The best alternative to twitter is no twitter. Let me explain. The feed and micro blogging format is a recipe for disaster. It's a combination of dopamine hits, crack addiction and rage inducing hyperbole. While there's merits to such a service, it's not clear they outweigh the costs of the format. When it's too easy for people to tweet their thoughts we end up in a disarray of thought leadership from mostly clueless people or those who elevate their significance based on number of followers.

In all honesty the best alternative to twitter is no twitter, until we find a better format for community discussion. Maybe it's private community chat, or similar, not sure. Maybe it's the end of public social. I think a lot of us are just looking for quieter smaller groups to share with.

A note on Mastodon. It's going closer in that direction of community specific servers but I think a better alternative would be if we could keep it private and cap group sizes. Right now it just feels like a replica of twitter segregated by topic or community. All the inherit bad behaviour still propagates because of the form factor.

I'll take the other side of this. While there certainly are examples of click bait and inflammatory BS on Twitter, there is also an element of legitimate thought leadership that can go viral in a way you just don't have on any other social media platform.

There are few other platforms I can think of where someone with deep expertise on any subject can publish interesting, informed takes on their field- On a platform where the barrier to entry to publish is near-zero, provided with a random chance to go viral.

When I used Twitter, seeking out and following these kinds of experts actually made the experience of Twitter a rich and informative platform- albeit one where you constantly needed to "weed the garden".

The problem of course is that was a thin layer of wheat in a big bucket of chaff- but there is a better answer to "best alternative to twitter is no twitter": The best alternative to Twitter is one that can maximize virality for expert opinions; incentivizing other users to write engaging, structured opinions. Try to build a system where the best way to engagement farm is to show real thought leadership.

Well, here we are seemingly near the end of the thing, and I'm not sure it's worth the risk. Twitter was really good at getting people to write, letting them know that others are interested in their area of research or expertise, and I hope they continue to do that. But the awfulness of the propaganda just doesn't seem like it's worth it. Aside from the format being the message (ideas devoid of nuance) I think the incentives are all wrong.

Twitter is grade school. You don't "win" by being right, you get that be being funny, sarcastic, a little cruel, and getting lots of likes.

I'd like to see a return to a platform at a slightly elevated level. Asking for it to be like a university discussion group is maybe a little bit too much, but how about like, the last year of high school, when all the drama has died down and you've all pretty much agreed to be friends? I feel like that's the time when people start listening to reasoned arguments over name calling.

I don't know what that platform looks like, and it's almost sure to be less viral that Twitter. But if that last 3 years have taught me anything it's that fast-moving viruses are bad. I think we should slow down.

This is exactly right, but it's really hard to see when you're still in the mindset of needing to be part of The Discourse. The people I know who were Twitter addicts and left for Mastodon have become Mastodon addicts. They've kept all the self-destructive attitudes they learned on Twitter and view Mastodon as better precisely because it lets them indulge with less out-group interference.

I see a lot of arguments that Mastodon is better because it lacks various bad things about Twitter (algorithmic sorting, the misalignment of incentives between Twitter-as-a-company and users, centralized moderation/ownership) and it certainly is in some sense, but we're still living in a world where the social norms that were created on Twitter completely dominate any other conception of how to behave. There can be no online space that is "like Twitter but good" because anything that is sufficiently like Twitter to appeal to Twitter refugees will import enough of the culture to end up with Twitter's problems. Mastodon might be a step towards fixing the problem, but undoing the damage caused by Twitter will require the grueling and unpleasant work of changing ourselves as well as changing our technology.

The only option for us as individuals in the short term is to reject the entire model and choose to engage with other people in ways that respect each other’s fundamental humanity. Prefer in-person to online. Prefer one-on-one communication to broadcasting. Prefer small groups to large groups. Prefer local to global. Prefer synchronous communication to async. Prefer video or voice to text. Trust me, I know each of those preferences is difficult in its own way and there’s excellent reasons to choose the other option in many circumstances (like this post, in which I'm violating almost all of them!), but they’re also powerful tools for connecting with others as whole people rather than as simplified abstractions. We should work to make it easier to connect people (particularly across geographical and linguistic boundaries) but it cannot be at the cost of flattening each of us into the most shallow, reductive versions of ourselves so that we fit through the machinery we’ve built and can be easily consumed by strangers on the other end.

