As Twitter destroys its brand by renaming itself X, Mastodon user numbers are again soaring | TechCrunch
As Twitter destroys its brand by renaming itself X, Mastodon user numbers are again soaring | TechCrunch
As Twitter ditches its iconic branding in favor of owner Elon Musk's favorite letter "X," its open source competitor Mastodon is once again seeing usage numbers soar.
It's not just lemmy that's benefiting from Elon Musk.
I'm sure there were a huge swath of people who used Twitter and didn't care at all about Musk one way or the other.
Then he rebranded and threw his ego and control in everyone's face. And all the people who like Twitter IN SPITE of Elon were now forced to acknowledge that their Twitter is gone.
Just like over at reddit now, the latest move has alienated the people who really cared about the platform itself. If they rebranded to "Spez's World", though, a lot of the people who didn't give a shit before would suddenly be ready to bail.
Lmao "Spez's world" will be so funny though
He has so thoroughly ruined Twitter that you can't help but wonder if that was his goal from the outset.
Narcissists like him would never seek failure intentionally.
To what end, though? The man blew 44b on a site that apparently was only worth 5-10b, and that was before he ran it into the ground. He also destroyed his reputation and the mystique as "genius entrepreneur" which the world can now clearly see he never was.
I can't think of a single net positive. I think it's an age old tale with people with too much money: he fell victim to an over inflated ego and too many yes men aiming to please. He started to believe he really was brilliant.
Sad thing is the man has so much money he still can't fail, personally. He'll have destroyed Twitter and even more people will lose their jobs. And autocrats around the world will be pleased. Musk will just shrug, tell himself it wasn't his fault, "it was the libs" or something, and move on.
Eta: the only winners here, as per usual, are the shareholders.
44b sounds like a lot of money (it is!), but his net worth right now is 219b after this fiasco. At this point it's just a score between rich assholes who got the bigger number.
You could take 200b away from his evaluation and he could still retire on a yacht and not work a single day in the next 100 years. Same for his children and his children's children.
So yeah, "bad" financial investment, but it might be worth for him to kill one of the biggest platforms where he was called out for his bullshit.
IMO Mush was trying to run a simple pump and dump scheme with Twitter stock. You know, make some statements about ho he's going to buy it at a massively inflated price, sell all the stock during the uptick and then suddenly find some issue with the sale and leave. However, during the "make some statements" phase he managed to make some legally binding statements and Twitter and their lawyers held him to them.
So there's no agenda or plan really, just a larger version of the Dogecoin pump and dumps that Mush has done in the past. It's just this time rather than some crypto rubes he tried running it on a company with lots of lawyers and it blew up in his face.
To reduce the ability of the 99% to interact with each other on a basis that results in change of the 1% methodology.
The people running this nation and the rest of the world absolutely do not want us getting together and figuring out how to make change effectively. I'm pretty sure it's why they keep ruining all of the social networks, we can't unite if there's not a platform for us to do so on..
Elon is a narcissistic idiot, but that's all he is. He bought the same crap his own PR team was peddling a few years ago, figured he didn't need his PR team because he was so great (according to propaganda they spread), and went on to confidently make idiotic decisions because of course the real life Tony Stark can make no mistakes
Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.
I wonder if his goal isn't for Twitter to be successful. I'm wondering if political influence will help to get cushty deals or legislative changes favourable to Tesla or SpaceX.
Why worry about losing $30bn from one hand when you gain $100bn in another?
Honestly even if the executive wanted to crash Twitter on purpose I'm not sure they could have done as good as Musk.
He's carefully destroying the brand, the infrastructure, the finances and the credibility of Twitter.
You can't be too quick because then people would take about for maybe a month and move over.
No it had to be slow and painful so everyone start to really hate it.
Is this migration already called xit? Because it should..
Xodus
tweXit
tweXit does have a nice ring to it. Made me laugh 😂
Not sure which I like more. I think I'll use both.
Xitting the Xitter (shit-ter)
Xatter (shat-ter)
It’s not the rebrand that’s killing Twitter. Elon is. He’s proving to himself that he cannot, in fact, run Twitter better than the prior owners.
