As Twitter ditches its iconic branding in favor of owner Elon Musk’s favorite letter “X,” its open source competitor Mastodon is once again seeing usage numbers soar.
Is that why I’ve seen more people today wanting to bitch about politics in completely random threads?
i never got into twitter, and the longer this goes on, the more glad i am about that
I don’t like twitter nor Elon but why would someone leave a platform because they would change their name?
Elon has done more damage before so people who would consider leaving should be long gone.
Maybe because this new decision is so unbelievably idiotic either it is the last straw or maybe some people realize
twitterx is lost cause? Idk.You’re not wrong, but consider that people who justified sticking around for some reason or another might leave because the brand change (to a name that is so brain dead even a little offensive) finally hits home for them that it isn’t going to be the same.
A brand name change is about the single most overt thing you can do to send the message that a product isn’t going to be the same. And when that happens, people tend to look at the recent trends for that product to get an idea of what to expect. The recent trends for Twitter happen to be right-wing echo chamber.
So yeah, the people who were going to leave have largely already left. But this brand change is going to be effective at galvanizing those who remain.
Make sense.
You could make the argument that all his previous outrageous behaviors were desperate attempts to squeeze more money out of a business he didn’t understand. But this… this is unhinged. It’s so bafflingly pointless and dumb it’s become clear that what was once a reliable dopamine delivery system could, without warning or reason, just… disappear one day. Even the people who rely on Twitter like addicts are starting to come up with exit strategies.
I’d argue as well that all the past dumb decisions, (Twitter Blue, anybody being able to name themselves anything they want, bugs everywhere, not being able to see anything without an account), all of that was just stuff you only had to passively bear. Now, it’s a brand change that will at least have you typing something different into Google to reach “X,” but it is still an active change you have to make.
If I had a Twitter account that was connected to my business, already had a whole bunch of followers, and was somewhat addicted to Twitter, I could understand having a hard time leaving. At the very least inertia would be a good enough reason for people to stay. But switching the brand recognition?
- First off, you’ve disrupted the Twitter addictions of everyone on the site, because you’d have to know that blue bird logo is associated with a lot of people’s dopamine responses
- Second off, now that people are already being forced to make a change, there’s less opportunity cost to jump ship to elsewhere
I don’t like twitter nor Elon but why would someone leave a platform because they would change their name?
Twitter has been around for so long, many are attached to it on an emotional level. It’s older than my eldest niece; she’s known about it since she could memorize the damn word.
So as dumb as it is that THIS is what pushes people to leave, I’m glad more are leaving regardless.
It’s a “final straw” situation. No individual straw broke the back of the proverbial camel. One straw after another was placed atop it until finally the back broke. It’s not the final straw that broke said back, but the load of all the straws including the final that did it.
So they’re not necessarily quitting because of the name change. They’re quitting because of everything else plus the name change. That was the thing that pushed the go/no-go decision into “go”.
Addiction it is. They think they are advocating for health and social justice. But they’re not. They’re just addicted to Twitter/X. I mean… it’s owned by someone who pays fascists to post on there, but they are still there? WTAF?
So the rebrand comes with X promising to be an app to replace everything?
X gonna give it to ya, X gonna deliver it to ya.
Well, it sure sounds like X is delivering users to Mastodon.
It sounds like he’s trying to copy zombo.com (listen to the audio for at least 30 seconds to a minute - the animation is a little broken by now)
Plot twist, Elon is a Mastodon marketer
He wants something like WeChat that does everything.
He does know that Wechat is the everything app because of the authoritarian government, right…right?
I think he knows well how it works.
Less than 1% of twitter users signed up to pay for twitter blue. And less than 1% of twitter users are going to do their banking through a social media site run by a megalomaniac. This is doomed to failure, just like it was 20 years ago.
As painful as it might be for him, this dude really needs to let go of his obsession with the letter X.
Source it was 1%?
