People keep saying this as if the only "success" mastadon can have is by being in everyone's pocket. It's not an SV unicorn startup, it's not trying to buy out some investors. It's doing exactly what it is designed to do: be a user owned platform. Not everyone will want that all the time, and some people will never want that, and that's fine, not everyone spent 24/7 on the forums of the old web either.

We could stop considering "Everyone is using it all the time" as the desired end goal maybe?

My view too. Not the best service ever offered, but allows me to continue distancing myself from Twitter.

Would I much prefer it if Twitter was a public company and/or ran by anyone else? Sure, but that isn't happening, so, I'll take Mastodon and any other reasonable alternative. We'll see how the market pans out.

An aspect of me wants Mastodon to win... but there's a deep cynicism in it ever working at Twitter scale (which may be the point, in the end).

> Mr Zuckerberg [...] described the situation as "normal" and said he anticipated retention to improve as new features were added to the app.

I think if it was normal, they wouldn't have publicly spiked the football after the admittedly incredible signup numbers. They would have been a bit more humble, said they expected most users to leave soon after, but that this is an encouraging sign (or something to that effect). Maybe a bit more celebratory, but playing with expectations a bit more. They started off with INCREDIBLY humble talking points about likelihood of failure and then I think just got too excited.

None of this is to suggest they have no chance. They still have a ton of users and I'd still consider the launch a success overall.

I have yet to see a single Threads post get linked anywhere -- not here, not Reddit, not even from Facebook.

(Edit: Or at least, I'm too ignorant to realize what such a post would look like, in which case, branding fail.)

https://www.threads.net/@carnage4life/post/CvPrxHdr4Y2/?igsh...

Since the recent changes, on Twitter you can't see replies if you're linked to a tweet while not logged in, and you don't even have any indicator that replies exist and that you could see them with an account. The whole implementation of the changes in that area is a real baffler.

Seriously dude. It takes more effort to break the web than just use it.

I stand corrected on other Meta properties linking it, but, of course, they have to get links outside of that sphere to compete with Twitter on mindshare.

I don't think they are doing very bad considering it's mobile only right now.

I mean, didn't they: 1. Leverage their IG user base to get a lot of early sign-ups and then... 2. Use those early sign-ups to hype up the platform?

They got exactly what they wanted, which was a lot of articles about how fast Threads was growing.

They probably knew all along that most of those early sign-ups weren't going turn into active users.

"Less than half" is significant, particularly when the CEO (to his credit) is calling it out as something that must improve. And it matters to balance the existing narrative from the Verge, which seems to just regurgitate Meta's VP's language about it being a runaway success.

Alright, forget the number. Let's focus on active users versus signups and how it's being reported for Threads.

I mean, we should? Startup valuations are full of MAU pumping and straight bullshit, so why shouldn't we judge their numbers with a cynical eye? Meta claimed a number of users the first few days, well, half of them aren't using it anymore, so they aren't "Users"

<https://www.fastcompany.com/1837332/exclusive-new-google-stu...>

<https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3977050>

The study in question is, to my surprise, still available directly online: <https://blog.rjmetrics.com/2012/05/15/new-google-plus-data-s...>

There are another 14 HN submissions matching "Google+ ghost town" at this writing: <https://hn.algolia.com/?q=google%2B%20ghost%20town>

I did my own assessment of G+ later, after there was much discussion of Google's own "engagement" numbers for the platform meeting open skepticism. (I used the platform heavily myself and appreciated elements of it.)

I think we're seeing more and deserved skepticism generally in accepting statements of activity at face value, which is a Good Thing in my view.

This was nearly a year after G+ launched. The article in question here is about three weeks after the launch of threads. That doesn't seem like a fair comparison to me...

The "ghost town" label had been stuck on G+ within the first few weeks, yes.

HN discussion from September 2011 (G+ launched in July):

<https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3019699>

Numerous HN takes in comments from June -- September 2011: <https://hn.algolia.com/?dateEnd=1316822400&dateRange=custom&...>

And, FWIW, at the time I was contesting the characterisation of G+. I distinctly recall the discussions and press coverage, however.

I've given multiple examples of just such a comparison being made over a decade ago.

In both cases, the new launch was by an existing giant in the sector, with claimed performance being not entirely credible.

Google of a decade ago had launched Orkut, Friendster, Wayze, Reader, and YouTube. Several of those were modest hits, one remains a giant (YT), and one is much missed by its small but quite significant fan base (Reader).

The Social space is immensely fickle, and the ability of even an established industry giant to succeed with a new venture is fairly thin. Facebook has largely bought rather than made its own follow-on successes to date (as did Google in buying YouTube).

Google didn't "launch" youtube. They purchased it. It was big before they purchased it. Regarding Reader, calling something "small but quite significant" is nonsensical. Additionally you're propping up a failed application which wasn't even a social network as a success.

As I said, your comparisons included far too much conflation of several varieties for me to take them seriously.

We have now:

- Long standing critical takes on new social media launches and claimed performance.

- Google as "running ... successful social networks".

You're litigating pedantry in a counterfactual manner. It's tedious.

I've shown this twice, which is sufficient for my tastes.

No need to continue your experience of tedium then, I'm not particularly interested in such loose arguing either.

