> It’s becoming increasingly obvious that Twitter isn’t going to be that place with each new chaos monkey attack from Musk, but what the successor place is going to be remains to be seen.
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).
> First, Mastodon was going to be the new place. It wasn't.
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.
Right. Hell, I wasn't among those saying Mastodon was going to be the "new place" or that Twitter was otherwise on its way out. Even with my proximity to tech circles, Mastodon seemed to me hardly a blip on most people's radars.
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, say, I absolutely need to interact with a particular small page/business. I don't use Instagram. I have only since logged in to Twitter once to look at my Following list and make a 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.
you're here, and your old blog is about tech stuff, so there's a decent chance you follow a lot of tech people. there are plenty of _those_ on mastodon, because tech people will suffer through bad UX if the product has certain qualities that that community values (federation being the big one in this case)
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
> that doesn't hold for other groups. people that don't want to think about internet application protocols
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.
I don't go to Twitter to read takes by other programmers about a world which exists only online. I go to Twitter to discuss the world in front of us, a world which hasn't been so exciting and full of conflict for a very long time.
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.
Yeah, same here. For my purposes, Mastodon is superior to what Twitter was at its peak.
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.
I completely agree that Mastodon isn't the new place, and I am increasingly thinking Threads may not be either (at least not to Twitter level, or not for a few years), however I'm very convinced that Twitter is no longer the place either.
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.
Mastodon (actually, the Fediverse as a whole) is still growing in a very healthy, organic rate. Threads just tried to buy its way into a bootstrapped network.
Last year Mastodon went through a hype cycle. Everyone was declaring Twitter over. You had people stating they were leaving for good, dual-posting, etc. Funnily enough many of those same people are back on Twitter today with little mention of Mastodon.
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.
It’s so funny to me watching everyone debate about what is or isn’t going to be the next ultimate single massive platform.
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.
The Mastodon "hype cycle" was jam packed with people saying "this isn't it"[1]. The choice of server, account migration issues (partly resolved), and just some aesthetic reasons made it obvious it wasn't going to be the thing. There was a strong, I would say majority sentiment that everyone was waiting for some more Twitter-like competitor.
"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.
> It (mastodon) peaked in November. Musk's antics might prop it (Mastodon) up every once in a while but the long term trend doesn't look good.
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."
People keep claiming this but it isn’t reality. Not one of the programmers I follow have posted on mastodons in the last couple of months.
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.
Saying "Not one of the programmers I follow have posted on mastodons in months" we can't argue with, I don't know who those people are, that's your subjective experience and YMMV, you do you.
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". On the contrary, it works fine for me, as I said above.
"Discussions happen only on X not Y" is a binary, absolutist, black or white thinking. If taken literally, it is ridiculous. I suppose you would also say that this here isn't a discussion, because that's "only on twitter"?
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".
It did peak in December last year, but then it "declined" and stabilized at more than double the active users it had before Elon bought Twitter: https://mastodon-analytics.com/
That chart is missing the big late-june/early-july burst that came when Twitter locked out non-registered users and put a cap on read tweets. Big bump in new registrations and since then activity has been up a bunch as well. Not as big as December, but mostly because it was short lived.
> ...As people leave, the value of the network goes down so even more people leave...
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..."
For me mastodon is where I get my cybersecurity and infosec chat from now. HN is my generic techy stuff Reddit replacement, insta for mountain biking and twitter is for lower league Scottish football- it’s very well setup on there.
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.
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.
Xitter has moved from offering 50% off ad purchases of $250k a couple months ago to threatening removal of "gold checks" from companies that don't spend $1k.
That is not the strategy of a healthy advertising-driven company. It isn't even a strategy, that's flop-sweat.
The thing is that what matters is not the total number of users but who those users are. Anecdotally, there has been a slow exodus of people in my writer circles from Twitter, either deleting their accounts or just not using them as much. I’ve found less to bring me back each day. There might be people engaging more to make up for it, but they’re not the people in my circles.
Mastodon was really never going to be that place where most of the internet moved. It would've been nice in a perfect world, but it's simply not set up as an advertiser-friendly social networking site that would attract celebrities and brands, and quite frankly I think the vast majority of its userbase considers that a feature and not a bug.
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.
I'm getting regular bluesky invites, and people use them. It looks like the most "correct" implementation to me at this stage, although the having to jump through hoops to share videos is frustrating.
That tracks with what I'm seeing - BlueSky is where most of my twitter-addict friends have either already ended up or are angling to get into. A few of them have Mastodon accounts too.
Mastodon has been really cool recently. It was bare at first, but I've been back since November and there's a critical mass of awesome shit and cool people imo.
> First, Mastodon was going to be the new place. It wasn't.
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.
VC money is tight right now, and Twitter was never profitable. If I were an investor, you'd have to have some kind of revenue story if you were selling me a Twitter killer.
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.
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).
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).