Good rationale and I agree with all of it. Looks like Mastodon has become the self reinforcing echo chamber of the far right for any group. Never to be challenged again. In fact that's the point of why so many people go there right? There's a feeling of safety in that lack of challenge. A lot of people will say twitter is an abusive place and I don't disagree but to never have your points of view ever challenged again is incredibly dangerous. It's the path towards ignorance. We as humans are imperfect and constantly learning. Part of that means accepting that maybe our opinions or viewpoints could be wrong and taking a step back to think about it when someone does question the things we say. Now there's communities on Mastodon where that will never happen again. It'll be something that creates a new type of privilege. The privilege of choosing to be and believe whatever you want without anyone ever telling you you're wrong.

> Never to be challenged again. In fact that's the point of why so many people go there right?

No. Some people don't view social media as "debate club". We never signed up for debate club. I personally signed up for Twitter at a software developer conference, and I used Twitter to meet other software developers, social network, and exchange information related to tech. I had no interest in debating politics or whatever. Twitter is possibly the worst possible place in the world to debate politics, given its format.

It's a weird assumption that Twitter is the best or only possible place to have your ideas challenged. Go to school. Ready a book. Talk with people you know. Tweeting sound bites at rando strangers typically goes nowhere fast.

That's not what I'm saying. It's that the people that were challenged chose to put out their thoughts in a way that welcomed it. If all you're there to do is meet fellow developers and network is should be no issue. I never ended up in situations of devolving debate. Not once. But there's a lot of people who want to put out their strong thoughts without recourse. If you use a public platform to make bold statements which 50% of the world will oppose and it welcomes comments as twitter does then you should expect to be challenged.

Again it's not about saying twitter is debate club. For the majority of people that's not the case for the outliers it is though and they don't like it.

I'm not sure I understand what you're saying.

If people want to debate, then they can go to a forum where people are debating. If they don't want to debate, then they can go to a forum where people aren't debating. Everyone gets what they want. That's good, isn't it?

Yes people should go to a place where healthy discussion is fostered. I'm not arguing against that. What I'm saying is there's a group of very vocal people who have left twitter to go start their own Mastodon communities because they did not like their views being challenged on twitter. If you're going to tweet publicly then it welcomes commentary, it's part of the system. If people want to put out their thoughts in an echo chamber then Mastodon is probably a better place for it.

imo the "echo chamber" scenario would be if you only followed people from your local server, and also set your posts to only show there. If you set your posts to public and gather a couple hundred mutuals...I find the Mastodon 2023 experience turns out to be pleasantly similar to early '10s Twitter.

> What I'm saying is there's a group of very vocal people who have left twitter to go start their own Mastodon communities because they did not like their views being challenged on twitter.

Do you have any evidence for this? The proximate cause of mass migration from Twitter to Mastodon was the acquisition of Twitter by Elon Musk.

Elon is a catalyst because of the rise of hate speech and an inability to moderate it but it's created the opportunity to build these cult like communities elsewhere. I don't want to point to it because I'll receive a lot of backlash for that but it's happening.

> because they did not like their views being challenged on twitter

> because of the rise of hate speech and an inability to moderate it

You're already changing your story.

> it's created the opportunity to build these cult like communities elsewhere

That's your characterization, which I do not agree with. Some would say that Musk himself has a cult-like following. In any case, Twitter and Mastodon have naturally segregated into pro-Musk and anti-Musk communities through no particular design by either side but simply as a result of the acquisition.

Those who enjoy Musk Twitter have no reason to leave and join Mastodon, so of course there would be less "challenge" from them on Mastodon, but whose fault is that?

No I'm not changing my story. You mentioned Elon musk and I said it was a catalyst, not that it was the reason. There's a difference. A catalyst is an accelerant, it's not the source of a reaction. You're removing context by what's convenient for debate. The things you're saying are true but it's not the whole truth. People were unhappy on Twitter before Elon, for the reasons I mentioned. I'll leave it at that.

> People were unhappy on Twitter before Elon, for the reasons I mentioned.

Yet they didn't leave until the Musk acquisition. Huh.

Again, it's about needing a catalyst. People suffer through much worse. What Elon did and the subsequent behaviour from alt-right uprising was enough not to just cause some people to leave but gave the vocal people with large followers a reason to voice their concerns and use it as a means to pull their audience to Mastodon. People would otherwise not have followed them and they'd essentially lose the audience they built. The cult leaders still need their followers. Without them, what are they? Crazy ranting folk.

> use it as a means to pull their audience to Mastodon

This is all a very nice conspiracy theory, thank you.

