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.
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.