I honestly think it sure will. People will probably go in 3 directions:
- Mastodon
- Wait for Bluesky
- Wait for Instagram “Threads”
Honestly, if people go fediverse way, they definitely should choose something like Misskey/Calckey. They’re much better options than mastodon IMO
I came to Lemmy and Mastodon today instead of Twitter and Reddit. So far, the experience has been positive.
Welcome!
The problem with Mastodon is that they don’t have very many major entities actively making posts. The main thing I track on twitter is OSINT and US politics, and that community basically doesn’t exist on Mastodon right now
I follow some major news sources on Mastodon (Reuters, NYT, WaPo, Guardian, and more). Im in NYC so I also follow transit alerts, one of the main reasons I had previously used Twitter.
That explains why it feels so empty, I can’t find any actual content on Mastodon despite how huge it supposedly is compared to Kbin and Lemmy
It takes a while to get it going. I go to the full federation feed and follow different users that I discover there, and also sometimes people that they follow… And I also follow some big news sources like Reuters. Eventually my followed feed has built up - it’s almost too many posts.
What you call a problem I call a relief. I’m tired of the cult of celebrity that corporate social media foists.
To each their own. I’m glad you enjoy mastodon
To each their own.
Indeed. That’s one of the gratifying things about the deaths of all the billionaire-owned sites. It’s giving room to breathe for those of us who don’t want their vision of a future of humanity on their knees before them servicing them.
Mastodon is best for sure!
Mastodon is good. But I find Calckey more appealing for average “Twitter user”. Again, it’s only my personal opinion
If more Twitter users had found Calckey or Misskey back in November, more would have stuck around. A lot more, I wager. It’s just such a better user experience in so many ways. And it’s gotten so much better in the last 6 months.
But even with prolonged discussions with some of them, they wouldn’t even look at it, because it was “Mastodon vs Twitter”, and Calckey wasn’t listed in that title fight.
I think we shouldn’t expect to see the same sort of migration from Twitter to Mastodon like we did for Reddit to Lemmy. Because of network effects, Mastodon will have a much harder time attracting refugees. What you can hope for is more of a slow drip as Twitter users get fed up with the platform. Every migrant to Mastodon makes it that much easier for the remaining Twitter users to move as well.
I’m hopeful but I wouldn’t count on it.
This is the thing, it is much harder to replicate your network on mastodon.
Lemmy is easy, you just look for communities of interest and join them. It’s largely a one sided affair (you the user), sure, people do have relationships in smaller communities but it’s the exception rather than the norm.
Twitter I follow about 500-600 people, and have a shade over 4000 followers. This is a lot harder to rebuild on a new platform. And many of those connections are (online) relationships built up on the platform over many years.
Moving from Twitter is a bit like leaving school. You might maintain relationships with a few of your closest friends, but on the whole, you will not see most of those people again, however much you enjoyed your time with them
I followed you on Mastodon ahaha.
Maybe it does go somewhere!
Consider the case where Twitter dies all at once. I really think we’re headed in that direction.
They went from 500 new users an hour to 4000 new users an hour in the past day. Im sure it’s all due to Twitter. Now, how many people will stick with it and become active users is anyone’s guess.
Mastodon is very stable and just excellent.
Been on mastodon for a couple of years. It’s excellent.
At least small artists have been really signing up since last night/this morning on mastodon.art. It is already causing a wave. Calckey is trying to grab more people, but half the shit doesn’t load for me right now so they can’t take the brunt of it.
Yeah, Mastodon will gain some more.
It’ll definitely happen, but it remains to be seen whether people will actually stay. For all we know, this latest Twitter thing could be resolved this week and people will come crawling back because they’ve built up a network/following there. Something like that is really hard to destroy, and even then I think it’s far more likely that a commercial product with a large budget and fancy apps takes in most of the users.
I also feel like the Twitter brand is still too well known to die forever. Even if it goes away for a while, someone else will buy it and bring it back.
Like Friendster and Myspace, those two grandly important pieces of the modern social media landscape?
Friendster was a flash in the pan and didn’t really have much buy-in from corporations, etc. Myspace was only truly popular for about 4-5 years, and even at its peak it never reached Twitter levels of popularity. Even still, the brand was strong enough to be sold and it still exists today. There’s even a streaming service that uses the Napster brand. Sometimes a brand becomes too valuable on its own to let die completely.
Yup, big spike in signups today: https://mastodon.social/@mastodonusercount
I imagine that anyone who has persevered through the delirium so far is there to stay.
I’d say no, honestly. It’s just as matter of when Elon finally breaches the Trust Thermocline. That’s when people who had the most invested finally get fed up and leave. Judging by how many people who made Mastodon accounts but decided to start with Twitter are using them today, I’d say if he hasn’t breached it with this, it’s coming sooner rather than later.
New signups have been crashing Cohost for much of this morning, and it looks like a lot of folks are seeing new Mastodon users as well
I have seen posts on Tumblr from people who went (back) there because of the Twitter situation, so there is an additional direction.
I think the issue with the Twitter->Mastodon conversion is that this style of social media is about following people and therefore people will stay where the people they want to follow are. So it becomes a bit of a difficult situation where people won’t move as a person they want to keep in touch with won’t move which means more people won’t move.
Reddit->Lemmy likely won’t have the same problem as this style is about following content rather than people.
I doubt it, at least for the people that actually “matter” and have huge followings or use twitter for promotion and their businesses. However, I hope it’s enough to at least get them to crosspost to mastodon? I’ve seen smaller content creators start to do it so maybe it catches on.
Twitter wont die overnight (no matter how funny that would be), the best we can hope for is gradual shifting elsewhere.