The idea that forgetting that Google failed horribly with Google Video before buying YouTube is a "smell" of bad faith is weird.

It's often easier to search within a specific timeframe on Hacker News itself given Algolia search's excellent date-range functions, and the fact that HN itself is strongly time-oriented. There are doubtless other stories elsewhere, but it would be more tedious to track those down and verify that they actually came from the period under consideration.

It's also possible to search via comments, with one useful set of terms being "Google+" and "ghost town", an assessment which was being thrown about early on.

And we can link directly to the HN threads and see what contemporaneous discussions were like and how they characterised the issue at the time.

By contrast, date-ranged General Web Search on, say, DuckDuckGo or Google is often confounded by Web pages which have inaccurate date indicia, or have been misclassified as to time by search engines. It's much more tedious to try to find specific content matching time criteria, though the universe of total such articles is obviously larger. Fortunately for this case, Google+ was of sufficient interest to HN that there were numerous submissions concerning it submitted early on, many of course highly syncophantic, but also concerning the rather fumbling rollout and weak adoption.

Amongst other possible archives, Google+ itself is no longer extant, and so cannot be searched. Its own search features did not afford date-ranged search, though I'm well aware that there was much early hand-wringing over the "brutally unfair" stories (in the framing of G+ advocates) circulating at the time.

Reddit might be another useful trove, though I'm avoiding that for the time being. Search there is limited to only the initial story title and, in a limited number of cases, the "self-text" content of text-based posts. Pointedly, comments aren't searchable on Reddit itself, and so the potential match space is far more constrained than it is on Hacker News.

Despite those limitations, in answering your own historically uninformed vague hand wave that the response to Facebook's Threads launch is exceptional, I'd given numerous specific and quantified examples from a roughly comparable time period for Google's G+ launch strongly suggesting otherwise.

Yes, the data I brought to bear are subject to a strong availability heuristic. But the evidence presented is rather stronger than your own none-at-all offerings.

Cheers.

>But the evidence presented is rather stronger than your own none-at-all offerings.

Are you seriously asking me to prove a negative? I'm saying the article doesn't exist. From someone who had the gall to suggest I was being tedious, to writing this? Please for your own sake, stop and spend your time elsewhere.

As Facebook did with Instagram and Whatsapp.

And with the facebook.com domain name, Parakey, ConnectU, FriendFeed, Octazen, Divvyshot, Friendster patents, ShareGrove, Zenbe, Nextstop, Chai Labs, Hot Potato, Drop.io, FB.com domain name, Rel8tion, Beluga, Snaptu, RecRec, DayTum, Sofa, MailRank, Push Pop Press, Friend.ly, Strobe, Gowalla, Caffeinatedmind, Instagram, Tagtile, Glancee, Lightbox.com, Karma, Face.com, Spool, Acrylic Software, Threadsy, Atlas Solutions, osmeta, Storylane (Mixtent), Hot Studio, Spaceport, Parse, Monoidics, Jibbigo, Onavo, SportStream, Little Eye Labs, Branch, WhatsApp, Oculus VR, Ascenta, Salorix, ProtoGeo Oy, PrivateCore, LiveRail, WaveGroup Sound, Wit.ai, Quickfire Networks, TheFind, Inc., Surreal Vision, Endaga, Pebbles, MSQRD (Masquerade), Two Big Ears, Nascent Objects, Infiniled, CrowdTangle, Faciometrics, Zurich Eye, Ozlo, Fayteq AG, tbh, Confirm, Bloomsbury AI, Redkix, Vidpresso, Dreambit, Chainspace, GrokStyle, Servicefriend, CTRL-labs, Packagd, Beat Games, PlayGiga, Sanzaru Games, Scape Technologies, Giphy, Mapillary, Ready at Dawn, Lemnis Technologies, Kustomer, Downpour Interactive, Unit 2 Games, BigBox VR, AI.Reverie, Within, Twisted Pixel Games, Presize, Lofelt, Armature Studio, and Camouflaj.

<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_mergers_and_acquisitio...>

Neither Google nor Facebook are distinctive within the tech sector in aequiring large numbers of other firms.

The puff piece in the WSJ combined with the all the positive press over the success of Threads, with now a quite rosy view of how it has played out since. I'm personally not a believer that they internally think Threads is a success, but to each their own. I constantly hear from my engineering co-workers about how much Twitter has changed and how the sky is falling, but the user numbers don't back that up and my user experience seems to be much the same.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/zuckerberg-channeled-og-mark-to...

Really? A bunch of engineering types who work for big corporations and who also dream and or do start their own hopefully big corporations prides themselves as being "counter-cultural?" That seems like a tough generalization to support.

I think people assume that because Musk is highly successful that he is a normal person, worthy of being judged by such a standard. From the outside nothing seems normal about him to me. He is almost certainly on the spectrum, yet fairly highly functional.

I attribute half of the hatred for him not because of his behavior, but because of the general anger towards the billionaire class.

I think the sharp divide in perception of him shows that polarization within America has reached unhealthy levels. I won't invoke the terms used to describe people believed to be pro or anti Musk here, but I think most know them. I wish we could get to a point where we discuss less about people and more about their individual actions.

Business Insider in particular likes to publish articles that are either outright shameless puff pieces or occasionally contain thinly veiled attempts at spinning things in his favor.

