is. He’s proving to himself that he cannot, in fact, run Twitter better than the prior owners.
I wonder if previous twitter execs are feeling a bit bad to have sold him twitter to see it destroyed like that.
I mean it certainly proves Elon is an idiot as he used fraud to manipulate the price and got played instead.
But was it worth it to let him destroy Twitter just because he tried to defraud it?
They got $44 billion, double what sane people thought the company was worth. It would be irresponsible not to take Elon for a ride.
Responsible financially, as agents of the corporation, sure. And I understand why they did it. Morally though (and I would argue civilly) it was wildly irresponsible. Thousands of people lost their jobs, hundreds of people are now forced to work at Elons insane business under threat of deportation if their visa is invalidated, and hundreds of millions lost a trusted, dependable direct link to governments, public figures, and other notable people. The world is a worse place for having let this deal happen. What is responsible financially is often irresponsible in pretty much every other way, and I wish this perspective was represented more.
As a shareholder in a number of other large corporations, I would actively like for buy-outs like this one to fail, even if it would make me a quick buck now, even if that quick buck is a lot. I much prefer stability to major erratic changes, even when they benefit me.
It should not have been trusted and pervasive to such an extent. If anything, better to cut the dependency now than later.
That’s a fair argument, and to an extent I agree. That said, I don’t think firebombing something hundreds of millions depend on is not the ideal solution, and it could have been handled differently, like by adding contingencies, for example. Or working in some form of transition period.
In an ideal world, yes. But face it, you, I, and my aunt's puppy knows that'd never happen. Get every govt agency in the world to cooperate? Yeah right. This might have been one of the best ways we could realistically have ended it.
I disagree. Nationalizing Twitter is definitely idealistic thinking, but adding some small contingencies to the deal definitely is not, and is actually pretty standard in large mergers, to maintain stability.
An easy counterpoint to what you just said: mahney. Nobody cares about doing the responsible thing when billions are on the line. Also, a lot of people say they wouldn't do something for a billion dollars which just boils down to "you didn't get a chance like that and you never will". Hypotheticals are easy till it actually happens to you.
I have morals that I will not violate. Money does not matter to me beyond enough to comfortably live on my own (and I have reached that point already). I give the rest away to people in need, because that’s how my moral system works. You’re welcome to think whatever you want about hypotheticals, but in this case it doesn’t matter if they sold or not. The people making this deal would have been obscenely rich either way. At a certain point, money is nothing more than bragging about a big number, your life doesn’t get materially different. If your moral system allows for that kind of action, good for you I suppose, but I can assure you its far from a universal perspective.
Also illegal, since Twitter was a public company- they can't discriminate on bona fide offers or they risk being sued.
As someone who doesnt use twitter... yes this was totally worth it!
I’d be bummed out but happy I have an unlimited supply of hundred dollar bills to wipe away the tears.
I wonder how long twitter would able to run at a loss if elon didn’t take it over as a slapstick joke went wrong.
I’m sure the previous execs are crying into their wads of cash. So much sympathy for them.
Lol. Like if they gave a shit they would have forced that buyout to go through.
Yeah. I left with the bluetlicker shitstain bump up in every reply. The dumbest people to ever buy a device and learn English that somehow didn't choke on rocks as a kid...
Just had enough and had to leave
To be honest, for me it absolutely was the rebranding that made me delete the app.
Why? I'm really curious what difference the rebranding made to users
Imagine your favourite fancy restaurant suddenly adopts an extreme “Batman” theme. Same food, but just hardcore decorated a la the Dark Knight. You’d probably still go there, but you’d have a different time. And you’d reconsider the types of people you’d bring there, etc.
Brand is far more than the logo in the top corner, and I think marketing textbooks are going to use Twitter -> X as an example of how not to do things.
Now I'm imagining meeting a professional contact at a classy Italian sit down place, but the waitress greats us with a deep gravely "I'm Batman."
Thank you for building that moment for me. And yeah, I see exactly your point now. If I hadn't already left X, I would be concerned about sharing a personal and professional brand with it.
It's stupid and unnecessary.
For me personally it was simply a gut feeling of how stupid that name and logo looked on my screen. I was of course annoyed but everything else going on before, but that didn’t yet push me away. This is a minor thing, but it was the tipping point.
If you said it was the final nail in the coffin, sure. But for that to be the only reason?? Why??
Are you one of those “my brand truck is better than yours because … bowtie” types?