> The cult leaders still need their followers.

People who tweet are now "cult leaders". Ok. By the way, how many Twitter followers does it take to become cult leader? I'm curious because I had over 3500, so I'm not sure whether I qualify or not.

> Crazy ranting folk.

Or HN commenters.

lol I'm not actually calling them cult leaders but I'm giving you a point of reference. People in mainstream media can have a "cult following", a group of fans who are so enthusiastically devoted. We have that for brands, movies, comics and whatever else. Today people become personalities on twitter that end up with a similar cult following.

Also I mean I'm not here to spin conspiracy theories. Pulling your audience to Mastodon isn't something villainous. It's an opportunity to remove a lot of the noise on twitter and focus people on your message and community. That could be anything. Your Mastodon server could be dedicated to die hard star wars fans or it would be liberal tech folk on the west coast who want a smaller space in which to voice their thoughts without the other side of the argument. It's just human dynamics.

At the end of the day it doesn't matter whether people use Twitter or Mastodon or whatever else. We're transition between platforms every decade, some people stick it out for the relationships and other people move on to new things. That's life.

> Today people become personalities on twitter that end up with a similar cult following.

Do you have any evidence of this? Name one Twitter personality like this who isn't famous outside of Twitter, and who moved from Twitter to Mastodon, bringing their "cult followers".

> Also I mean I'm not here to spin conspiracy theories.

Your whole argument is a conspiracy theory. Occam's razor suggests that people moved from Twitter to Mastodon because of Musk. And indeed, that was the case for me personally. Yet you say no, it's... something else, Twitter "cult" leaders wanting to move their followers out of Twitter to avoid "challenges", and Musk was somehow just an excuse or something.

> Your Mastodon server could be dedicated to die hard star wars fans or it would be liberal tech folk on the west coast who want a smaller space in which to voice their thoughts without the other side of the argument.

This is a misunderstanding of Mastodon. It's distributed. A server is just a server. I personally switched servers because of technical difficulties on my old server. You can follow and communicate with anyone on the fediverse. You're not restricted in any way to activity on one server.

> The best alternative to twitter is no twitter.

I used to think this. And by "used to" I mean 3 months ago, after I quit Twitter.

Initially, I didn't miss social media. I had a nice restful period, a vacation if you will. Eventually, though, I found that I did miss it, so I signed up for Mastodon. Some of the same problems as Twitter had exist on Mastodon too, I admit. I guess I am addicted anyway. In recent years I've quit both alcohol and caffeine entirely, yet I'm not sure I can quit social media entirely. It's my weakness.

Time for a return to the InvisionFree/phpBB forums of old (I fully acknowledge those also had their fair share of toxicity).

This is the best reply.

Yes and no. No because it is missing one popular use case: getting updates from projects that don't have mailing lists or RSS feeds.

Mailing lists and RSS feeds don't incentivize me to compulsively check them so that the important updates I care about aren't buried under a 47-post rant about why I should be angry about something in the news or hidden by an algorithm because it thinks I'm more likely to engage with a bunch of memes.

Maybe it works if you only follow low-traffic announcement accounts, but when I was actively using Twitter I found that I regularly missed posts like that because they either didn't get engagement (algo timeline) or were posted when I wasn't paying attention (chrono timeline). I understand that a lot of projects have chosen to rely on social media for that kind of news for various reasons, but it's not a good situation.

If the project is in Mastodon, it has an RSS feed. Just subscribe to https://domain.tld/@username.rss.

I didn't think I was going to switch to Mastodon - I try to stay apolitical and I mostly used Twitter for news and influencers/disseminators with large followings who weren't moving.

And yet, here I am, primarily using Mastodon. Maybe it's just my server, but it's so much more _pleasant_ to be there. I don't need to wade through pages of insanity and irrelevant ads to get to the content I care about.

It's as if an annoying ambient buzzing slowly built up in my favorite coffee shop over a decade, and I never really noticed it, but now there's a crunchy alternative cafe next-door with fewer options which is blissfully silent. I just can't bring myself to go back.

I'm thinking about setting up a private instance for myself and my friends, plus the people I meet online through different, more personal channels, like 1:1 calls and rants via my Calendly.

Another reason is that not using hay@potato.horse as my handle feels like a missed opportunity.

I love that the Taliban is on Twitter along with drug cartels and all kinds of bad people, but everyone ran when a former elected President of the US had their account restored. Wild. I haven’t switched. I feel like the drama will blow over. Twitter is still best for diverse conversations and reach.