Some examples:

https://www.businessinsider.com/elon-musk-new-logo-x-twitter...

https://www.businessinsider.com/elon-musk-twitter-x-rebrand-...

https://www.businessinsider.com/facebook-asana-dustin-moskov...

And here’s a Newsweek one:

https://www.newsweek.com/twitter-has-undeniably-gotten-bette...

As for the disliking or hatred towards him, I’m not sure why this puzzles you.

He is simply an unlikable person, doing unlikable things.

Yeah sure it doesn’t help that he’s wealthy in this time and age and it also doesn’t help that he’s attributed accomplishments of mythical proportions that are mostly veneer, nor does it help that he seemingly has taken it upon himself to disprove the business acumen that people attribute to him, but all of those are just cherries on top.

Certainly not half the reason people dislike him.

Gates, Zuckerberg and Bezos are in the same order of magnitude as Musk (at least from the perspective of most people) and don’t nearly get as much hate, because they don’t act like utter tools at every single chance they get.

That’s it, that’s the reason. It’s not rocket science.

Which is why it’s weird that you seem to yearn for a time where people will judge him on his individual actions, when they already do so.

You are correct in that this was unavoidable because the original number was artificially inflated in a non-sustainable way. But well, that would be a huge red flag for a startup too. It is less so for a giant company like Meta, as they can eat the loss from forcing the market, but it is still ridiculous, even for a company as large as Meta.

There's often an early "tyre kicker" phase, with people signing up to explore a service. Or to ensure that others don't misappropriate well-known account handles.

User attrition / retention rates for sites, services, and apps are well-studied and closely watched.

E.g., "Retention rate on day 30 of mobile app installs worldwide in 3rd quarter 2022, by category"

<https://www.statista.com/statistics/259329/ios-and-android-a...>

General social media growth (or plateau) trends as of 2021 / Pew:

<https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/2021/04/07/social-media...>

The highest retention rate listed is 11.3%, for the news category.

As an example, Facebook (the site, distinguished from other aquisitions) has seen stagnant or falling usage in certain markets, notably the US and EU, as of about 5--6 years ago:

<https://www.theverge.com/2018/1/31/16956818/facebook-q4-2017...>

<http://www.businessinsider.sg/facebook-hits-wall-usage-falls...>

What part of my comment exactly is wrong?

Facebook is one case, and is still the largest (or among: TikTok and a few newer entrants may be giving it a run for its money).

But if you want to look at multiple platforms over time, it helps to ... well, consider other cases.

I've been something of a purveyor of niche and smaller social networks, from the beginning (Usenet). What I've observed of these is that even among those which continue for a considerable period as a viable option there is the tyre-kicker uptake, a fade back, and then ... several possible trajectories. One of those is straight to the floor, but another is to have either a steady base or a longer and slower growth.

Sure, both of those are death for a venture-backed site or service. But if that's not the foundation, then steady-state or long-steady-growth is a viable option.

And I've seen the pattern:

- On Google+: there was an initial excitement, then the site got stale (2011--2013 or so), then I (and from what I can tell, others) came back. The forced integration with YouTube annoyed a lot of people (on G+, on YouTube, and of course, Not On Either). After about 2015 things seemed to go into a long slow fade, which turned into a race for the exits after the planned shutdown was announced in 2018.

- On Diasapora*: Similar pattern, though I'd participated early on (2011-ish), after leaving G+ for a spell (around 2013--14), and then returned to the site with the G+ shutdown announcement. Some long-standing gripes and personal hardware failures had me lose interest about a year ago, though there quite honestly still is a good community there.

- Ello: It was (somewhat poisonously) plastered with the "Facebook Killer" label in 2015, and saw a few periods of excitement buzz. The site remained small (a few hundred thousand MAU, low millions of total accounts, by my own guess, verified in person with Ello staff), but had a vibrant community. The killer was sale of the site to a VC with the original staff gagged as part of the agreement. Various protections (B-Corp organisation and highly member-friendly policies) seemed to disappear at that point, and most of the small crowd I'd followed there drifted elsewhere.

- Mastodon: I'd joined in 2016/7, participated a bit, faded off, then came back. After HN it's my most active online presence. Mastodon's long-term growth has shown numerous large-influx phases where a significant influx of new members arrive, some of whom remain active. The trend is episodic but positive.

- Tildes.net: Launched by an ex-Reddit staffer, deimos, the site's been ticking along as an invite-only beta since 2016. I've given more invites in the past three months than the previous seven years, so far as I can recall. As with other sites, it seems to gain and lose activity on phases, though overall seems to be growing.

- Imzy: An ill-fated venture which followed the "crater rapidly" phase. It remains the most socially-dysfunctional online network I've ever participated in directly, strongly at odds with its "kinder, gentler Reddit" labeling.

- Hacker News: The site has seen a long steady slow growth since opening to the public in 2007. I've been studying front-page activity for the past few months, one element of which is looking at total activity (votes and comments) on those front-page stories and how that's changed over time. It's an interesting dataset as there are a fixed number of items per year (10,950, 10,980 in a leap year, based on 30 per day), but as participation increases we'll see more activity on the page, and metrics such as distinct sites and distinct submitters can vary. Votes per story have actually held relatively constant for 2020--2022 (most recent full years), comment activity continues to rise, see below. According to dang, MAUs have held steady at about 5 million for years, as have other indicia of site activity (<https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36146958> <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18150721> <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33454140>).