You are jumping into conclusions. See my other answer here https://lemmy.world/comment/2511227
This is how I mainly used Mastodon before Lemmy. It lets you follow topics instead of people; I prefer finding content this way. Unless a person really likes the format of Mastodon better, I'd suggest Lemmy over Mastodon for people that would rather follow topics than individuals.
I found it very refreshing that it doesn't have an algorithm at all. I know there are some downsides to that, but I think they're worth it.
On Mastodon? I distinctly recall reading that it did not have one but I guess these projects are fast moving so maybe it has changed or I am just mistaken.
Another good thing is putting people you follow into lists. I just wish we could do the same with hashtags.
Tusky is a great app. But it doesn't seem to have a trending tab, which I use to find cool accounts to follow. For now I use trunks.
Not not trending hashtags. Just overall trending posts. Maybe I need to uninstall and reinstall tusky or something.
If you go to settings you can add/remove tabs which includes trending. You can also add your own tab with any combination of hashtags, but pretty sure this only sorts by latest
Those are actually not groups. Groups boost posts from all users that mention them. https://a.gup.pe/ is one implementation of groups with mastodon in mind, but lemmy communities actually work the same way when followed from mastodon. I believe other fediverse platforms implement groups in similar ways under the hood. This means that everything is more or less interoperable between platforms.
Very true. Following hashtags is a pretty essential feature.
Groups boost posts from all users that mention them. https://a.gup.pe/ is one implementation of groups with mastodon (and other federated microblogging platforms) in mind, but lemmy communities actually work the same way when followed from mastodon. I believe other fediverse platforms implement groups in similar ways under the hood. This means that everything is more or less interoperable between platforms.
EDIT: Try it yourself! Follow [email protected] from Mastodon to see what I mean. Although I don't know that I would stay a follower of a community that large unless I wanted significant impacts on my feed. A smaller, potentially more useful, addition to your feed are things like gardening communities.
Cool, but the article is from July 24th
Just deleted my Twitter account. Of course, the app gave nothing but errors so I had to do it on desktop, but it’s done!
So now you have an ex-Twitter account. Or an X account for short.
Maybe Elon was truly 200 IQ with his naming
I deleted all of mine and move to mastodon when I heard Elon was possibly going to buy it. I'm glad I did, because who knows what he has all implemented since then.
I am sure my account was never "deleted", even under Jack, but at least I know I gave the best chance for my data to be deleted.
Twitter under Elon looks similar to the UK under Brexit.
So smooth sailing right? Right??
I find Mastodon very stuffy and boring, is there a way to shake up my feed? I feel like I'm missing something about how the app works.
The more i see and recognize the use of the term "Federation", the more my inner geek hopes this is how IRL Star Trek starts.
"The federation started as a group of loosely associated social media and information hubs where people would share ideas, porn and memes. The ideals and social structure would eventually spread to a much larger and more dynamic series of instances that built up to and even greater federation of the human online colonies. As it grew, first contact was made and the inter galactic trade federation was established to trade porn and memes, would eventually go onto to much more larger, important, totally not porn related causes. To explore strange new worlds, and seek out new......"
There is a whole star trek instance conveniently enough: startrek.website
I love the fact that you can now have a website that ends in
.website. It's like having[email protected]as your address.I can’t wait to charge aliens 5.99 intergalactic glonches to see my butthole every month.
"...to seek out new porn and new positions. To boldly jerk off to something no one has seen before..."
I wanted to use mastodon, but I haven't even used twitter in years, so then I realized I just don't social media that way anymore (or much at all for that matter).
I got it and I'm trapped in a weird bubble of shit that doesn't really interest me and I don't like microblogging I think
Same. @squizzy, I don't like microblogging in general either. I was raised in the golden era of forums (the days of phpBB and vBulletin). My twitter account hasn't been touched for years now.
I mostly used twitter for checking trending topics for news
I was finally super duper permabanned from Reddit, and decided to give up. No more workarounds, new accounts, new emails, spoofing MAC addresses, multihop VPNs... And I've got to say, I have gotten more done in the past few weeks than in the last year combined.
What the hell did you do?!
I got permabanned for canning a right wing troll a loser. Apparently I had repeatedly violated the rules ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
I got permabanned for shitting on russians (I am a Polander so it's my default behavior).
I posted unpopular opinions. Perpetually for over a decade.