I wonder if previous twitter execs are feeling a bit bad to have sold him twitter to see it destroyed like that.
I mean it certainly proves Elon is an idiot as he used fraud to manipulate the price and got played instead.
But was it worth it to let him destroy Twitter just because he tried to defraud it?
As someone who doesnt use twitter... yes this was totally worth it!
I’d be bummed out but happy I have an unlimited supply of hundred dollar bills to wipe away the tears.
I wonder how long twitter would able to run at a loss if elon didn’t take it over as a slapstick joke went wrong.
I’m sure the previous execs are crying into their wads of cash. So much sympathy for them.
Lol. Like if they gave a shit they would have forced that buyout to go through.
Yeah. I left with the bluetlicker shitstain bump up in every reply. The dumbest people to ever buy a device and learn English that somehow didn't choke on rocks as a kid...
Just had enough and had to leave
To be honest, for me it absolutely was the rebranding that made me delete the app.
Cool, but the article is from July 24th
Just deleted my Twitter account. Of course, the app gave nothing but errors so I had to do it on desktop, but it’s done!
So now you have an ex-Twitter account. Or an X account for short.
Maybe Elon was truly 200 IQ with his naming
I deleted all of mine and move to mastodon when I heard Elon was possibly going to buy it. I'm glad I did, because who knows what he has all implemented since then.
I am sure my account was never "deleted", even under Jack, but at least I know I gave the best chance for my data to be deleted.
Twitter under Elon looks similar to the UK under Brexit.
So smooth sailing right? Right??
I find Mastodon very stuffy and boring, is there a way to shake up my feed? I feel like I'm missing something about how the app works.
I'd recommend following the hashtags you want to see. It's sort of a build-your-own algorithm
This is a huge thing about the fediverse.
Users are used to being told what they want (algorithms) without any choice (centralised and only platform).
Whereas Lemmy and Mastodon require users to curate their stuff.
Perhaps some "meta fedi" sites would be useful. Things that generate lists of hashtags, instances and users "shake up" your experience
This is a welcome change tbh. All these other platforms push rage bait and crap just to drive engagement numbers.
It's refreshing to go back a little to how the Internet used to be. You had to go and find what you liked, not have a million things pushed on you.
Subscribe to the hashtags you're interested in.
Tools help, and because the Fediverse API is completely accessible, folks have already come up with awesome stuff.
- Populate your following list by finding friends, the Fedifinder still appears to work and helps find friends from Twitter on Masto: https://fedifinder.glitch.me/
- Now find friends of friends, the wider social graph. Followgraph works wonders: https://followgraph.vercel.app/
- Now you will likely miss posts, so try following updates of people if you really enjoy their content, plus of course pinning hashtags. PLUS. Up your game with an algorithm, either in the dedicated Mastodon app (trending posts) or with more customisation through the app Fediview: https://fediview.com/ Using Mastodon Digest (GitHub), you could also set up your own automation script.
- Folks have created lists and groups you can mass subscribe. The most successful one I know is from and for academics, perhaps there is a field for you in there. Journalists have similar stuff. See https://github.com/nathanlesage/academics-on-mastodon
- There are many awesome apps out there to access your content, improving the experience. I recommend Phanpy because of its unique and sleek design, see https://phanpy.social/. If you miss Quote Tweets and other stuff, try an app like Elk.
- Mastodon is only one option, if you want all of Twitter's tools and more cool stuff, try Firefish. You can migrate followers and posts. This way, you can skip many external tools.
And that's just the beginning.
This is a brilliantly helpful reply.
I agree... it feels like the Fediverse doesn't quite have the same algorithms that the single-corporation services have, and I feel it most in the search to broaden the content I see. Hopefully the exploratory element picks up as time goes on!
The Fediverse doesn't do algorithmic pushing and that's a feature, not a bug.
The main ways to find new stuff on Mastodon are all actions taken by you, the user:
- Hashtags. Watch and follow hashtags you like. Hashtags are the main way stuff is categorized, and if you use them liberally on your own posts and find others posting to those same tags you can find accounts which align with those interests of yours.
- Home. Check out stuff in the "home" timeline which will be your neighbors on your own Mastodon instance. (In the case of general instances this isn't so helpful, but in those instances themed around a hobby, subculture, geographical area, etc. you know you have that common ground with your neighbors to start with.)
