Every time I went to sign up for their site they required that I list my Twitter account. But, I’ve never had consistent interconnected social media profiles.
I think one of the things Musk has proven is that there was a fair amount of organizational dead weight in Twitter.
If he’d made some staffing cuts, paid less for ego offices, and done it all while shutting up and not being Apartheid Boy we’d be applauding his 4d chess.
The advertiser exodus is 100% a result of his policy changes and public persona. That’s just how it works, the advertisers don’t care about anything but brand awareness.
He changed policy, they left because that policy could be damaging to their brands.
But one of his policies was gutting the workforce, and despite all the dire predictions the platform has somehow still not exploded. There’s certainly a lot of reasons for that, and he’s been publicly embarrassed more than a few times, but if he’d gone in with a scalpel instead of a hatchet and not scared away the money and the tech it’s almost certain he could have made Twitter at least briefly profitable.
Twitter was losing money, but not by standards of potential and net valuation.
Put it like this.
In 2016, Twitter probably decided the US election. At the time, they had 3500 employees.
In 2021, they had 7500, and were losing less money.
Can you think of anything they did in that five year period that made you say, “Wow, that’s a good feature,” or “this community is amazing?”
Not really, right? It was the same Twitter, with double the workforce, doing not a whole lot with them.
This is what happens when an organization gets sufficiently large. And this is not necessarily a bad thing.
“Surplus” staff is very important when a new project comes and the organization needs to scale up. Instead of suddenly hiring a lot of people with no understanding of organization culture, the staff can be mobilized to work on new things without affecting existing project and structure.
There is a reason why governments around the world don’t suddenly fire their staff when it is apparent a lot of them are not working at max capacity. Redundancy is a kind of safety.
Not sure if it’s from an alternate universe or from our own future, but somewhere there is a version of this article that’s like “Today, the market for Mastodon alternatives is a crowded one to say the least. There are numerous services for consumers to try, including the open-source based Misskey, smaller startups like Pleroma, plus the Elon Musk-based product formerly known as Twitter.”
It was invite only, not open registration, so not surprising they didn’t have many users. Although Bluesky is the same and that seems to have loads. Hmm.
I had an account but literally used it for five seconds and then largely forgot about it.
I think it should take for someone to make a mastodon instance that just doesn’t boast about federation yet is federated for this to take off more. People say “join mastodon” or “join lemmy” but then you’re hit with a list of servers and you just give up. Contrary to something like “join talkfunhouse.com” which is actually a federated instance
Crazy to me that they'd shut down instead of going open source and integrating with the fediverse. Doesn't even seem like a good business move as offering hosting for other companies and professional groups seems like a good market opportunity in a world where businesses even dislike Twitter.
Edit: for example, offer gitlab like service but for social media.
Wouldn't even need to open source - they could have joined the fediverse as closed source, offering a platform to those people who are apparently scared away by anything with a permissive license.
Then again, these people are probably more eager to be on bluesky.
I think the whole step to integrate with the fediverse would have taken too much time and too many resources. Seems like a massive rewrite of the codebase to me, if it wasn’t taken into account from the very start.
I remember hearing about “Pebble” for the first time about a month ago when it showed up in an article in my “all” feed (pawb.social/post/2688668).
Its name before its rebrand was already questionable as I think T2 already has strong associations with the Terminator franchise; and its new name was not any better. “Pebble” is too generic a term to get people to understand the platform’s concept and in the tech space, I think everyone would think of the wearables first.
All this to say I am zero percent surprised they went out of business. I’m only surprised it happened so shortly after their rebrand (though at this point I’m starting to think that must have been some sort of Hail Mary).
Yep, I looked it up that day for the first time and haven’t heard about it again until now, when they’re kind enough to tell us to not even bother with it.
I actually think conceptually “Pebble” is a great name for a social media site if you lean into the “drop a pebble in a pond and it ripples outward = even the smallest person can reach a large group of people with their message.”
At least it MEANS something, unlike whatever “X” is supposed to represent (a name so bad, it’s STILL usually followed by “formerly Twitter” whenever it’s mentioned by anyone)
Following that concept, a platform called Ripple where individual posts are called Pebbles and responses/reshares are called Waves wouldn’t be half-bad, branding-wise.
I think the T2 was to insinuate that it was “Twitter 2”. I didn’t understand the rebrand, because, even though it’s been a few years, Pebble to me is still associated with the smart watch.
I actually signed up and used it a little, but I put up a funny post with a Corvette that had a wheel off sitting on wood blocks with the caption, “When Rednecks get Corvettes! 🤣” It was a stupid little joke, but my post was flagged as offensive and removed. At that point I made one more post explaining what had happened, and that I was going to be leaving the platform. I left the post up for a couple of weeks and then deleted my account. If that was considered offensive, my sarcastic self didn’t stand a chance on that platform.
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