I never used Twitter save for occasionally hearing about tweets, but I have been enjoying using Mastodon because in practice it's basically just a way for me to have a feed of cool astronomy pictures.
I found cool astronomy pictures on Reddit, and some now on lemmy! Cheers for random cool pictures of space.
Lemmy would be soaring too if it weren't for terrible database code allowing for easy ddos.
Try using a smaller instance. I recently switched from lemmy.world to lemmy.zip and it's lightning fast. While you still get all the content from lemmy.world :)
I find it interesting how many people are looking for the overall lemmy experience. The first thing I did was find the community niche that interested me and the relevant instance, then when I've exhausted that instance I switch to the Everything tab and all find the generic content.
Edit: I accidentally wrote fine the community niece...
How did you like the community niece?
They fined her, so they obviously thought she did something wrong.
Man, this is what I get for being illiterate.
Oops
Yeah that's what I said after my first community niece too.
I'm one of them. I use Sync so the whole caboodle feels like just one site to me, whether it's the Everything feed or my subscribed.
(I am not a techy person)
I also use sync, although I bought the lifetime ad-free version for Reddit years ago for like $5 and now it's $100 which I can't afford here which is a shame. Still, it's my favourite app and I'm very familiar with it.
A hundred dollarydoos for an app to view a free website!?
It's the reddit pricing swapped over exactly, I'm not outright against an independent app creator having a paid option, because it's a very high quality app that deserves support, but I do feel it's soo steep. There are also subscription options but I never take those, and the ads are reasonably unobtrusive.
So the developer has no underlying API cost to justify it and is pocketing it all? Obviously they can charge what they want and people can spend their money however they like, but this seems like an absolute con!
I think I’m up to 5 lemmy instances now. Various reasons that others will figure out as they gain experience.
switched from LW to discuss online
Hopefully they can fix that issue and the communist communities stop having hissy fits.
they're prob ddosing themselves for failing the purity tests.
I had one tell me “you know nothing about communism, stop talking,” and I was like, oh, that’s right, I know nothing despite being well informed about the history of workers movements going back to the 1840s, Das Kapital, the Manifesto, and despite these noble ideals, the fact that every single communist government relied on purges to accomplish its goals, formed an exclusionary ruling class, and were corrupt as fuck. Fucking teenagers and their black and white thinking.
But you see, that wasn't real Communism. Communism is a great and perfect egalitarian society by definition, so when it inevitably devolves into just another brand of stratification and oppression then it's not Communism anymore. Next time it'll work, though. We'll still follow exactly the same formula that's failed spectacularly every time it's been tried, but this time it'll work. For reasons. And if you say otherwise you're just a status-quo liberal (never mind the fact that those supposed status-quo liberals are the ones implementing real tangible change that actually affect peoples' lives while all the Communists do is endlessly wank about some glorious revolution that'll happen some time in the nebulous future.)
When people say stuff like that it's not about politics, it's straight up about gatekeeping.
At least it's open for collaboration so people who can or help contribute to fix bugs for them are able to do so. That's the beauty of open source, anyone can help out.
There were stories that Tesla had a team in place to distract Elon any time he showed up to the office, and I absolutely believe that. Now that Elon has Twitter to distract him, I wonder what that team is up to.
Can we have something nice here please? I miss when the internet was nice, and you were allowed to talk to each other about whatever you wanted.
TRON FIGHTS FOR THE USER!
You have pretty skin.
Your hair looks small.
Throughout history, the wealthy always have a habit of congratulating themselves on work that others have created while doing their absolute best to mess everything up.
I don't know what's going on here but I'm just glad to be part of something.
We couldn't have done it without you
Thank you! I got it off the back off a well fed lady!
Fuck spez. Why isn't he doing more psycho shit like Elon so he can move more people to Lemmy.
Give him some more time. It's not that simple keeping up with Elon's adventures
By the way, your username shows as bot to me. I think you need to disable it in your profile.
Thank you
Well, don't change it if you are a bot.
Hoping they rename Reddit to Y or some such
Apparently, as a competitor of any major platform you just need to get close to the features your adversary has and wait for that site/service to start the process of enshittification, let's see if reddit makes more blunders
I feel that reddit is already at this stage. It started feeling more like a half-bombed corporate minefield so I decided to flee the site one week ago. This site feels much more like things should be. You can even browse on a decent site on your phone.
Try Voyager/WefWef from a browser, it improves the UX a lot
I've been trying to stick to Mastodon and ditch Twitter, but honestly, even though I've gotten into the habit of using Mastodon every day, it's pretty hard for me to resist accepting information from Twitter.