- Boosts. When you find people and accounts to follow, they boost (reblog/retweet) things they like, you find things to boost, etc. and it all works like a friend introducing you to their other friends, friends of friends, etc. leading to your own circle of friends increasing.
All these are things you do and you have to put a little work in to make them happen, but it's purely fueled by your own interests and wants instead of the traditional social-media algorithm which does a little aligned-interest stuff but is mostly powered by whoever has money to pay the platform to force them into your timeline. On Twitter or Facebook you get shown what the platform thinks they can get paid by showing you. On the Fediverse the rules of invasive centralized ad-choked personal-data-harvesting social media don't apply; you get shown what you actually want and request.
It's different and change can be scary, but when you get used to the idea that things don't have to work the old way anymore it can end up being a good thing.
have a look here https://lemmyverse.net/communities
Why isn't kbin magazines in that list of communities?
Follow a lot of people to fill up your feed. Be generous with it, and if someone you followed continuously posts something you're not interested in, you can just unfollow, or put up a filter so those posts from that person do not show up.
There's also a feature to follow hashtags so they appear in your home feed, so just search hashtags of things you find interesting. That's a good way to find new people to follow as well! Advanced web view also allows you to make feeds for specific hashtags or hashtag combinations for even more control.
And if you happen to find an instance catered to your specific interests, you can make an account there, and you can even migrate an existing account so your followers come with. Chances are the local feed will be filled up with content you enjoy on such an instance.
And if you want to help your followers discover similar people, be sure to boost content you enjoy.
On Mastodon, you are in control of your feeds. Even on the federated timeline, to an extent (as filters work there as well).
Follow hagstags and accounts you like. Also ask for follow recommendations and introduce yourself, some hosts share introductions to people.
I wanted to use mastodon, but I haven't even used twitter in years, so then I realized I just don't social media that way anymore (or much at all for that matter).
I got it and I'm trapped in a weird bubble of shit that doesn't really interest me and I don't like microblogging I think
Same. @squizzy, I don't like microblogging in general either. I was raised in the golden era of forums (the days of phpBB and vBulletin). My twitter account hasn't been touched for years now.
I mostly used twitter for checking trending topics for news
I was finally super duper permabanned from Reddit, and decided to give up. No more workarounds, new accounts, new emails, spoofing MAC addresses, multihop VPNs... And I've got to say, I have gotten more done in the past few weeks than in the last year combined.
I never used Twitter save for occasionally hearing about tweets, but I have been enjoying using Mastodon because in practice it's basically just a way for me to have a feed of cool astronomy pictures.
I found cool astronomy pictures on Reddit, and some now on lemmy! Cheers for random cool pictures of space.
Lemmy would be soaring too if it weren't for terrible database code allowing for easy ddos.
Try using a smaller instance. I recently switched from lemmy.world to lemmy.zip and it's lightning fast. While you still get all the content from lemmy.world :)
I find it interesting how many people are looking for the overall lemmy experience. The first thing I did was find the community niche that interested me and the relevant instance, then when I've exhausted that instance I switch to the Everything tab and all find the generic content.
Edit: I accidentally wrote fine the community niece...
I think I’m up to 5 lemmy instances now. Various reasons that others will figure out as they gain experience.
switched from LW to discuss online
At least it's open for collaboration so people who can or help contribute to fix bugs for them are able to do so. That's the beauty of open source, anyone can help out.
Can we have something nice here please? I miss when the internet was nice, and you were allowed to talk to each other about whatever you wanted.
TRON FIGHTS FOR THE USER!
There were stories that Tesla had a team in place to distract Elon any time he showed up to the office, and I absolutely believe that. Now that Elon has Twitter to distract him, I wonder what that team is up to.
Fuck spez. Why isn't he doing more psycho shit like Elon so he can move more people to Lemmy.
Apparently, as a competitor of any major platform you just need to get close to the features your adversary has and wait for that site/service to start the process of enshittification, let's see if reddit makes more blunders
I feel that reddit is already at this stage. It started feeling more like a half-bombed corporate minefield so I decided to flee the site one week ago. This site feels much more like things should be. You can even browse on a decent site on your phone.