I don't think that's why most people left Twitter. N=1, but for me it was much more the rapid decline in "default" content: when I sign in now, my DMs are filled with spammers and my recommended feed is just the owner and a bunch of reactionary stuff.

Your feed can be just people you follow. You never have to look at the recommended feed or whatever it is called now.

I did that for a while, but both the app and Twitter’s website would always switch me back to the inorganic feed. And honestly, it was fine before — most of the recommendations were appropriate.

It doesn't matter anymore why people left (and barely any people actually left.) What the OP brought up is that Musk vastly overpaid for the thing and he's got to wring money out of it, so even if you love (especially if you love) twitter you need an alternative. There's no reason not to inflict any sort of humiliation on a person who has no alternative to you.

Personally I’m not on Twitter anymore just because Tweetbot does not work anymore.

Spaces are kind of a gem hidden in plain sight right now, a few months ago when the censorship dam broke it felt a lot like early 2000s internet where literally any topic could be broached. It's died down a bit since then as the pent up topics were cleared out of the collective consciousness but it's still a great place for news analysis, at least compared to anything on cable, by far.

I guess if you want to follow people like terrorists, Trump and criminals, then Twitter is the place for you.

It is pretty wild that centralized automated content moderation amplifies their voices, but decentralized manual moderation shuts such lunacy down.

I've been on Twitter for going on fifteen years and have yet to see a Taliban tweet. The advantage of having everything in one place is obvious, you can find the most obscure stuff. But by the same token, lots of bad stuff will be on there. The responsibility to choose what to look at wisely rests on the user much more than "the algorithm".

I'm sure a 200 user Mastodon instance moderated by a vigilant hall monitor will not have a problem with Taliban content, but then it won't offer any of what makes Twitter an interesting site.

I don't think Twitter amplifies the Taliban or drug cartels, in many years on Twitter I've never seen a tweet by them.

Trump doesn't post anything on twitter, if this helps?

Mastodon trades one set of problems (centralised authority, terrible management, beholden to advertisers) for another set of problems (expensive n^2 bookkeeping of decentralised model, moderator fiefdoms, less polished UX). Whether you find one of those worlds easier to live with than another is up to you.

So far, the people who've moved to Mastodon seem happy with that choice, myself included.

Personally, I find the UX on Mastodon is strictly superior to Twitter. The UI is more responsive, you have Tweetdeck style columns that let you track lists on the same page, you can mark content as sensitive, collapse long posts, and automatically caption images. I find all of these things are big quality of life improvements for me.

I also really like the fact that you can turn off notifications for likes and boosts. I only care about replies, and this lets me avoid the noise in my notifications.

Finally, another big UX feature is that you can follow people on other platforms that support ActivityPub. For example, I follow a few photographers on Pixelfed, and some streams on Lemmy in my feed.

For me Mastodon + my "Say Hi" calls every few days + groups Signal are a much more useful and less toxic combination. I miss forums.

Now, more about Mastodon itself:

In short, Mastodon is less toxic and the feed doesn't artificially amplify content made to generate engagement.

People tend to mistake free speech and discourse artificially shaped to pump ads in your eyeballs and that shows. Your content IS moderated but more subtly, and your mod is an advertising company.

On Mastodon, you'll _still_ see weird crap on the federated feed (including controversial stuff, like xenophobic content), but quickly you'll realise that the ratio of truly disturbing, aggressive or xenophobic content is much, much lower.

This is partially due to:

- the fact that algorithmic feeds rely on controversial, divisive, emotional responses as they turn into higher engagement.

- the fact that people are still weird, but _way less_ evil and mean.

You can think of Mastodon as a mix of an internet forum and a chat from 2005. For instance, the default client UX can be clunky (no sweet ad revenue $$), but it doesn't go in your way like the dark patterns on Twitter (e.g. the chronological feed resetting to the algorithmic one ever x days).

Also, you can always change the default client. Elk is neat.

Mastodon will perform worse in terms of reach, but better in terms of engagement (let's appreciate the irony here).

One of the comments says:

> The best alternative to twitter is no twitter

And I 100% agree with that. Better go outside and touch grass, pet a dog. I wish internet forums were more utilised, because I use micro-blogging mostly for announcements regarding my projects and this format encourages shallow discourse.