Hacker News isn't dying. Sites such as Metafilter remain not only reasonably vital (in terms of on-site activity), but have high quality discussion, as opposed to the plunge to the bottom of Reddit and Twitter. Diaspora* ... continues to tick along. Mastodon and the Fediverse are growing fairly rapidly (particularly for a non-venture-funded platform). Ello succeeded ... for a while. Google+ made it to just shy of the 8-year mark, and for much of that time did have quality discussions and engagements in my experience. Sometimes small scale is a virtue.

HN runs on a single server and with a single public moderator. I suspect it's pressing the edge of viability with both, but the results are ... pretty good.

As with another thread I'd participated in yesterday, one challenge is that there aren't a whole lot of major social network initiatives, most especially not by existing major players. Facebook's Threads is the first sui generis effort by that company since its original The Harvard Facebook launch (all others have been acquisitions). Last year's Bluesky launch by ex-Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey was the first significant new launch in years. The most recent major launch by an established company before that, so far as I'm aware, was Google+ itself. There've been other social media efforts, obviously, but most of those were not by an incumbent major player in the field, and were instead new ventures.

Checking myself, HN search lists 677 results for "new social network": <https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...>

Among prominent mentions, with "name" (affiliation) YYYY:

- Google+ itself (Google) 2011

- "Hello" (Orkut) 2018

- "Friended" (?) 2019

- "Slyde" (?) 2020

- "So.cl" (Microsoft) (2012)

- "Inside.com" (Jason Calacanis) 2022

- "WT.social" (Jimmy Wales) (2021)

- Entries named or by: Hipstamatic, Frontpile, and Coccoon, on the first results page.

- LinkedIn, Skype, Pinterest, WeWork, and Slack are all mentioned.

Overall, though, I'd say my characterisation is accurate: there aren't many new large entrants, especially not by incumbents, and those that do emerge tend to see a rapid initial "testing the waters" bump, followed by some subsequent trajectory either up or down.

On Hacker News front-page story activity 2007--2022:

  Year  Stories     Points (   mean )  Comments (   mean )  Sites  Submitters
  ----  -------     ------ ---------   -------- ---------   -----  ----------
  2007     9382      92264 (   9.83 )     61207 (   6.52 )   2644        1163
  2008    10980     294775 (  26.85 )    186339 (  16.97 )   3458        2021
  2009    10950     608603 (  55.58 )    303962 (  27.76 )   4157        3017
  2010    10950    1062763 (  97.06 )    491718 (  44.91 )   4397        3987
  2011    10949    1657004 ( 151.34 )    632724 (  57.79 )   4830        4889
  2012    10980    1829402 ( 166.61 )    778634 (  70.91 )   5047        5537
  2013    10950    2132819 ( 194.78 )    998387 (  91.18 )   5250        5975
  2014    10905    2057628 ( 188.69 )    916438 (  84.04 )   5338        5920
  2015    10950    2001269 ( 182.76 )    845719 (  77.23 )   5301        5313
  2016    10977    2521394 ( 229.70 )   1137575 ( 103.63 )   5238        5341
  2017    10950    2776064 ( 253.52 )   1259899 ( 115.06 )   5236        5274
  2018    10950    2762928 ( 252.32 )   1262654 ( 115.31 )   4986        5038
  2019    10950    3051011 ( 278.63 )   1447141 ( 132.16 )   5302        5123
  2020    10980    3338150 ( 304.02 )   1734703 ( 157.99 )   5938        5564
  2021    10950    3376829 ( 308.39 )   1859933 ( 169.86 )   6178        5339
  2022    10950    3308025 ( 302.10 )   1986265 ( 181.39 )   6446        5443

Per HN's "flamewar" metric (or what I prefer to call "spiciness"), that would suggest that spice has increased especially 2020--2022, that is, the ratio of comments to votes is up. HN views that as a possible sign of discord, though it could be more interest in discussion.

  Year  Stories     Points (   mean )  Comments (   mean )  Sites  Submitters    Spice
  ----  -------     ------ ---------   -------- ---------   -----  ----------   ------
  2007     9382      92264 (   9.83 )     61207 (   6.52 )   2644        1163   66.339
  2008    10980     294775 (  26.85 )    186339 (  16.97 )   3458        2021   63.214
  2009    10950     608603 (  55.58 )    303962 (  27.76 )   4157        3017   49.944
  2010    10950    1062763 (  97.06 )    491718 (  44.91 )   4397        3987   46.268
  2011    10949    1657004 ( 151.34 )    632724 (  57.79 )   4830        4889   38.185
  2012    10980    1829402 ( 166.61 )    778634 (  70.91 )   5047        5537   42.562
  2013    10950    2132819 ( 194.78 )    998387 (  91.18 )   5250        5975   46.811
  2014    10905    2057628 ( 188.69 )    916438 (  84.04 )   5338        5920   44.539
  2015    10950    2001269 ( 182.76 )    845719 (  77.23 )   5301        5313   42.259
  2016    10977    2521394 ( 229.70 )   1137575 ( 103.63 )   5238        5341   45.117
  2017    10950    2776064 ( 253.52 )   1259899 ( 115.06 )   5236        5274   45.384
  2018    10950    2762928 ( 252.32 )   1262654 ( 115.31 )   4986        5038   45.700
  2019    10950    3051011 ( 278.63 )   1447141 ( 132.16 )   5302        5123   47.432
  2020    10980    3338150 ( 304.02 )   1734703 ( 157.99 )   5938        5564   51.966
  2021    10950    3376829 ( 308.39 )   1859933 ( 169.86 )   6178        5339   55.079
  2022    10950    3308025 ( 302.10 )   1986265 ( 181.39 )   6446        5443   60.044

For those who think discussion's getting more heated, there's some evidence of that.