Try Voyager/WefWef from a browser, it improves the UX a lot
Nice, the official P.J. Fry.
I've been trying to stick to Mastodon and ditch Twitter, but honestly, even though I've gotten into the habit of using Mastodon every day, it's pretty hard for me to resist accepting information from Twitter.
It's ok to get information from places like X/Twitter or Reddit. It's even fine to have an account. But it's better to post your OWN material to platforms that best align with your sensibilities.
My issue with Mastodon is that many big companies still use Twitter/X as their main way to publish news outside of of their websites and press releases.
It's all about what matters most to you.
I'm not usually interested in what big companies have to say, but I follow some journalists who fortunately cross post to Mastodon, but all discussion takes place on elmo's X site.
I am so annoyed that Twitter got ruined.
Don't get me wrong. I don't like Twitter. I don't follow anyone on Twitter. But if I had no other recourse I could complain about a corporation that wasn't paying any attention to me and they would do something about it.
By the way fuck FedEX. Is there a place on mastadon I can bitch about FedEx? I have had a mis-delivered package sitting on my porch for over a month. I call about every three or four days and tell them, pick up your package so it can go to the right place. They say they will get it. They never do.
Never use FedEx.
Is there a place on mastadon I can bitch about FedEx?
#fuckfedex #fedex
I like the idea of referring to it only as "The social media site formerly known as Twitter" from here on out.
Also "former bird site" has a nice ring to it
I use the historical name, twitter, because to the extent future historians will have to talk about it, that's the name they'll use. I cannot imagine it will do anything of relevance from this point forwards except as a glaring example of the failures of capitalism.
the name "X" is just a bunch of pollution to other topics that happens to have something of the same name. i hate it.
Ex-twitter
Musk trashed Twitter with intent, by design, and on purpose. Elon Musk is worth 95 Billion more now than when he bought Twitter.
The continued forced cognitive dissonance is the grandest example of info_corpo_kabuki i've ever seen. It's all just so fucking dumb.
Elon bought it to trash it so he could have access to Saudi markets for his electric cars and rocket ships. The face he's a fascist fucking cunt who gets to stick it to liberals where they most liked to exchange news, information and organize online was just a bonus for him.
He didn't want to buy Twitter. He lost a lawsuit that forced him to buy it. None of it goes that deep.
I don't buy this, simply because he bought it. He didn't need to destroy it, could could have just turned it off.
That Twitter had essentially become accepted as an official source of communication and Elon's purchase of Twitter so near to the time that he was experimenting with his ability to perform market manipulation on his own companies using Twitter, those things combined made me assume a large part of his reason for purchasing Twitter was to see how far he could take market manipulation and if he could influence other companies. In my darkest version of this scenario, I think Elon was just testing how far his reach is.
Maybe the verified checkmark debacle really was created by incompetence and Twitter tried quickly to fix it, or maybe it was a nefarious way to undermine legitimacy and cause a multi-billion dollar blip on the stock market. Either way, I could easily imagine Musk telling politicians and CEOs after that, "look at what I was able to do just by moving a single finger. Now imagine what I could do to you if I really wanted to."
This. He's on the hook for a relatively small percent of his personal wealth. He has a ton of government contracts, which equate to cash flow. To insulate that cash flow, he needs a loss. He can get that loss by destroying the value of Twitter, which he also artificially inflated by making an insane offer in the first place.
The thing that folks don't get is that money is different when you have none, some, and a ton. When you have none, you are effectively living moment to moment - when youre out, you spend what you have on your immediate needs, and make it work the rest of the time.
When you have some, which is most of us, you may live paycheck to paycheck, but you can still plan two weeks at a time and may have some long term plans.
Elon musk and others in his bracket could literally burn 99% of their wealth and still have more money than almost anyone else. This level of rich is marked by planning years in advance, and having contingency plans to take advantage of set backs. For example, a market crash for most of us means we lose wealth and still probably never recover it. But for Elon musk, a market crash is just a fire sale on stock. He can sell at a loss for tax benefit, or he can buy up stuff at step discounts. The benefit of wealth is that ever situation can make you more money.
