It's resilient due to the wide prior adoption. For example, I rarely see Threads or Mastodon embeds in new articles, it's still mostly Twitter. Changing that will take years.

Yep, network effect.

The numerous competing platforms that want to replace it are all competing for users, which prevents a migration to a single alternative platform.

And that buys time for X to improve, which IMO it is. I may be wrong but I think long term it’s going to come out on top. At this point it’s getting tough to bet against Musk.

Counterpoint: I can bet that in the past three months there has been noticeably more mastodon threads hitting the front-page of HN than twitter.

You really think that? In any case I would take the bet if you want money bet.

I don't know if that's true yet, but there are a lot of FOSS and infosec and other software people on Mastodon. Centrist politics seems to be gradually migrating to Threads; lefty politics seems to be going to Mastodon. I'm starting to see Mastodon and Threads embeds where you'd expect Twitter embeds on mainstream sites.

Twitter isn't dead yet, but it's no longer the universal town square, and the longer Musk controls it, the further away from that it will get.

A quick search on Algolia is showing a lot more links to twitter, but only a minority of them with enough points to have made the front-page. By contrast, the majority of links to fosstodon.org and hachyderm.io have front-page worthy scores, and mastodon.social is 50/50.

Not to sound like a gatekeeper, but it feels Twitter is still appealing for the /r/startups crowd, "indiehackers" influencers and wannabes. The center of "real" tech talk has moved away from twitter.

It’s not really a situation where you can look for alternatives. Either the friends/celebrities/politicians/comedians/brands/etc you like are there or not. It’s gotten significantly worse, but Twitter is still the only place you can go to search for something that’s happening in realtime. Other alternatives have been able to create small niches, but X is the only one with a global scale.

(That being said, yes, I agree that Elon is doing everything he can to ruin that)

Seriously, try Mastodon. It's certainly not worse than Twitter for the Ukraine and Gaza events. And you're not putting money in the hands of neo-nazis.

This right here is why the Mastodon userbase is so unappealing to so many of us. Ridiculous extremist thinking.

Unless you expect to interact with celebrities/politicians/comedians/brands, you can follow them just fine from the numerous twitter mirrors.

What's left are your friends, and for those I had a mixed strategy: help them set up accounts on Mastodon and still follow their twitter mirror. The ones that stayed on Mastodon, I can interact directly. The ones that dropped out, I follow their mirror and I ping them on im/email/phone when something they posted is a good hook for a conversation.

Freedom of speech. Every other major social network actively suppresses speech. Especially conservative speech or anything that doesn't align with the ideology of the left.

And I don't even consider myself a conservative. I just like my information uncensored.

Oh fun, can you please give specific examples to what sort of thing is now allowed on X but not on facebook, that keeps you on X?

X is still relatively porn-friendly.

It took me like 5 minutes to google a bunch of conservatives that got banned on FB. And it's not them that keeps me on X, it's the idea that some random activists are deciding which political speech I'm not allowed to see. It actually made me go and see what these people have to say.

Examples:

- Donald Trump.

- Milo Yiannopoulos.

- Paul Joseph Watson.

- Laura Loomer.

- Alex Jones.

These are not conservatives, they are criminals, authoritarians, fascists, and unhinged conspiracy theorists, who should not be given “free reach” to spread their message to millions of people.

On the other hand, pg, the creator of this site, was banned under the new management at Twitter. Ditto many other people whose only transgressions were saying words like “cis” or relaying publicly-available information.

Free speech indeed.

pg posts many times a day on Twitter. He was briefly banned when Elon and he started arguing, but they quickly worked it out.

Yes, that’s true, and doesn’t refute anything I said.

I mean, literal Nazis post hateful shit every day and don’t get banned. So the takeaway is that as long as you don’t anger the toddler-in-chief you’re good to go. Free speech!!

Twitter is complying with more government demands under Elon Musk. [1]

Before Musk, Twitter's full compliance rate hovered around 50%; since the takeover, it is over 80%.

These countries include China [2] and India [3].

[1] https://restofworld.org/2023/elon-musk-twitter-government-or...

[2] https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-features/twitte...

[3] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/apr/05/twitter-accuse...

What’s wrong with following the law? The article you linked states that Twitter used to not follow the law. Now it does. I’m happy with the speech laws in my country, and full compliance is all I want from a messaging layer.

Because in many countries e.g. China the laws are more about ensuring companies toe the government line.

So you can't argue that X cares more about free speech than Twitter when they aren't willing to fight those laws through the judicial system. As always judge people on their actions not their words.

"Non-conservatives" who just want "uncensored information" struggle to process factual information. This is all fake news because Musk said so—and since he personifies the uncensored truth, how can one not trust him? A vicious circle.

Elon has done just as much “censoring”, if not more. He’s just changed what he censors. Remember when he went on a personal banning spree? Or increasing censorship on the things the Turkish/Chinese government asked him to? Or where he banned people for “parodies”? Or blocking links, like those to Substack? Or shadow-banning people he personally was arguing with, such as Taibbi? Or how he now considers the word “cis” a slur that you can’t say? He even banned the guy who created this site (pg).