Note that HN's "flamewar detector" is triggered for comments > 40 and comments/votes > 1 (or 100 as I calculate it above), best as I understand.

I haven't used Threads, but it's 2023. People have years of experience and expectations using social media, also probably shorter attention spans. I'm fairly sure that an launch ready MVP in 2023 should be WAY more feature full than 5-10 years ago.

I know there are other factors at play here as well regarding retention, but I don't think one can easily recover from a highly popular lauch with uncompetitive features.

That was probably a wise decision to seed it with something for people to look at and interact with so they didn't just sign in and see a blank page. The random influencers and other people "go away" pretty quickly if you start following and interacting with people you care more about.

And even without that, the influencers mostly went away for me when I followed people I found more interesting.

And marketers. Remember: marketers ruin everything. They early adopt every up-and-coming platform and fill it with grifty posts.

Hell, it required an Instagram account to sign up. You already have their follow graph.

First, Mastodon was going to be the new place. It wasn't.

Then Threads came along and again everyone said it would be the death knell for Twitter. It wasn't.

My takeaway would be quite the opposite. While everything that comes along might show promise at the start, people quickly revert back to their familiar network that they know and like (regardless of how much they claim not to).

It peaked in November and then went into decline. As people leave, the value of the network goes down so even more people leave.

Musk's antics might prop it up every once in a while but the long term trend doesn't look good. My prediction is in a couple of years time, the only remaining users will be the most avid hardcore fans.

I, and many Fediverse people, are on the Fedi explicitly hoping it isn’t in that list. Mastodon is a success to me because of the thousands of people on it and that I interact with, and that it is precisely not containing the masses.

So many people think we need another Reddit and Twitter. Many of us however are looking for exactly something not Reddit or Twitter.

Mastodon and Lemmy/etc are a smash success to me. They have more traffic, users and activity than the other comparable options combined (citation needed). And most importantly, they did it without becoming the next big thing.

Plus if, god forbid, it does become the next big thing - It can still isolate and be a small forum. That alone is lovely to me.

Personally, interactions feel more significant in smaller communities, too.

"Everyone was declaring Twitter over."

I mean...Twitter is very much over. References to Twitter, or Twitter being the canonical source, has utterly disappeared. Whole media spheres have made Twitter just another place, not the place. Whole fields have dried up on Twitter.

If you're hardcore into culture wars, Twitter is probably your place. Probably feels as alive as ever. In virtually any other field (sports, media, tech), while some people with big accounts are still trying to hang on -- for obvious reasons as other platforms just set them back -- engagement and "the crowd" has absolutely dissolved. Governments, agencies and groups used Twitter as a public space, and not only have many pulled back, I cannot fathom anyone making that choice today.

And that doesn't mean one needs to cite where someone replaced their "Twitter-like" activity. Many people just took it as an opportunity to assess the joy that sort of site was bringing them and decoupled. In the same way that the decline of blogger didn't mean that other sites grew the same amount...many people just stopped blogging.

[1] isn't it for a "general public, all topics" solution. Mastodon absolutely is a technical solution for niche spaces and groups and is absolutely flourishing in those realms.

https://fedidb.org/software/Mastodon

But, i would posit that there is a rhetorical currency exchange at play here. The "value" that one might assign to a silo like Facebook or Threads is not the same "value" one might assign to various software stacks and/or networks on the Fediverse. Like, its not enough for me to state that they're different/like comparing apples vs oranges. I mean, for example, if I only have a single kid/offspring, does that mean that i have not grown the "value" of my family, because i have not maximized my partner's reproductive capabilities, or resorted to adoption to extend that, etc.? That's sill of course. Well, i assure you, the intent of networks on the Fediverse is NOT the same as the goals and intent of silos like Facebook, twitter, threads, etc.

I think @unshavedyak stated it great with their comments, but this is my favorite of theirs: "...So many people think we need another Reddit and Twitter. Many of us however are looking for exactly something not Reddit or Twitter..."

At least that's what I think you mean. Lots of ambiguous "it" in the text above.

Not accurate according to https://mastodon.social/@mastodonusercount/ or my subjective experience. mastodon is fine. mastodon is growing. Mastodon is fundamentally not a business that needs to "get big fast or die trying" so that VCs can make their big ROI back. Slow, steady improvement is fine. Scalloped growth is not evidence of a platform in decline. (1)

I'd say - to write the above in a clearer way: "Twitter peaked in November 2022 and then went into decline. Musk's antics might prop twitter up every once in a while but the long term trend doesn't look good. My prediction is in a couple of years time, the only remaining users of twitter will be the most avid hardcore fans."