Elon Musks' favorite thing on earth is tweeting dumb shit to his mob of ass-kissers, I doubt he trashed Twitter on purpose. I think he really is just an extremely rich hair-brained dumbass.
Yes thank you, this is what’s happening for sure. He’s so immature and petty and he can’t hide it.
That is right baby. The Fedi is a life raft always waiting to scoop people up.
Honestly, I joined Twitter begrudgingly in 2015 after ignoring it for years only because I thought it might be easy to keep up with some interesting news before it hit Reddit.. and it worked for a while...
Now, I just wonder why I'm still there at all.
I also don't.see why I might want a mastodon account at this point though... I don't feel like I need a replacement for something that I never really liked...
I feel the same about Mastodon. I just want to be social with my friends, not on broadcast to a bunch of randos. It makes sense for brands and I guess people who commercialize their identity. But I don't really care about trying to keep up with the lives of brands or really people i don't know, so i haven't want or need for such a site. Also I prefer to catch up with someone for real. Like tell me what you did when we hang out next. I don't want to sit there and pretend like your trip to wherever is news because i already casually saw all the pictures you posted a month ago. And if we are never going to meet again, then I don't need to know what you do with the rest of your life. I like this format much better. Ego is much less in effect and people can just bounce ideas and jokes around. Reddit though... most of the user base is still over there. I've stopped posting and voting entirely. Full lurk mode.
You and I have very similar attitudes on this it seems for sure.
Fuck reddit and mastodon and twatter and all of it at this point ...
Lemmy is pretty good and I'm content with it for the most part.
There's an ethical consideration when you sell a company. Dorsey and co. took a big payout and this is the result. I was thinking earlier about how this probably wouldn't have been happened if you had an even equity split across the company's employees.
It was a corporation. Corporations exist to get shareholders paid. You can't expect those to not be for sale for the right price, which in this case was more than it was worth. If you want the people running companies to make decisions based on ethics, you should ban publicly traded corporations first otherwise it's just not happening.
I mean, they routinely make the unethical decision. They probably wouldn't be in the position to make it in the first place if they didn't already have dollar signs in their eyes. And I've been around enough tech companies to know that's usually the way it breaks down.
You're right, this is the only decision where we can't judge Dorsey's ethics, and we should be attacking a dozen other positions and mistakes he's made. If it would even help; twitter addicts probably don't wanna hear it.
I recall Dorsey publicly coming out in support of Elon's Twitter well after the sale. Maybe there was no ethical conflict for Dorsey and he likes what he sees.
Yeah, maybe all of this wouldn't have happened if the equity was split among the employees.
Showing ongoing public support is often written into the contract with these big deals; Dorsey probably has to say he supports Musk for a few years at least
Why are people so fucking addicted to Twitter? It's just people posting a few sentences about shit I see on the Internet already. But what do I know, I've gone my entire life without using the stupid shit. Maybe I'm not taking into account how many people want to be internet celebrities with their parroted tweets and recycled jokes. Why is it so hard to make another site where dumbass celebrities can feed 2 lines to the drooling masses?
Twitter culture (depending on what parts of twitter you were on) was really hard to explain. Unless you used it and really knew how to, you don't really get the benefit from it. Its feed structure combine with post length and algorith meant that it was really easy for you to know what other people were saying about things going on right now (reality shows, football matches etc). It also made searching for news so easy (due to its Trending feature), so you were kept in the loop about things.
The meme culture of Twitter was also very unique. I can say with absolute confidence that Twitter memes were bomb (before Musk ruined it). Way better than any memes I'd come across on Reddit or Lemmy so far.
The only problem is you had to take Twitter in small doses. Stan culture and cyber-bullying culture were real negatives of Twitter. Certain people on that app were unhinged and that went unchecked because of how echo-chambers were set by the algorithm. You really had to check yoursel to make sure you weren't being corrupted, especially because cyber-bullying was so normalised there (at least in my experience).
It was really good for artists and entertainers (streamers included) to gain a following
Wouldn't you have to care about nfts though? I feel like I'd rather have their art on a T-shirt.
idk why but I felt the need to remind everyone
that's cool. The Masto instance I've been on for the last half year is no longer available and I'll have to start over because I didn't have a main and a back up account like I ended up with on Lemmy, but sure, that's alright. I have no idea what happened, the instance still has a blank page up, but it ain't Mastodon.