That’s going to be challenging. The latest metrics show that only 0.2 percent of Twitter users are paying for Twitter Blue. Twitter Blue did have an estimated 116,000 confirmed signups on the web in March, up 138 percent from the month before, according to Similarweb. Still, that’s not nearly enough to make up for the lost money in advertising dollars.
https://www.vox.com/technology/2023/4/15/23683554/twitter-dying-elon-musk-x-company
This is probably a stupid question, but for those of you that use Mastodon — how did you find people to follow?
I tried it out a few months ago but I didn’t like the few accounts they recommended, and searching for users or keywords didn’t get me too far either…
It helps if you can find a half-dozen people involved in something you like to follow at the start. Other than that, try joining a mid-sized (~1,000-3,000 users) Mastodon server based around a hobby, interest, or social group you’re a part of. Most Mastodon clients allow you to keep a column open for the people you follow as well as the people on the “Local Timeline” who are a part of your server.
It’s a new social network. If you see someone pop up who’s made a pithy post or two, give 'em a follow. If they’re not working out a week later, un-follow them. Don’t feel afraid to follow a ton of people when you first get started to liven up your feed until you find a good circle of folks.
how did you find people to follow?
Find tags that you like; follow the tags.
Eventually you’ll find people posting in those tags that you end up liking; follow them.
And repeat. =)
There is an account called Fedi Follows on Mastodon that shares accounts according to their topics. Hope it helps.
Thank you, that looks like a great place to start!
That’s kind of the problem I think. I was able to find like 2 people there I want to follow. Lemmy is going to be far more successful at displacing its alternative because all the communities you’d want to subscribe to are here.
I wrote since stuff to help new Mastodon users: https://babylon4.com/mastodon
What I did in the very beginning:
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don’t worry about the instance that you are on. My server is quite generic and is meant to be a simple entrypoint to the fediverse, not a “community in itself”.
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Go to the mastodon directory to find the list of servers based on interests. fosstodon is one for FOSS enthusiasts, beekeeping is for those interesting in gardening, mountains.social is for those that like hiking, etc. The important thing here is to find servers that are not huge, but that have an active userbase.
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Now, the real trick: for all these servers you found that could be interesting, you go browse at the federated timeline. This will give not only the activity from people in the server, but you will also see what they are following, boosting, etc. To me this was a way to find not just interesting people, but who the interesting people are following as well.
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Be very generous when browsing these timelines, and follow as many as you can possibly can. During the first week, try to add 50 a day.
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Follow hashtags. This will also make your timeline more lively and will bring different people who might be interesting to you.
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Write an intro post, and pin it to your profile. Usually pinned profiles are always visible between servers, so it will make it easy for people to interact with you.
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(Somewhat controversial, but I do it) If you have people that you like to follow on Twitter, follow them on Mastodon as well via a BirdSite mirror. You won’t be able to do it from the larger instances, but if you join a more chill instance (like mine ;)) it should be fine.
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Evangelize: if you have friends on Twitter, ask them to join as well. Most Mastodon servers have a way to let you send invites to others.
When you start getting the feeling that you are getting overwhelmed, it’s the time to cull down the list. Feel free to unfollow any person or hashtag that you think is too noisy or not really interesting.
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I mainly used it for news till the rate limiting but i just followed news sources and have since found users to follow.
You need to follow hashtags but primary groups. You will find groups boosting toots about your topics. It’s the first accounts to follow then you will find others.
It’s not that hard. People have to keep in mind, it’s not Twitter and so it works differently.
boosting toots
I don’t think they call it TOOTS anymore.
I’m a grandpa of mastodon.
Toots despite the proximity with tweet is good for the community aspect.
I used a site that let’s you follow the same accounts on Masto as you did on Twitter.
I joined up before you could subscribe to hashtags, so my approach was:
- Read my local instance feed and click on content that interested me.
- Checked the users that made the interesting content to see if they had more.
- If they did, followed.
Nowadays I would add this step:
- Subscribe to hashtags on topics I’m interested in and follow people who regularly contribute good material to them.
are there any frontend webapps like wefwef/voyager?
I don’t want to rain on your parade but I’ll do it anyway: The numbers of active posts and members in Lemmy communities, even in the most active ones, are mindbogglingly low in comparison with Reddit, even in comparison to somethingawful what I still consider the dirty cousin of Reddit.