1) https://doctorow.medium.com/of-course-mastodon-lost-users-c4...

There was a huge rush of most of the people I follow going to mastodon. But even those who still has their mastodons links in their name or profile haven’t posted in months.

The fact is that discussions happen on Twitter. Not mastodon.

But this is not my subjective experience actually. And yes I follow "programmers" and other IT people in the mix. I'm not here to tell you what's true _for you_ but you appear to be telling me that what I experience isn't "reality". It works fine for me, as I said above.

"Discussions happen only on X not Y" is a binary, absolutist, black or white thinking that's if taken literally, ridiculous. I suppose you would also say that this here isn't a discussion?

Discussions and communities are going to happen in different places. It's almost like there's a use for a protocol that lets them interoperate in some kind of "loose association".

I’m not sure where threads sat for me, it was all the same folk who I follow on instagram but only posting text, now they post pics on thread and their reels on insta.

I’m not fully up on all the fedoverse stuff but I think that’s just due to a lack of effort so far.

If not, maybe wait more than 3 weeks before declaring it Twitter's successor.

Twitter can go away without being replaced by a singular entity.

People are certainly going somewhere (outside?), what isn't happening is for all of them going to the same place. IMO, that's a very good thing, but it does break any ambition of social world domination large companies may have.

That is not the strategy of a healthy advertising-driven company. It isn't even a strategy, that's flop-sweat.

You might as well jabber on about tulip bulbs.

Just about all the people whose opinions I'm interested in hearing are on Mastodon now. I don't really care if anyone else shows up. Maybe it's better that they don't.

I only finally checked it out during all the Reddit protests and am thoroughly amazed to simply see content without all the cruft.

It is only now that I don't feel as sure; Twitter still has its login wall today. I reactivate my facebook account only when I absolutely must in order to briefly see and interact on a page. I don't use Instagram. I have only since logged in to Twitter once to look at my Following list and make my first pass at building my Fedifeed by seeing who's moved over (incidentally, most of the people I follow that are still active). This time, I might actually check my feed regularly while logged in, since I'm not seeing a sponsored submission or ad every other post.

I only look at Xitter for Ukraine news - that community hasn't migrated elsewhere. But that's mostly on third-party pages, I don't log in anymore, so the site itself is useless to me.

that doesn't hold for other groups. people that don't want to think about internet application protocols (most people) throw up their hands and leave at the first notion of needing to choose an instance or needing a JS bookmarklet to follow someone not on your instance

plenty of those people are experts in their field and write interesting content i wouldn't otherwise encounter, but they aren't migrating to mastodon because of that, and there's a decent chance they won't migrate anywhere and will return to sharing their work in niche walled garden academic journals and conferences

sure, mastodon maybe keeps out the garbage firstnamelastname9023285023 accounts that do nothing but send low-content replies and retweet inane celebrity(s' social media managers') posts, but it's keeping them out because only a very specific population will bother to get in, which is a bad filter

It is a startup wisdom that it is better to have less users who love your product than many who merely like it. Tech-savy people often have a strong opinions (both positive and negative). By the mentioned startup wisdom, it can be very valuable to have them as users.

Mastodon is great if you want to read nerds talking with other nerds. For the rest of the population though, we need some takes from outside the nerd-cage.

I assure you I genuinely do not like what Twitter has become. The lack of viable alternative doesn’t change that fact.

Mastodon works for the people who are willing to "pay" (in social labor or hosting money) the startup costs. Threads very likely has the limitations it has because that's what Meta thinks will generate useful advertising data — their bread and butter.

For tech people, I think the most likely way to get a Twitter killer in the near-medium term would be to convince Microsoft to add that feature to Github. As usual, you're the product.

Mastodon is chugging along, still growing steadily, unglamorously. I don't see a boom and bust there. It is unbacked by VC "get big or die trying" money, not buoyed by big tech or media hype. Don't write it off in a week or a month.

The technology is crumbling (see rate limiting, interaction counts), the product is moving further away from what people want not towards it (see Zuck's tweets about Threads to see what popular product direction looks like, even if it's not perfect), the ad quality has dropped very noticeably suggesting they've lost good top paying advertisers, the new ad payout program suggests that their ad inventory is low anyway (see also interaction numbers here too), and the culture has gone from pretty bad to openly hostile to large swathes of the population, at least among English speakers (see anti-trans trending topics, rise of hate speech).

I'd agree that reversion to the mean and people going back to what they know is the most likely course of action in most circumstances, but these are not most circumstances. Twitter can't recover from this, at least not without a change of leadership and many years to rebuild.

Still, I believe that BlueSky and Threads remain a looming existential threat to Twitter. One important role that Twitter filled was being the de-facto centralized RSS feed. It is by far the thing that I see that Twitter is still used for, even by ex-Twitter users and people like me who never used the site in the first place.

To be the centralized RSS feed, you need a web-facing interface, so you can pass links around over the clearnet. Threads doesn't have one. BlueSky isn't even open to the greater public yet. But either one of those could change overnight.