He censors. He just censors the things he doesn’t like. Can you give an example of anything you can say on Twitter that you can’t say on, say, Mastadon or even Facebook?

It’s much easier to get away with racial slurs on Twitter now, especially if they’re 21st century slurs commonly used on 4chan. On Mastodon, people will block or defederate you for that, but Twitter will make it trend.

"As much" censoring is a lie. Prior to Elon Twitter banned tons of conservative accounts with hundreds of thousands or millions of followers.

Taibbi is still on Twitter and is posting like every hour:

https://twitter.com/mtaibbi

> Can you give an example of anything you can say on Twitter that you can’t say on, say, Mastadon or even Facebook?

Ask Trump.

Facts don't care about your feelings: Twitter admitted it was biased towards rightwing politicians and news outlets. [1] The idea that Twitter was "censoring conservatives" was always a lie, because they tended to break the rules more often.

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2021/oct/22/twitter-a...

> because they tended to break the rules more often.

No, this is a lie. The rules were applied in a very one-sided manner. A left-leaning poster would not even get a warning, while a right-leaning one would get insta-banned forever for the smallest infraction.

That's weird because I watched as left-leaning accounts got banned one after the other over the years. Maybe you think it's biased a certain way because of who you follow and listen to.

I never thought I would recommend an episode of Joe Rogan, but the one where he had Vijaya Gadde on provided a lot of insight into how Twitter thought about moderation. It was a lot more nuanced than I expected.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DZCBRHOg3PQ

Please provide evidence to support your claims.

> Twitter admitted it was biased towards rightwing politicians and news outlets.

Twitter claimed it was biased towards rightwing politicians and news outlets, while refusing to release the data that it claimed would show this.

> The idea that Twitter was "censoring conservatives" was always a lie, because they tended to break the rules more often.

Were those rules neutral? Even more importantly, were the people determining whether those rules were broken or not?

So glad Musk personally banned the account that was tracking his flights. This country would have transformed into a communist dystopia if it was allowed to operate any longer.

If you want free speech, you will never get it on a platform. Self hosting is the only way to know your message isn't tampered with or canceled.

I have a friend who thinks X and Elon are great, and yet he misses the possibility of no platform at all to interfere in your communications.

Many Twitter accounts have been locked post Elon, so it's curious to me how anyone can consider it truly uncensored or free speech in any capacity.

KiwiFarms couldn’t even self-host.

Not totally familiar with what happened with that site. What prevented them from hosting?

Can't get an ISP or CDN

Not sure why you are getting downvoted.

As a centrist Australia, it was clearly leftist.

I much prefer it now, I can actually see post from both sides.

Network effects cannot be underestimated.

For me, I follow ~2.5k accounts. It's a nice mix of artists, frontend software devs, game devs, and comedy accounts that I've built up over 15 years.

I have yet to find another social media site that brings all of that together in a nice, "streaming" kind of way. Reddit (where I'm subscribed to ~1k subreddits) is _almost_ as good but visiting Reddit is only really interesting once or twice a day because of the nature of their algorithm. TikTok is honestly pretty close to having a mix of art and programming, but the video format isn't as information dense as text.

Twitter keeps me coming back somehow.

Since you follow so many accounts, did you notice some of them closing or turning inactive?

Not really, but it seems like Twitter's recommendation engine tends to skew to a few hundred accounts/topics that I interact with the most. If something like 10-15% of accounts I follow just stopped posting, I wouldn't even notice (in fact, that might be the case!). It doesn't seem any less active than it did before Musk took over.

The big change since he took over is that now I have to block a dozen or so people every day who are just on the opposite end of who I would ever want to interact with. Not just politically, but people actively seeking to be harmful to others in one way or another. Before that, I went 14 years of using Twitter daily and had only blocked a few spam accounts.

Twitter / X has a strong network effect and was tested to be strong enough to still have hundreds of millions of daily users still using it even after the changes 1 year later with nonsensical reports of it being completely shut down or collapsing since the acquisition.

Compared to what? Pebble (T2) [0] that tried (and failed) to challenge this alongside the string of other alternatives that have failed to over take Twitter / X's active user base.

Twitter's network effect is reason why these alternatives have mostly failed at being an alternative even after marketing as such.

Network effects really should not be under estimated.

[0] https://pebble.is

I use it regularly. It gives me a simple way to follow people I'm interested in. I noticed bots are also down from a few years ago where there were tons of fake vitalik spam bots. And I like supporting the idea of a paid social network that does revenue share. This was the dream of a lot of social media critics in the past but is now out of fashion for some reason.

If you’ve never used it it’s hard to explain. X has far more signal to noise compared to bluesky and mastodon, especially now that the censorship has been turned down. It’s been an asset in the Israel-Hamas conflict as OSInt on X has proven to be unrivaled, especially compared to American media. It pays creators as well, which is why many stay.