All the numbers are just two sizes lower than Reddit and then there is the atrocious web interface. I have stopped counting how often my posts got eaten, the reply button didn’t react and general stuff didn’t work at all.
we willget there eventually.
you can’t compare a product that is decades old wuth something that’s fairly new.
Apparently this is all part of some grand master plan. Maybe Elon will pull it off???
I can’t fathom that anybody could be this stupid. Does he have a reason to purposely destroy Twitter?
The decisions he’s making aren’t just bad, they’re the worst possible ones that he could make. As in, he gathered a group of experts and these are the best ways to destroy Twitter that they could think up.
Some people are suggesting he ran up so much debt buying Twitter that he’s now running it into the ground in order to declare bankruptcy and not have to repay the debt. I don’t know how plausible this is.
I wonder if that would be taken to court if true.
I imagine it would be hard to prove, because he would never admit it was intentional, and he’d never have to tell anyone else that in order to execute the plan. It can look like a series of blunders either way.
Totally could be pulling a Sears/Kmart and an Eddie lampert.
Lol
ain’t no way
His master plan sure does seem massively reactionary for a master plan
name a single grand master plan that elon has ever pulled off
Weren’t all his companies successful in the end?
The companies he took over after they were were founded?
Okay? Taking over a company, growing it, and then selling for huge profit is still good business sense.
He’s a douchebag and takes too much credit for the engineering that has made them successfull, but SpaceX has delivered some next-level rockets and Tesla has been very successful creating a new market niche and selling a ton of cars
Financial suicide?
Still waiting for Teslas driving from west to east coast completely autonomously. And Elon flying to mars.
Anyone recommend a good iPhone app for Mastodon?
I use Tusker and it’s been great so far. More features than the official app, and it’s pretty stable too.
I’ve been using ivory, it’s nice
Gonna go against the grain here and just recommend the default Mastadon app. It’s simple and gets the job done with no Bells and whistles. Not sure there’s much missing
Yeah I’m also on the default and not sure what other apps have going for them that make them better
Ivory is the iOS app I use and absolutely enjoy.
Ivory is my favorite as long as you don’t mind supporting the developers. But a close second place for me is Ice Cubes.
I second Ice Cubes. I would recommend Mammoth as well, but feed loading can be super slow.
The official app loads super fast, but way too many limitations IMHO.
Ice Cubes is great for me, beautiful UI and cute sound effects
I personally like Mona.
That’s exactly it. I saw a lot of people on Twitter today saying they’re only staying the fallout. It’s dumb, and yes, I’m part of the problem, though I’m staying only to update some connections on where I’m going.
Those same people have “only been staying for the fallout” since musk bought it, still tweeting away dozens of times a day. They’re the same people that said they’d leave Reddit on July 1 yet are still there.
Completely agree. I think people are so engrained that they just don’t want to try something else.
Yay, another week of higher than normal activity, until the fomo kicks back in and they leave yet again cause “everyone is on X/this is sooo complicated/I just wanna see the fallout/whatever excuse justifies their addiction”
Every time that happens the fedi retains a good chunk of users. There’s significant and stable growth throughout.
Ya that’s what happened with me, I deleted my account once Musk took over and started a Mastodon account and now I’m on Lemmy too and haven’t looked back at either platforms
Why aren’t posts on mastodon called “toots”?
TL;DR: The lead dev is German and had no idea at the time that toot was American slang for farting, he thought it was just an elephant/mastodon noise.
They were called toots and they fucking got rid of it? How uncreative can you be!?
People still use it all the time, often ironically.
I’ll say that, fart jokes aside, I like just saying “posts” for everything because at this point, and in an interconnected set of networks where we’re all using multiple services I’ve frankly outgrown the need to brand each bit of text I spew onto the Internet. It’s the same reason I say “I’ll text you” instead of “I’ll whatsapp you” or whatever.
we can keep calling them toots
I vote for calling them twats instead
This is just another of Elon’s stunt to increase traffic to Twitter.
Or is he flushing Twitter down the Xitter?
In B4 Musk tweets this
A more appropriate rebranding would be ‘L’.