A. Attention-seekers have gone to Threads or stayed on Twitter

B. People who are into niche interests and not part of group A are very active on Mastodon.

Mastodon to me very much feels like early-days Twitter. I truly I hope it stays like this. Threads might even be blessing in disguise for Mastodon network when it develops into a network similar to Instagram (content creators, brands, attention-seekers).

ie something like Reddit karma but it's based off how controversial a users posts and comments generally are, how many times posts are reported or flagged, and use ai to do sentiment analysis as well to verify the reports and scores are accurate.

Maybe have the users tweets a shade of blue and the more respected the brighter the blue color.

Is this hyperbole? Twitter will be fine, Musk isn't going to train-wreck 10s of billions. Twitter today isn't even that fundamentally different from pre-Musk. The biggest change has been perception from ideological extremes. I'm sure Twitter will evolve but evolution is for growth, not death.

You use Twitter for exposure to writers, wouldn't the proposed lifting of the character limit be a net positive for writers? Wouldn't writers use Twitter more if writing on Twitter was a source of income?

He already has?

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2023/jul/18/twitter-i...

https://www.fastcompany.com/90901033/for-elon-musks-co-inves...

It's big enough and established enough that it's not going to disappear overnight, but so far the results are pretty underwhelming.

I, for the life of me, can't figure out why someone who has been successful and earned a decent amount of goodwill in other ventures, would start burning through all that to deal with social media which is just super difficult to manage even in the best of cases.

What’s the point of the question mark there? Are you not sure of your statement?

You mention that Twitter isn't that fundamentally different and from a product perspective, and I would mostly agree, but their finances are WAY worse than they were pre-Musk. The company has lost something like 50% of ad revenue, they've saddled themselves with something like an extra $1B dollars a year in debt payments from the buyout, and they're facing a number of large lawsuits based on how they handled layoffs.

Why would a user of the site/app care about this? How is it impacting their experience?

Financial woes though will usually produce change that impacts the user, for better or worse (a good kick in the ass, or craven desperation may follow).

You have a very, very rosy perception of login walls. All the stats I’ve see would disagree.

If you don't have a Twitter account, you cannot see threads on Twitter anymore.

At the same time a lot of people I never would have wanted in my feed are now showing up all the time.

(there's also a userscript version IIRC)

I'm trying to find if there's anyone who regularly experiences hitting the limit.

It's got downsides for sure but I hasn't killed the UX IMO

Also, popularity based in upvotes from nobody, unverified accounts is usually inorganic. Scoring upvotes based on how many of them are from verified or likely authentic accounts can only improve user experience (for content providers, not professional reply guys.)

... where "any" is the number of people who paid for a blue check.

which holds a value "X"

x.com

A not implausible theory I’ve seen bandied about is that Musk isn’t happy about having been forced into buying Twitter so he’s trashing the place out of spite.

It seems a rather expensive bit of spite, but it makes as much sense as anything else.

On it’s first fucking day

Been using the new follow feed and honestly I appreciate the algo feed sprinkling some randomness here and there

For these cases, I follow the Twitter accounts on Mastodon by way of the mirror sites - bird.makeup is the most popular I believe.

"But you can't respond to people there". Yeah, but I don't care. Since Elon changed the meaning of the blue checkmark and made it effectively pay-to-play, the chances of someone seeing my responses are effectively zero.

I put that gem in my book of glorious UX behaviors Mastodon has, right next to painfully navigating to another user's profile and seeing 'Posts from other servers are not displayed. Browse more on the original profile' only to be brought to a different site with a different layout and theme.

Didn't Musk break Twitter a few weeks back in a hamfisted attempt to deal with scrapers? What that was he was fighting against?

Anyway, it should be known that fighting against scrapers is a lost cause. Nitter is still going strong, BirdSiteLive (the software that powers bird.makeup) as well, and even if he really blocked these alternative methods, I wouldn't be surprised if the archive.org people came up with some browser extension that could help replicate the content elsewhere.

While Twitter hosts some services on its own servers, the company has long contracted with Google and Amazon to complement its infrastructure. Prior to Musk buying Twitter last year, the company signed a multi-year contract with Google to host services related to fighting spam, removing child sexual abuse material, and protecting accounts, among other things.

Relevant: https://www.xing.com/

(a site very similar so LinkedIn that rather has its mainstay in the German-speaking market instead of a more international focus like LinkedIn)

Agree on the need for a proper website that isn’t read-only. I get that most usage will come from mobile, but for the more interesting and prolific posters, tapping out blurbs and interacting with others on mobile is a second-rate experience that doesn’t feel as rich when compared to using a web app.

Meta’s working on it, so hopefully we’ll see if the culture of the service shifts away from that Instagram feel.

Do they want to? Definitely, but it's not a simple lift and shift. It will only happen once Musk either terminally runs Twitter into the ground (bankruptcy), or makes it completely unbearable.

https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=today%201-m&q=...

It's kind of interesting to see stuff like that.

And he was much, much younger than the Google founders who are the only real comparison (in that they consistently make money).

They launched it at a very opportune time when Twitter was having massive technical issues.

That was enough to get millions of people to kick the tires and more importantly, create awareness.

The next time Twitter goes down, and it will any day now, people will again flock to Threads and notice that it got a little better. Twitter will get fixed again, and a lower percentage of Threads users go back again.

And repeat.

Meta chose quick growth over European users.

