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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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
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.
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.
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. www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-d&q=twitte…
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
Yup Twitter was for following people and Reddit was for following topics. Lemmy with all the new users is pretty much viable for big topics now but Mastodon doesn’t magically have all the people I want to follow just because it’s a better format.
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.
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
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
There is a sports instance of Lemmy, I don’t remember what it’s called though. I think I saw the red devils community (name could be wrong, I don’t watch sports) drop a post about moving to the instance.
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.
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.
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 remember when facebook changed its looks to mimic twitter (the whole newsfeed launch was part of that.) I can’t believe it. After 10+ years, fucking facebook might actually dethrone twitter.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
They don’t. This story is a nothing burger. Mastodon user count has actually gown down by ~400,000.
The author attempts to justify their opinion with the logical fallacy: correlation equals causation. But they only consider the times when the correlation is in their benefit. When user count goes down, the author ignores it.
For perspective, Threads user count also went down: to 13 million users. 10x more than Mastodon.
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.
Don’t underestimate the value of a brand. One of the most common reasons people stick around even after negative change is because it still feels familiar and safe.
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?”
Even when Facebook reformed into Meta and Google reformed into Alphabet, they still kept the old brands, to the point where people still call Alphabet “Google” more often than not. Other companies, when they want to get rid of a brand, will slowly phase it out. An ISP like Charter becomes Charter Spectrum, then over time just become Spectrum.
Dropping a brand overnight like a hot potato upsets the customer because brand identity is (tragically) huge in the modern day.
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!"
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
Inefficient how? I don’t use twitter, I never liked twitter being mentioned in the actual news (“a user twitted this, another use twitted that, etc”), but what’s more efficient than opening that stupid app and getting content from people who are in the area where the news is happening?
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.
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