It's ok to get information from places like X/Twitter or Reddit. It's even fine to have an account. But it's better to post your OWN material to platforms that best align with your sensibilities.
This. I still lurk reddit for information, but I will never contribute. Advertisers these days only care about interaction anyway, so I doubt lurking significantly impacts the profitability one way or the other.
I think you should do you and browse whatever you want. I still use Reddit when looking for opinions on products and services because there's nothing close to the discussion on there. But visiting the site (without an adblocker) 100% still generates ad revenue and is what matters to ad companies, regardless of actually participating in the discussion.
So wait visiting with Firefox+ad block doesn't make Reddit money?
The clicks, even with an adblocker, are still worth something, right? Especially if they're tied to an account.
My issue with Mastodon is that many big companies still use Twitter/X as their main way to publish news outside of of their websites and press releases.
It's all about what matters most to you.
I'm not usually interested in what big companies have to say, but I follow some journalists who fortunately cross post to Mastodon, but all discussion takes place on elmo's X site.
Nice, the official P.J. Fry.
#fuckfedex #fedex
I like the idea of referring to it only as "The social media site formerly known as Twitter" from here on out.
Musk trashed Twitter with intent, by design, and on purpose. Elon Musk is worth 95 Billion more now than when he bought Twitter.
The continued forced cognitive dissonance is the grandest example of info_corpo_kabuki i've ever seen. It's all just so fucking dumb.
Elon bought it to trash it so he could have access to Saudi markets for his electric cars and rocket ships. The face he's a fascist fucking cunt who gets to stick it to liberals where they most liked to exchange news, information and organize online was just a bonus for him.
He didn't want to buy Twitter. He lost a lawsuit that forced him to buy it. None of it goes that deep.
I don't buy this, simply because he bought it. He didn't need to destroy it, could could have just turned it off.
That Twitter had essentially become accepted as an official source of communication and Elon's purchase of Twitter so near to the time that he was experimenting with his ability to perform market manipulation on his own companies using Twitter, those things combined made me assume a large part of his reason for purchasing Twitter was to see how far he could take market manipulation and if he could influence other companies. In my darkest version of this scenario, I think Elon was just testing how far his reach is.
Maybe the verified checkmark debacle really was created by incompetence and Twitter tried quickly to fix it, or maybe it was a nefarious way to undermine legitimacy and cause a multi-billion dollar blip on the stock market. Either way, I could easily imagine Musk telling politicians and CEOs after that, "look at what I was able to do just by moving a single finger. Now imagine what I could do to you if I really wanted to."
I really like the razors, here Hanlon's razor is relevant:
"Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity"
I'm sure Elon has no grand plan behind any of this, just a chain of impulsive actions.
Well put. He's been too busy sniffing his own farts. He's out of touch with reality, as most ultra rich people are.
Little wonder what he is trying to turn Twitter into with X. He's tried it several times with several other companies, all of which either failed or ejected him.
He's even tried it with the "X" name more than once.
He is impulsively trying to manifest this idea of something into existence despite the fact that it repeatedly fails. Because the idea just isn't good.
He wants to make the western equivalent of WeChat, when a good amount of the functionality is already hadled by Whatsapp in Europe and non-Sino Asia, and Americans are pretty resistant to the idea domestically. He failed the moment he politicized it. Hell, he failed before he even bought it because Twitter has always been a narcissistic den of toxicity--Tumblr, all grown up. There's a reason that Jack created a Twitter clone under a different company with different everything while CEO of Twitter. It was a sinking ship, and Elon was in the wrong place at the wrong time because he thinks he really is something special.
Oh, the conspiracy side of the story is just to sound saucy. I don't think these were calculated moves, but I still wouldn't be surprised if he tried to profit from his incompetence by labeling it as a flex to those he wants to control. Like, a dumbass who accidentally shoots their own foot and then shouts, "yeah bitch! And that's MY foot! You think I won't cap you too?!"
This assumes all other things are equal.
Elon musk and Donald Trump and others are not stupid. They may act stupid. Their brains may be psychologically damaged by the distance their money allows them to put between themselves, others, and the consequences of their actions.
But they are not stupid. If they were stupid, their stupidity would sometimes bite them in the ass in a way that actually has consequences for them. Since that does not happen, we can be relatively certain that their actions are going according to plan...their plan? Maybe. Or their accountant's plan. But until a mistake costs them actual money that they cannot recoup through tax shenanigans, I find it hard to accept that they aren't just evil.