Edit: be more specific about the UX issues pertaining mostly to the default client. Thanks @wowfunhappy

> For instance, the UX can be clunky (no sweet ad revenue $$)

Once you've chosen an instance (which I realize is fundamentally a bit weird because of how we've been conditioned to use the internet), what exactly is wrong with Mastodon's UX?

To my eyes, it's basically Twitter circa-2013 or so.

Thanks, I meant the client, so made the comment more clear on that.

Following across federated instances using the default client would be the first issue that comes to my mind. It should be a single click.

Not a big deal and already fixed in alternative clients.

What I wanted to highlight (poorly) is that because the UX isn’t adversarial (dark) it’s still much more of a pleasant experience to use.

Thanks! Just to be clear, the reason I asked is because this is something I keep hearing from lots of people, not just you!

IMHO ActivityPub the protocol is a a perfectly suitable alternative to other platforms. Not perfect, but good enough that I have no major objections. And the fact that it is currently in the lead makes it an easy choice.

Mastodon is currently the most popular software that implements that protocol. However, I think Mastodon is very flawed. There are many design decisions that are just awful both in the realms of UX and also software architecture.

Thankfully ActivityPub is an open protocol. Anyone can come up and make a competitor. And that's what I hope happens. Some other social platform(s) implement ActivityPub and replace Mastodon.

It's similar to how back in the day Apache was absolutely the dominant web server, but nowadays nginx is on top. Anyone out there reading this, please make the nginx of ActivityPub.

I finally signed up for Mastodon after years of reading it just wasn't good enough, when Twitter had their "ban all Mastodon addresses" phase. I follow people I follow on Twitter and there is substantially less noise. Overall way above what my expectations were.

Aye. I moved from the bird to the elephant and will never go back The crowd on Masto is a lot less toxic and theres no Musk

The exodus definitely showcased who can exist in a society among people they support as well as people they object to and people who need to be in a selective group to be comfortable. Interesting stuff.

There's a difference between "exists in a society with people they object to" and "wants to have people who are actively hostile to their existence constantly shoved into their timeline and conversations by an algorithm designed to keep you glued to Twitter for as long as possible, regardless of what it does to your mood and mental health".

No. Because Twitter and other online spaces are not society. They’re a bizarro world version of that. Case in point: nearly everyone is 5 clicks more obnoxious on Twitter than in real life. Confrontations happen that wouldn’t otherwise.

Not to say that I disagree with you in principle but I'd think there is a large difference between disagreeing with someone's opinions and disagreeing with someones values. You generally can't have a meaningful conversation in the latter case.

At the moment? Yes.

It's nowhere near as active as Twitter (or to be honest, many social media sites), but it's leagues ahead of the other Twitter alternatives online at the moment, and you often get the same people chat to you on a regular basis. It's got a community feel for sure, and my posts have done a lot better than they did on Twitter because of it.

As for the others I've tried...

Hive was promising once, but the months of non availability after the security issues came to the fore basically took a sledgehammer to whatever level of activity it had, and most people moved on. It also has an issue with self promoters basically having free reign, and said folks having no interest in actually holding a discussion. This is easy to see on the trending content pages, where about 3/4 of the posts are random folks posting selfies and advertising their Twitch streams.

Post is okay... if you're interested in political content. If you want to discuss any sort of hobby, the activity just isn't there. This was probably made worse by the ridiculous waiting list that existed for signups prior, where your average (non referred) member had to wait weeks to get an account there.

Other sites and services I've seen for this are dead as a doornail, and basically have zero people using them on a regular basis.

The Hogwarts Legacy drama on mastodon.lol is a perfect example why it's not better or worse. Turns out the software doesn't really matter, it's the people https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34748195

There was also a very very good comment here on yesterday https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34934996

>... every federated network will be judged by the worst actor in that network, whether or not they are isolated from each other. As a result it doesn't matter (for public opinion) if there are strictly moderated mastodon instances because they will be associated with the free-for-all ones by the Mastodon name alone. This is different from how the internet as a whole is interpreted, where both HN and 4chan can exist without impacting each others reputation

Personally I will keep using Twitter unless a critical mass (+50%) of my followings (37 accounts) will move permanently. But not even a single account I follow moved... Anyways I just use the linear timeline, no ads, no algorithmic tweets. Nothing really have changed so far.

You can make accounts on any or all of those new apps. You can make multiple mastodon or other fediverse accounts. The networking can be very good, but it just takes more effort, which is why people consolidated to Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn in the first place.

