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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
@GunnarRunnar If you look at local... ufff I helped people about 20-40 with posts like please use # if you don't use it people won't see your messages... so yeah they stumble and just drop. It's best time to find new people and have new friends!
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
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.
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?
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