This. He's on the hook for a relatively small percent of his personal wealth. He has a ton of government contracts, which equate to cash flow. To insulate that cash flow, he needs a loss. He can get that loss by destroying the value of Twitter, which he also artificially inflated by making an insane offer in the first place.
The thing that folks don't get is that money is different when you have none, some, and a ton. When you have none, you are effectively living moment to moment - when youre out, you spend what you have on your immediate needs, and make it work the rest of the time.
When you have some, which is most of us, you may live paycheck to paycheck, but you can still plan two weeks at a time and may have some long term plans.
Elon musk and others in his bracket could literally burn 99% of their wealth and still have more money than almost anyone else. This level of rich is marked by planning years in advance, and having contingency plans to take advantage of set backs. For example, a market crash for most of us means we lose wealth and still probably never recover it. But for Elon musk, a market crash is just a fire sale on stock. He can sell at a loss for tax benefit, or he can buy up stuff at step discounts. The benefit of wealth is that ever situation can make you more money.
Yes thank you, this is what’s happening for sure. He’s so immature and petty and he can’t hide it.
Elon Musks' favorite thing on earth is tweeting dumb shit to his mob of ass-kissers, I doubt he trashed Twitter on purpose. I think he really is just an extremely rich hair-brained dumbass.
That is right baby. The Fedi is a life raft always waiting to scoop people up.
Honestly, I joined Twitter begrudgingly in 2015 after ignoring it for years only because I thought it might be easy to keep up with some interesting news before it hit Reddit.. and it worked for a while...
Now, I just wonder why I'm still there at all.
I also don't.see why I might want a mastodon account at this point though... I don't feel like I need a replacement for something that I never really liked...
I feel the same about Mastodon. I just want to be social with my friends, not on broadcast to a bunch of randos. It makes sense for brands and I guess people who commercialize their identity. But I don't really care about trying to keep up with the lives of brands or really people i don't know, so i haven't want or need for such a site. Also I prefer to catch up with someone for real. Like tell me what you did when we hang out next. I don't want to sit there and pretend like your trip to wherever is news because i already casually saw all the pictures you posted a month ago. And if we are never going to meet again, then I don't need to know what you do with the rest of your life. I like this format much better. Ego is much less in effect and people can just bounce ideas and jokes around. Reddit though... most of the user base is still over there. I've stopped posting and voting entirely. Full lurk mode.
You and I have very similar attitudes on this it seems for sure.
Fuck reddit and mastodon and twatter and all of it at this point ...
Lemmy is pretty good and I'm content with it for the most part.
There's an ethical consideration when you sell a company. Dorsey and co. took a big payout and this is the result. I was thinking earlier about how this probably wouldn't have been happened if you had an even equity split across the company's employees.
It was a corporation. Corporations exist to get shareholders paid. You can't expect those to not be for sale for the right price, which in this case was more than it was worth. If you want the people running companies to make decisions based on ethics, you should ban publicly traded corporations first otherwise it's just not happening.
I mean, they routinely make the unethical decision. They probably wouldn't be in the position to make it in the first place if they didn't already have dollar signs in their eyes. And I've been around enough tech companies to know that's usually the way it breaks down.
You're right, this is the only decision where we can't judge Dorsey's ethics, and we should be attacking a dozen other positions and mistakes he's made. If it would even help; twitter addicts probably don't wanna hear it.
I recall Dorsey publicly coming out in support of Elon's Twitter well after the sale. Maybe there was no ethical conflict for Dorsey and he likes what he sees.
Yeah, maybe all of this wouldn't have happened if the equity was split among the employees.
Showing ongoing public support is often written into the contract with these big deals; Dorsey probably has to say he supports Musk for a few years at least
Why are people so fucking addicted to Twitter? It's just people posting a few sentences about shit I see on the Internet already. But what do I know, I've gone my entire life without using the stupid shit. Maybe I'm not taking into account how many people want to be internet celebrities with their parroted tweets and recycled jokes. Why is it so hard to make another site where dumbass celebrities can feed 2 lines to the drooling masses?
idk why but I felt the need to remind everyone
I just don't understand how he's shaped that way.
He’s driving the Torso™️ from Tesla®️
He's wearing an Eggar suit.