The three main things people seem to need with Mastodon are:

1. A server to join. Try techhub.social or hachyderm.io or infosec.exchange or ioc.exchange or sfba.social or even one of the official servers like mastodon.online -- any of those will be fine

2. An app. I use the web interface and am happy with it, but I've also tried Ivory and it's a pretty good app

3. People to follow, to get started. That's going to depend on your interests. There was a HN post with a lot of good recommendations here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34413641

The web site https://fedi.tips/ collects a bunch of suggestions in this vein for improving your fediverse experience.

The best way to find interesting people to follow is to follow hashtags you are interested in and see who is using those hashtags.

In a sense Mastodon reminds of the very early stages of Twitter, where there was mostly no toxicity and people were mostly kind and willing to participate in civilized discussions. Hopefully this will continue that way for longer time, given the get-popular-quick schemes that worked on Twitter don't tend to work in Mastodon.

But be careful of the server you choose. I submitted this some days ago to see what people think, albeit it got no traction, so I'll put again here just in case:

https://lapcatsoftware.com/articles/mastodon2.html

If switching servers is not made painless and straightforward, we'll end up having a single, mostly trusted, mostly centralized server (whatever that happens to end up being), because nobody wants to see themselves in the situation of losing their accounts on a server that seemed to be trustworthy. And also nobody wants to put on themselves the burden of having to make a full research on the viability of each and every potential server that they might want to use, that's something that shouldn't be a problem solved by individual users, but a problem solved by the service itself, somehow. A Covenant is far from enough.

Mastodon is federated and thus more resistant to user-hostile takeovers, unlike other alternatives like post.news that are basically clones of Twitter that aren't owned by Musk yet. That's why I moved to a local Mastodon instance. nostr is tied to toxic Web3 bullshit so I didn't even consider it.

s/Web3/bitcoin maxis/g

I like mastodon. Not sure anyone here can accurately tell you whether it fits your needs (especially since ppl use twitter very differently).

One difference that sticks out to me is that mastodon isn't designed to goad for more engagement. For example, 'likes' on mastodon are public but not the same thing as 'resharing' in terms of appearing in timelines. Twitter used to treat likes similarly, but over time it changed. I imagine they saw more engagement when 'likes' were treated more and more like 'retweets.' I appreciate that on mastodon I can show the author of a post I like the content without automatically putting it in the feed of my own followers (and it's easy to do both if I chose to).

I'm getting good mileage out of Mastodon by being selective about who I follow and curating that well. Being able to choose who you read (and who you don't!) and when is a huge advantage over Twitter.

I'm on Mastodon and in agreement with most of the on-topic top-level comments that it's much more pleasant and less toxic. I've heard good things about Akkoma, though, so I've been meaning to check it out: https://akkoma.dev/AkkomaGang/akkoma/#differences-with-plero...

Stuff like support for code blocks, different reactions are a draw for me, coming from Mastodon.

Unfortunately the quality of the apps and app ecosystem is not the dominating factor, for me and I believe for most people. It's the network.

I'm on Mastodon, at this point just to be another follower of all the people I want to follow - who come to check it out, but Twitter is still where it's at for my network.

Hopefully that'll change soon.

Either way, if Twitter is out for you, there's nothing else that really looks like it'll gain traction aside from Mastodon.

I (and apparently most of the people I follow) moved to Mastodon and bridge some posts to Twitter, hopping over to keep tabs on stragglers and read the odd comic that is still Twitter only.

I’ve no regrets other than now having two places to check daily.

Less likely to take something seriously named after Nostradamus. I'm sorry but until it gets renamed it's hard to buy into it. It has huge backing from Jack Dorsey staking his reputation on it by tweeting about it but in all seriousness like for like replacements aren't useful. If this thing goes mainstream it won't be for the reasons it started and it's going to take 5+ years before that happens. Along with a rename.

Twitter was never particularly profitable, so what's the incentive?

Exactly how most people feel about Twitter then?

I think this question will be answered better in a few months.

I was finally able to make an account (when I tried most servers weren't allowing it) and I followed a ton of people that moved off twitter... but I came to realize they seem to have stopped posting all together or quietly migrated back. (our very own pg, for example)

To add to this, I hopped to escape the politics on mastodon (more akin to 2000s style IRCs or forums) but visiting after a few months (mas.to instance) it seems even more polarizing than twitter. 8/10 posts on the explore tab are a "political dunk." Exhausting. That's why I use HN more than anything else these days, lol.