I was finally feeling moved in but now, kaput.
I don't think this thing was really ready for absolutely everyone on Twitter to bail onto it, is the problem. I don't think it was ever supposed to be. It was always supposed to be like a clubhouse for people who didn't mind being the dweebs of the internet.
Mastodon will never be a twitter replacement simply because of lack of algorithm and proper content discovery, but seemingly the devs and admins there are fine with it and prefer it that way. It is definitely not filling my need for curated news and discovery of new interests that twitter used to provide before it went to shit, seems like bluesky might take over that function since most big content creators are shilling their bs pages nowadays.
Mastodon doesn't want to replace twitter. Twitter is shit. Mastodon is already far better than twitter. Mastodon depends on twitter continuing to exist so that twitter can suck up all the shit and leave the rest of us in peace.
If you were getting your news from Twitter, it probably turned you into an idiot already! So no worries.
For everyone on Twitter to bail onto it there would need to be an instance with the same level of funding and infrastructure as Twitter to support it.
Sounds just like Lemmy and any other fediverse service.
I'm starting to believe Elon never cared about twitter. He only bought the userbase and is doing whatever with it. That's sad. Twitter is just not what it once was.
He very obviously did not want to buy Twitter; he tried for months to get out of it but because of stupid things he had publicly said, if he had failed to go through with it, he might have been up on criminal market manipulation charges. He was forced to purchase it by legal action from Twitter after he said the stupid things.
I think that's it. His vision is to try and make a WeChat competitor. As much as I hate it, I fear that if he can string along the investors for long enough he could actually maybe make it successful if he adds everything else to it.
But the Fediverse is growing too which is better. Let Musk and Zuck have their dick measuring competition and let's build something better over here!
yayyyyyyyyyyyy
Huh???
Elon bought Twitter by accident, he's stuck with it. Chances are he's either playing with it until it implodes, or he's turning it into something else entirely with the benefit of an existing user base.
Nah man, the ultrawealthy are used to having some avenue of publishing that they own. Bezos has the Washington Post, Twitter was supposed to be his "newspaper" so to speak.
Except he's a clown and can't keep from sticking his dick in everything so he just went ahead and fucked it.
that's fair
It'sstrange to me to see people waxing nostalgic about Twitter when it's always been a cesspit.
A consistent cesspit that wasn't dying because of management's stupid decisions and that was enshittified slower than other services
I never used it. I just mean, the blatant transformation of the platform (going from twitter to X) and so on. I know it meant something to people.
Honestly twitter was already pretty awful. He just somehow made it awfuler
The term soaring is pretty relative in this case. It's still completely unknown to the majority of the world. It's just like Lemmy, where the very few rigid types that absolutely couldn't stand for one particular thing that happened to their social network will do anything, including cutting their nose off to spite their face rather than continue to use it. That's why we're all here and it's why nobody else but us are coming.
Hey Elon! I hear there's this bigger, better Public Square that you should buy. I hear it needs more fascists to platform their hate...ahem, "free" speech in. It's called Reddit.
Someone in an unrelated discussion, wrote on LinkedIn that blackberry was profitable and grew for a few years after iPhone was anounced. The same for blockbuster after Netflix came to business. Then he was asking on what technologies today will be obsolete because an iPhone has emerged. For me lemmy or mastodon although slow but slowly will eat the competitors as they develop.
For me I am still reading Reddit since lots of information is there. But I am avoiding on participating there.
Reddit has become yahoo answers for me. If an answer from Google pops up, read the top comment or two to get an answer and move on.
Good, Twitter is a disgrace to humanity
I don’t think I cared about Twitter, the entire duration of its existence, and now there’s a whole new thing that’s apparently the same and I still don’t care about
my engagement rates on mastodon and bluesky have been significantly higher than twitter despite having 1/5 the number of followers
Small town big city syndrome, in a small community you can conceivably know, recognise or otherwise relate to a good proportion of the people in your town, and anyone you don't know you likely know people in common - but once a community gets big enough your brain can't deal with it and your neighbours become an abstract concept, background noise, rather than people.