Sugar...
https://th.bing.com/th/id/OIP.UEpX242RH9o4BQijybY9sgHaKs?pid=ImgDet&dpr=2
that's cool. The Masto instance I've been on for the last half year is no longer available and I'll have to start over because I didn't have a main and a back up account like I ended up with on Lemmy, but sure, that's alright. I have no idea what happened, the instance still has a blank page up, but it ain't Mastodon.
I was finally feeling moved in but now, kaput.
I don't think this thing was really ready for absolutely everyone on Twitter to bail onto it, is the problem. I don't think it was ever supposed to be. It was always supposed to be like a clubhouse for people who didn't mind being the dweebs of the internet.
Mastodon will never be a twitter replacement simply because of lack of algorithm and proper content discovery, but seemingly the devs and admins there are fine with it and prefer it that way. It is definitely not filling my need for curated news and discovery of new interests that twitter used to provide before it went to shit, seems like bluesky might take over that function since most big content creators are shilling their bs pages nowadays.
The lack of algorithms is what a lot of Mastodon users like about the platform. Many just want a timeline of posts of the accounts nd hashtags they follow.
There is also room for both to exist, one doesn't have to replace the other.
That's pretty much what I said, and I'm not saying its the wrong choice for them - it just means that Mastodon can never be the replacement for twitter, yet people keep bringing it up as an alternative. I personally want news that I care about and on mastodon it all gets buried in a chronological feed filled with irrelevant stuff I don't care about. I'd probably like it if it only consisted of close friends that I care about, so its like a tightly knit social network, but not when its randoms across the world with some very hot or annoying takes.
And I'd love an alternative but bluesky is gonna have the same issue as twitter, its owned by the same type of people and actually funded by twitter the company from what i read. It's just trading one devil for another.
Mastodon doesn't want to replace twitter. Twitter is shit. Mastodon is already far better than twitter. Mastodon depends on twitter continuing to exist so that twitter can suck up all the shit and leave the rest of us in peace.
If you were getting your news from Twitter, it probably turned you into an idiot already! So no worries.
For everyone on Twitter to bail onto it there would need to be an instance with the same level of funding and infrastructure as Twitter to support it.
Sounds just like Lemmy and any other fediverse service.
Good, isn't this what people want? Twitter to shut down? I've been hoping he just closes up shop and gets rid of it.
I'm starting to believe Elon never cared about twitter. He only bought the userbase and is doing whatever with it. That's sad. Twitter is just not what it once was.
The term soaring is pretty relative in this case. It's still completely unknown to the majority of the world. It's just like Lemmy, where the very few rigid types that absolutely couldn't stand for one particular thing that happened to their social network will do anything, including cutting their nose off to spite their face rather than continue to use it. That's why we're all here and it's why nobody else but us are coming.
Sadly true. As a nose cutter I will say that I have found the transition from Twitter to mastodon far more painless than Reddit to lemmy
Can you give more info on nose cutting? Haven’t heard the expression before.
Doing something you know will result in a negative(in our case here, losing a huge level of activity, participation, stability, etc).
Hey Elon! I hear there's this bigger, better Public Square that you should buy. I hear it needs more fascists to platform their hate...ahem, "free" speech in. It's called Reddit.
Someone in an unrelated discussion, wrote on LinkedIn that blackberry was profitable and grew for a few years after iPhone was anounced. The same for blockbuster after Netflix came to business. Then he was asking on what technologies today will be obsolete because an iPhone has emerged. For me lemmy or mastodon although slow but slowly will eat the competitors as they develop.
For me I am still reading Reddit since lots of information is there. But I am avoiding on participating there.
Good, Twitter is a disgrace to humanity
I don’t think I cared about Twitter, the entire duration of its existence, and now there’s a whole new thing that’s apparently the same and I still don’t care about
if there was (more) portuguese content in mastodon I'd move to it
Thank you Elon ❤️ 🤣🤣
my engagement rates on mastodon and bluesky have been significantly higher than twitter despite having 1/5 the number of followers
Small town big city syndrome, in a small community you can conceivably know, recognise or otherwise relate to a good proportion of the people in your town, and anyone you don't know you likely know people in common - but once a community gets big enough your brain can't deal with it and your neighbours become an abstract concept, background noise, rather than people.
I remember someone studied this real sociology. They watched people greeting each other in small towns and such and found that around the 1000 person mark people stopped greeting each other.