I have bsky accounts and plenty of invites, but it’s just a boring, joyless network full of the miserable people who left twitter sharing the same opinions back at each other, a feedback loop is how I’d describe it. I’m guessing that’s who it attracts, similar to how I assume places like Gab also attracted miserable people from the other side. I’d kinda describe that place as all the worst parts of 2020/21 twitter.

There’s also threads I guess, but it just seems like a network of celebrities and brands trying to seem hip.

> it just seems like a network of celebrities and brands trying to seem hip.

As someone who has never used _any_ of these... that pretty much sums up my impression of them all. Just makes all the "but _my_ network of celebrities and brands is better!" all the more amusing.

bullshit. https://www.wired.com/story/x-israel-hamas-war-disinformatio...

“I know it’s bullshit because the journalists who have been fact checked told me so”

Consider the possibility that just because people in your bubble are fleeing it doesn’t mean that the userbase in general is.

The only "bubble" that isn't gradually shrinking on the emerald mine is right-wing propaganda.

Their daily active user base was down 11% post acquisition as of September:

https://mashable.com/article/twitter-x-daily-active-users-dr...

I think that was before it was revealed that Musk sabotaged a major US-backed military strike in Russia.

Backed as in refused to pay?

I use X and to be honest it just hasn't changed that much, at least from my perspective. I feel that the drama around it's "collapse" or "rebirth" is widely a proxy for signalling your particular political views, and it really isn't that different to your average user.

I don't pay for anything; not really worth it to me as a casual user. I follow a few hundred accounts and maybe a couple dozen have announced their departure. I find new people to follow often before and after. Seems there's a bit more spam lately. But it's not something I'm super invested in so the changes don't bother me enough to justify spending the time to curate a new list of followers on a new platform that might die in a year or two itself. Who knows what X holds for the future but if I had to leave I wouldn't stress over it either.

so basically your follow list is holding you hostage?

That's not quite what I said. The product experience has not changed sufficiently such that I'm motivated enough to pay the 'cost' of trying to find a better product experience elsewhere. 'hostage' is a strange word to use.

Fair enough, I more so meant to ask if the core reason for you staying rather than transitioning to an equivalent service was the follow list. For example, if a tool existed that let you simply export/import your follow list to an equivalent platform, would you still stay for something you believe twitter does uniquely well? My big concern with twitter is it's main selling point was trustworthiness, which it has lost. Right now the one thing it seemed to do better than other platforms was combat misinformation, but now it is the same as other platforms, if not somewhat worse than some.

Gotcha. The short answer is I'd stay, but not for something I believe twitter does uniquely well. A tool like that would make it easier to move away from Twitter for sure, so the motivation threshold for doing so gets lower. But the core reason is that I'm just not motivated to move away from it. It still does what I want more or less like it did before and it doesn't seem that any other platforms are doing it obviously better (at least right now).

> activly fleeing userbase

I feel like this stated-as-fact assumption is actually the real question.

Sure there was a lot of loud fleeing in the months after the takeover, and motivated media outlets relish at reporting any figures that can be presented to suggest that this is a continuing trend.

Plenty of those who loudly fled have quietly come back, so many prominent voices are still there.

About a year ago I started a new account, keeping my follow list to about 100 people (mostly friends and people I like in tech/startups/sports/music/personal-growth) and avoided following anyone who is heavily politically partisan/vocal, and I find it to be fine.

What the actual hell brings someone to consider this an appropriate comment for HN and a reasonable reply to my comment. This is what people do when they want to show that they're on the right side of ideology/history? My.

Not even the people fleeing are staying gone.

I've seen countless accounts that have pinned post saying they quit the site but have about 10-20 posts/day, every day.

The number of people posting incessantly while a bluesky account they forgot about is in their bio are staggering.

X is fine, hatred of it or equivocating about what was demonstrated in The Twitter Files does seem to say more about the media narratives one is predominately exposing oneself to, or one’s direct political leanings, more than reflect the reality for users on the platform.

I mean, I get to read translated tweets from both Bibi and the Ayatollah, which is a depth of exposure I’d not see in MSM. I like that about X. I don’t think you get that kind of thing on Threads. You can choose who you follow and interact with on X, there’s no shortage of fascinating people and personalities, and ultimately you make it what you want. Some of the new features, like Community Notes, are appreciated.

All else being equal, I prefer less government/NGO/employee censorship collusion, so that’s a big change compared to old Twitter. I like to see contrarian viewpoints. It also differentiates the platform from Facebook and YouTube. I realize some people think differently, and I guess that’s what Threads is for. But Twitter/X seems like a more vibrant place to me than it did before.

There’s still no shortage of left-leaning shit posting and there’s probably more right-leaning shit posting than was allowed before. Tune out the noise. The idea that clearing the leftist and establishment filters has made the place an abandoned and barren hellscape is quite the opposite of reality, IME.