I remember someone studied this real sociology. They watched people greeting each other in small towns and such and found that around the 1000 person mark people stopped greeting each other.
I've notice the same thing on hiking trails. If I only see a few people the whole day we not only greet each other but we may stop to chat. More people and you just say hi. A very popular trail though? You might get a nod.
I get 5 bot followers a month since Elon took over twitter
yeah besides bot followers I mean like likes and people replying and being cool
Does anyone have figures on subscription hikes to other fediverse systems? Mastodon is probably the best like-for-like switch for casual birdsite fans, but I wonder if there's also an emerging desire for something a little different.
if there was (more) portuguese content in mastodon I'd move to it
Be the change you want to see in the world.
That's what every Brazilian and Portuguese thought of before they gave up on joining. It's a chicken and egg scenario. The loop must be broken by early adopters and selfless contributors.
I made a mastodon account but there aren't as many meme feeds on mastodon.
That's my problem too. Weird Twitter just doesn't seem to be a thing on mastodon , or if it is the lack of an algorithm makes it hard to find the right kind of accounts to follow
They definitely exist - quite a lot of them in fact - it's just after the big migrations in 2022, the kind of people who tend to get popular on Mastodon are the more "serious" posters, as they've eclipsed the memers in popularity. (Eternal September kind of thing)
If you check out the explore and local feeds of instances such as Wet Dry World or Beige Party, you'll find the meme posters, who you can then follow.
What doesn't help either is that meme posters never use hashtags, even though they're the primary way to be discovered on Mastodon. On the other hand, people who are posting "serious" takes tend to use hashtags a lot - this also helps skew the meme posters away from people. Unfortunately, hashtags have gone completely out of vogue and just aren't used by most people.
Mastodon is implementing full text search soon though, most likely with 4.2.0 (the next version), which should hopefully make things easier.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
As Twitter ditches its iconic branding in favor of owner Elon Musk’s favorite letter “X,” its open source rival Mastodon is seeing usage numbers soar.
According to a new post from Mastodon founder and CEO Eugen Rochko, the number of monthly active users for his Twitter alternative has been steadily climbing over the past couple of months to have now reached 2.1 million — or, as remarked Rochko, “not far off from our last peak.”
Meta’s recently launched Twitter rival known as Instagram Threads has committed to integrating with ActivityPub, which may have raised awareness around Mastodon and decentralized social networking in general.
Musk claimed that Twitter needed to change the rate limits to deal with a significant increase in bots and spam.
Or perhaps, it’s a combination of both of these things and more, including the momentum created by the launches of polished third-party Mastodon clients that have made using the social network less complicated and more enjoyable.
Other Mastodon apps like Ice Cubes and the no-frills client Radiant have also debuted, while Mastodon’s official mobile app received a refresh of its own earlier this month, aimed at addressing various pain points and adding more customization options.
I'm a bot and I'm open source!
Haven't used my twitter account in probably close to a decade or so but I still can't find a use for mastodon either.
Any android app recommendations? I'm yet to use Mastodon.
Megalodon is definitely the one.
Use https://elk.zone as a PWA. It's really good!
It's a Twitter UI clone, perfect for replacing behaviors without being too jarring of a UX switch.
I use Tusky on android, I'm happy with it.
I also recommend elk.zone
Official one, Tusky and for advanced users is Fedilab.
moshidon
Anyone using tooot ??
'Trunks' is a brand new one I'm liking an awful lot.
Edit: they have a web based front-end as well: https://trunks.social/
Megalodon or moshidon would be my recommendation
Tusky, Fedilab
Megalodon is quite good.
I use Tusky, and I like it. It's on F-Droid too
Soaring? 2.1M users is soaring? I'm all for the Fediverse, but it will never reach mainstream social media numbers, and honestly I hope it doesn't.
YouTuber Ctop is soaring!!!
I honestly hope the Fediverse does become the predominant medium through which online social discourse takes place. Probably not going to happen, but I can dream.
As long as no single instance dominates the entirety of the Fediverse, I think it could avoid many of the pitfalls of centralized social media platforms.