I've notice the same thing on hiking trails. If I only see a few people the whole day we not only greet each other but we may stop to chat. More people and you just say hi. A very popular trail though? You might get a nod.
This type of comment is evidence Lemmy has attracted all types of reddit users.
No fucking shit Sherlock.
just kidding asshole, hands in the air this is a sting!
I get 5 bot followers a month since Elon took over twitter
yeah besides bot followers I mean like likes and people replying and being cool
Does anyone have figures on subscription hikes to other fediverse systems? Mastodon is probably the best like-for-like switch for casual birdsite fans, but I wonder if there's also an emerging desire for something a little different.
Haven't used my twitter account in probably close to a decade or so but I still can't find a use for mastodon either.
That's my problem too. Weird Twitter just doesn't seem to be a thing on mastodon , or if it is the lack of an algorithm makes it hard to find the right kind of accounts to follow
Any android app recommendations? I'm yet to use Mastodon.
Only tried Tusky from F-droid store, no complaints.
Megalodon is definitely the one.
Use https://elk.zone as a PWA. It's really good!
It's a Twitter UI clone, perfect for replacing behaviors without being too jarring of a UX switch.
I use Tusky on android, I'm happy with it.
Official one, Tusky and for advanced users is Fedilab.
I also recommend elk.zone
moshidon
Anyone using tooot ??
Tusky, Fedilab
Megalodon or moshidon would be my recommendation
'Trunks' is a brand new one I'm liking an awful lot.
Edit: they have a web based front-end as well: https://trunks.social/
I use Tusky, and I like it. It's on F-Droid too
Megalodon is quite good.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
As Twitter ditches its iconic branding in favor of owner Elon Musk’s favorite letter “X,” its open source rival Mastodon is seeing usage numbers soar.
According to a new post from Mastodon founder and CEO Eugen Rochko, the number of monthly active users for his Twitter alternative has been steadily climbing over the past couple of months to have now reached 2.1 million — or, as remarked Rochko, “not far off from our last peak.”
Meta’s recently launched Twitter rival known as Instagram Threads has committed to integrating with ActivityPub, which may have raised awareness around Mastodon and decentralized social networking in general.
Musk claimed that Twitter needed to change the rate limits to deal with a significant increase in bots and spam.
Or perhaps, it’s a combination of both of these things and more, including the momentum created by the launches of polished third-party Mastodon clients that have made using the social network less complicated and more enjoyable.
Other Mastodon apps like Ice Cubes and the no-frills client Radiant have also debuted, while Mastodon’s official mobile app received a refresh of its own earlier this month, aimed at addressing various pain points and adding more customization options.
I'm a bot and I'm open source!
Soaring? 2.1M users is soaring? I'm all for the Fediverse, but it will never reach mainstream social media numbers, and honestly I hope it doesn't.
YouTuber Ctop is soaring!!!
I honestly hope the Fediverse does become the predominant medium through which online social discourse takes place. Probably not going to happen, but I can dream.
As long as no single instance dominates the entirety of the Fediverse, I think it could avoid many of the pitfalls of centralized social media platforms.
Threads is deliberately limiting its growth. Just this morning I saw a guy I know talk about how he really likes Threads despite the smaller number of users. He still doesn't have any invite codes to give out.
Circles made that mistake also.
How's bluechew or whatever, I still haven't gotten an invite
I root for Mastodon like everyone else but as long as there is some very good improvement in discoverability and intelligent feeds, it will never be the same in function as Twitter (not X, Twitter). Especially when it currently has a fraction of the creators Twitter had.
For real, I just want to open an app and scroll. I’m not going to put effort into reading funny microblog posts. It’s why tiktok is so successful, the app is really really good at delivering relevant content.
Discoverabily is like crack. It's what hooks you, and it's what drags you into hell.
These platforms always been here? So not really a down side to Elon here, gives users a taste of the wider internet?
Good.
Is there a need to have a lemmy and Mastodon?
Theoretically they're somewhat interoperable but if you plan on using both you'll probably have a better experience having an account on an instance of each service.
Yeah, I think that's what I'm gonna do. I wanna try it out, I haven't used any popular social network in years though.
From what I heard mastodon is formatted more like twitter whereas lemmy is more like reddit.
You could use only one, but browsing lemmy through mastodon (and vice versa) isn't a great experience, so its recommended to have an account on both.
If you want just one account to experience both, use kbin.
I'm gonna give that a try and see, before I spend time making an account. Thanks for the recommendation!