People have been saying this since the day Elon took over... but has it really gone down that much? More than other tech products? E.g. how many outages have the big cloud providers had in the last year? When I hear people say 'any day now' it reads like they are looking for any excuse to say 'mars man bad'.

https://www.cnn.com/2023/07/01/tech/twitter-rate-limit-excee...

rather than cloud providers it would probably be more useful to compare to eg Instagram or TikTok

And high-volume users are who create content for the site.

Also, the idea that Threads will be better than Twitter is simply a promise based on nothing. The concept I heard is that they were going to mod out politics, but that's a) impossible at scale, ask China, and b) Facebook couldn't care less about politics; the reason they censored anything other than nipples was by government demand, and Facebook has promised to cooperate with the House Judiciary Committee that it was hiding documents from until a few days ago under pain of contempt of Congress, personally, against Zuckerberg.

I don't think he's hero enough to go to prison for the sake of this administration, especially since he started censoring for the last administration. He doesn't care about the politics at all, so who would he be going to prison on behalf of? Movement Democrats will certainly make him a hero, like Cheney, Comey, etc., but what will that get him if the Democrats go down in the next general? All this is to say is that he's motivated to govern Threads with a light touch.

That's how Telegram have 700 million active users.

[1] https://steamcharts.com/app/1063730

I am earnestly trying to go all in on ActivityPub these days.

Once brands realize that they can utilize custom feeds to reach potential customers granularly instead of -- or in addition to -- paying for advertising, it's going to be over for Twitter. Twitter could introduce something similar to compete, but they shit-canned all of their talent, and in the process hamstrung their ability to innovate.

Would've expected closer to 70/30 personally.

I don't know a single person who willingly prefers a limited, bogged-down experience of any product (social media or otherwise) over a full-fledged desktop client.

Of course I prefer doing all of my computing on my desktop computer. But I don't take my desktop computer with me to the grocery store. And I use Twitter to entertain myself when I'm waiting in line at the grocery store, for example. When I am at my desktop computer, I'm much less likely to be interested in using Twitter.

That said, one of many reasons I didn't bother creating a Threads account is precisely that reason: no desktop client. Unless forced, I won't use anything that is exclusively available on mobile devices.

81% of Facebook users interact only by mobile phone: https://www.statista.com/statistics/377808/distribution-of-f...

The relevant number would be to condition on only the 20th to 80th percentile users (by time spent/day) and see their breakdown. I am going to bet that number is more biased towards desktop, while both the 0-20% (occasional users) and 80-100% percentiles will be mobile focused.

Twitter's cultural cachet was because you could link and embed Tweets. Whatever platform you're on, viewing things on Twitter "just works" if you have a URL. That means journalists can point to things on Twitter, post things on Twitter, and the normal mechanisms of internet virality mean they can spread through basically any medium (i.e. how many times are Twitter links shown on other platforms?)

It's also worth noting that "influencer" types don't - or didn't - use Twitter directly. They used various bits of API management software to curate their appearance.

Threads has none of that: without a web browser experience, you can't share and link things on Threads in other mediums. There's no possibility of embedded Threads posts being a thing. And that means, fundamentally, Threads can never actually pull sign-ups by organic virality - or pull views from it either. It's notable the big sign up wave happened right as it looked like Twitter was going to block viewing Tweets for users without an account - that was (correctly) interpreted as the final nail in the coffin (and was rolled back).

You do realize that even after the initial drop (which is expected, for something that managed to get so much hype) they’re likely still the biggest app in the history in terms of DAU in few weeks after the lunch?

I would rather see Mastodon and federated services succeed, but it is not the most user friendly. Then again, just because something is big doesn't mean it's the best.

To me that marked it as doomed from the start. Most people use Twitter to follow specific niches or topic areas, not as a general conversational platform. If I follow even one account that's posting low quality content at any sort of frequency, it seriously degrades the experience.

It's really a headscratcher how they launched without that. I guess the idea is that ad placing is easier if you have an algorithmic feed instead?

Ironically, the people who refuse to use the "Following" tab on Twitter are, I expect, the same people who are most dissatisfied with Twitter. If you use the Following tab, Twitter remains pretty damn great. It's when you allow an algorithm to feed you stuff that the experience can become something between unsatisfactory and toxic.

Some of these aspects have changed, but again, they are part of a larger recommendation experiment that twitter constantly pushes because a strict following feed = less money less engagement.

You cannot curate twitter as well as you think you can. It would be nice if that was possible though.

Then I just got bored, and realized it was just reclaiming the time that I had gained by quitting Instagram in the first place.

The rest don't have a chance at all and are as good as dead or cannot handle the amount of users that both Twitter/X or Threads has.

It is clear that both of them will co-exist and retention always matters, with any so-called 'exodus'. For Threads it is early days. On the other hand over at Twitter / X [0] it seems far from 'dying', from the months of nonsense from the media who exaggerated the immediate collapse of Twitter / X last year which never happened.

Perhaps it is time to admit that you have been manipulated by the doomsayers who's only mission is to post clickbait and attract your eyeballs to their articles spreading nonsense to grift for affiliate links.

[0] https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1684978651857596429/phot...

Sorry! We're going to have karma sharing for these cases at some point; in the meantime, it at least evens out in the long run if you keep posting good things.