How's bluechew or whatever, I still haven't gotten an invite
These platforms always been here? So not really a down side to Elon here, gives users a taste of the wider internet?
I root for Mastodon like everyone else but as long as there is some very good improvement in discoverability and intelligent feeds, it will never be the same in function as Twitter (not X, Twitter). Especially when it currently has a fraction of the creators Twitter had.
For real, I just want to open an app and scroll. I’m not going to put effort into reading funny microblog posts. It’s why tiktok is so successful, the app is really really good at delivering relevant content.
Discoverabily is like crack. It's what hooks you, and it's what drags you into hell.
Good.
Is there a need to have a lemmy and Mastodon?
Theoretically they're somewhat interoperable but if you plan on using both you'll probably have a better experience having an account on an instance of each service.
Yeah, I think that's what I'm gonna do. I wanna try it out, I haven't used any popular social network in years though.
From what I heard mastodon is formatted more like twitter whereas lemmy is more like reddit.
You could use only one, but browsing lemmy through mastodon (and vice versa) isn't a great experience, so its recommended to have an account on both.
If you want just one account to experience both, use kbin.
I'm gonna give that a try and see, before I spend time making an account. Thanks for the recommendation!
Nice
And the award for the worst rebranding decision goes to Elon.
Still waiting for my friends to make the switch so I can delete this shite.
Or I might just delete it anyway and maybe they'll take notice and move. 😂
You can also ask yourself why you feel you should use Twitter because your friends are using it?
Not trying to offend or start shit, it's a genuine question.
It won't last unless Mastadon gets some serious improvements. It's buggy, glitchy, feature-poor, and confusing to use. There's no way in its current state it's going to compete with the big guys for the average person's attention.
Do you remember the early days of social media? IMHO, as the new hotness I’ve seen a rapid pace of improvements that I honestly expect to ramp up further as more utilization comes. Pure speculation but I’m basing it on my grey beard and the refreshing experience I’m having here.
I mean, they need to ramp it way faster. It's pretty garbage right now and there's really no excuse. Compare it to Lemmy and it's very obvious. Lemmy still has problems, but it's much easier to use and has way fewer bugs and glitches. If you're used to Reddit, then switching to Lemmy is pretty easy to do, and I can see average users making that jump. But Mastadon isn't even close to the user experience that Twitter/X offered, and I cannot see the average Twitter user sticking around and waiting for all the issue to be fixed.
From a user-experience standpoint I'm intrigued by the idea of someone who is comfortable using Lemmy finding Mastodon confusing to use. From a technical view it's literally the same stuff (ActivityPub + a distributed network) fueling the same general concept (federated social media) just with a different skin on top (Twitter/Tweetdeck-flavored instead of Reddit-flavored.)
It's all just decentralized online community organized by interest; a /c/ here is a hashtag on Mastodon. If you have already come to terms with instances and federation and such in order to use one, what about the other still confuses? Is it just the interface or are there deeper pain points?
"Just the interface" is a big deal.
Reddit is the same backend as the Reddit I was using through a third party app a few months ago, but the user experience is significantly worse for me, because the interface I'm accessing the service through adds friction to how I use the service and steers me towards how I don't use the service. Same with accessing email through a web interface versus Outlook versus Thunderbird versus Alpine versus the iOS Mail app.
Lemmy is how I want to interact with user-generated text and comments. Mastodon's interface is not. I don't care that it happens to be ActivityPub on the backend, because the interface drives how I consume and interact with the content.
It’s buggy, glitchy
I haven't seen any glitches or bugs for quite a while.
Which ones are you speaking of?
I've had no issues on Mastodon.World and the advance features are essentially tweetdeck.
Do you guys remember when I ordered that salad and when they brought it out, it was really really big.
yeah that was pretty cool.Really really big
I think also some people from certain generations are just confused by it. Don't want to deal with it.
Xport to
IMO X is shorter, easier to say and cooler. I like it!
Twitter, Tumblr and Bluesky seem to fill the Twitter void for me fairly well, as I am mostly participating in the Furry and Sonic communities which are some of the first to move to these platforms.
There's like 300 active users here. Just don't talk about piracy. Weaks
Sure they are xP