Only technically true. The two don't work super well together, Mastodon is a better frontend if you're looking for a microbloggingn experience.
How do you follow a mastodon account from lemmy?
My understanding is that isn't correct - in Lemmy you currently can follow Mastodon communities, but not users (following users on any fediverse platform including Lemmy itself just isn't a part of Lemmy yet). I believe it's planned to be implemented, but this is one thing differentiating Lemmy and Kbin - you can currently follow Mastodon users in Kbin, and in that case I think it's just the same way you'd follow another Kbin user. To find their user page it would just be kbin.social/u/[email protected] instead of kbin.social/u/user, so I assume it would be similar for Lemmy once implemented
How do you follow mastodon communities?
I think "communities" term is used on Mastodon in reference to what are "instances" on Lemmy. I'm talking about communities as they apply to Lemmy - in Mastodon I think they're generally called a "group" account. You subscribe to them in Lemmy mostly the same as how you'd subscribe to a Lemmy community on a different instance. e.g. go to your.lemmy.instance/c/[email protected] and subscribe. Or just search for the Mastodon group on the Lemmy communities page, making sure the filters are set to "All". To find a Mastodon user page is the same, just /u/ instead of /c/. You just can't follow or subscribe to the user pages because that's not currently a feature in Lemmy, but you can for groups/communities
Hmmm doesn't seem to work for me. Do you have a link in Lemmy to a mastodon group I can subscribe to, just to try it out?
Upon looking to this further I'm not sure if it actually works as I understood it to, due to the way group services are handled currently in Mastodon. Clearly there is some sort of flag in Activitypub on group accounts to indicate to other apps that it is a group account, because e.g. https://lemmy.ml/c/[email protected] works and you can follow it but the same link substituting /c/ for /u/ does not work. And for normal user accounts, the inverse is true.
However, aside from that flag, my understanding is they are essentially just user accounts that boost any posts from followers that mention the account handle, which causes the boosted post to show in the feed for all followers of the account. Since that account isn't actually posting the posts that it boosts, I guess it makes sense that activity wouldn't be visible in Lemmy, where boosts don't exist. Following this logic no posts would be displayed, and that's what is observed. Initially I thought this was because no one on the instance had followed the group yet, because e.g. https://lemmy.world/c/[email protected] does show posts while https://lemmy.ml/c/[email protected] does not. The same group on a.gup.pe also shows more posts on https://lemmy.ml/c/[email protected].
It's hard for me to make sense of what's going on here (especially as I don't microblog or use Mastodon personally) because clearly the Mastodon content is federating through the lemmy instance, but I've only been able to observe a subset of it and I haven't been able to figure out the parameters that have caused some posts to be visible in Lemmy but not others.
Nice
Still waiting for my friends to make the switch so I can delete this shite.
Or I might just delete it anyway and maybe they'll take notice and move. 😂
You can also ask yourself why you feel you should use Twitter because your friends are using it?
Not trying to offend or start shit, it's a genuine question.
And the award for the worst rebranding decision goes to Elon.
It won't last unless Mastadon gets some serious improvements. It's buggy, glitchy, feature-poor, and confusing to use. There's no way in its current state it's going to compete with the big guys for the average person's attention.
From a user-experience standpoint I'm intrigued by the idea of someone who is comfortable using Lemmy finding Mastodon confusing to use. From a technical view it's literally the same stuff (ActivityPub + a distributed network) fueling the same general concept (federated social media) just with a different skin on top (Twitter/Tweetdeck-flavored instead of Reddit-flavored.)
It's all just decentralized online community organized by interest; a /c/ here is a hashtag on Mastodon. If you have already come to terms with instances and federation and such in order to use one, what about the other still confuses? Is it just the interface or are there deeper pain points?
I've had no issues on Mastodon.World and the advance features are essentially tweetdeck.
I think also some people from certain generations are just confused by it. Don't want to deal with it.
Do you guys remember when I ordered that salad and when they brought it out, it was really really big.
yeah that was pretty cool.Really really big
Xport to
Twitter, Tumblr and Bluesky seem to fill the Twitter void for me fairly well, as I am mostly participating in the Furry and Sonic communities which are some of the first to move to these platforms.
IMO X is shorter, easier to say and cooler. I like it!
There's like 300 active users here. Just don't talk about piracy. Weaks
Is it any good?
It feels like the 2008-10 era twitter based on my experience. I didnt have anyone I knew on twitter either.
Sure they are xP