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.
I hear ya… The advantage that Lemmy and kbin have over Mastodon is that Redditors tend to be more technically inclined than Twitter users, so ditching Reddit for Lemmy was easy, while I only know a grand total of three people on Mastodon, and two of them are tech YouTubers.
Redditors tend to be more technically inclined than Twitter users
This used to be true, but Reddit has been mainstream for years now. Today’s average Redditor is likely pretty similar to the average Twitter user.
When a quarter of the replies on Reddit have become “this” or “💯” or “^^,” which it feels like it became when I left, I’d agree with you.
I remember when you’d get ripped apart and down voted to hell for daring to use an emoji on Reddit when commenting. People hated it. Then one day it was fine to do it, no one cared anymore. I guess that’s around when Reddit became mainstream, maybe.
Probably cause more and more users gravitated to mobile where it became commonplace to include emojis in posts. I remember too when using emojis was a mortal sin. At most you could use an emoticon but that was it.
Back when I started using Reddit it was frowned upon to post OC. I remember some subs had rules that you would be banned if you more than like 10% of your posts were OC.
bump
This
Is
^^
nice
fr fr
And my axe!
I feel like when the Reddit API controversy happened I was more inclined to switch due to the blackout vs Twitter which didn’t have nearly as instant of an event that would happen to get me off. Now all of a sudden because of Reddit I’m on various Fediverse projects such as Funkwhale, Mastodon, Kbin, and Lemmy.
But in the other hand lemmy seems much more mature than lemmy.
Don’t get me wrong, the experience has been rapidly growing in recent weeks thanks to the proliferation of third party apps 👍 But Mastodon’s first party experience feels solid and their new official app just blends in any mainstream app.
I assume you mean Mastodon seems much more mature than Lemmy?
Yeah, I’d agree with you there. I’ve had zero issues trying to find people and content on Mastodon, while I have had federation issues with Lemmy. And I do use the official Mastodon app.
My only gripe with Mastodon is that it isn’t obvious that you should follow hashtags. I didn’t know this at first and struggled to get into it with post after post complaining about Elon, but once I figured out to follow hashtags, I like it now. I’m just annoyed that all the artists I follow on Twitter are flocking to Threads and Bluesky instead of Mastodon though.
Plus there’s some staying power to posts on here
I’m replying to what you wrote 10 hours ago. My local feed would be a lot of shit before I ever saw this
And it’s 100% relevant to the area of content I wanted to read. Same if I went to a gaming or news related group
They even stole x.org’s logo:
believe it or not its more likely they straight up ripped off U+1D54F MATHEMATICAL DOUBLE-STRUCK CAPITAL X:
𝕏
absolutely no creativity. at least threads drew the ring in @ clockwise instead of the usual anticlockwise
Imagine a billionaire approving that “logo” despite how uncreative it is. Like get a better graphic designer I guess?
only difference between billionaires and normal people is that billionaires have a lot of money. best not to assume they have above-average logo appreciation skills. although they could hire some good advisors i suppose
yeah but then they’d be spending money to be told they might not be 100% right and perfect 100% of the time, and that’s just a waste of money
Billionaires wouldn’t care if they’re wasting money
if that was true then maybe the stingy fuckers would tip wait staff
Saw this on Mastodon:
Important sets:
ℂ the complex numbers
ℕ the natural numbers
ℚ the rational numbers
ℝ the real numbers
𝕏 the set of fascists wannabes
ℤ the integers
I would argue that ℤ would also be the set of Russian fascist wannabes.
My favorite comment about this from Mastodon: “X is just a sans serif swastika”.
Wow That is a ugly logo 🤢
Reminds me of the X-windows logo
God I hate that. It’s confusing on mobile
nice
Yay, another week of higher than normal activity, until the fomo kicks back in and they leave yet again cause “everyone is on X/this is sooo complicated/I just wanna see the fallout/whatever excuse justifies their addiction”
Every time that happens the fedi retains a good chunk of users. There’s significant and stable growth throughout.
Ya that’s what happened with me, I deleted my account once Musk took over and started a Mastodon account and now I’m on Lemmy too and haven’t looked back at either platforms
I can fathom no world where you’d want to trade away a multi billion dollar brand for a new brand you literally can’t SEO. What, you think your brand is gonna be more impressive that the generic variable, and a part of the alphabet?
“Follow me on Twitter” becomes “follow me on X”? “You should tweet that” becomes “you should X that”? The little blue bird on every shop window, website, and business card becomes a stylized letter that, hopefully, doesn’t look so threatening on the next iteration?
It’s a textbook case of brand destruction. I almost regret never making a Twitter in the first place, just so I could quit today, or at any of the hundred days in the past year where it got inexplicably worse without reason.
Follow me on ten.
“You should tweet that” becomes “you should X that”
“You should X-create” that
Ain’t X-ing a term for cutting something out of your life ?
Yes, and I was thinking how confusing it could be. A: “Hey, did you see that trend on X?” B: “What? No, I don’t talk to my ex anymore.”
It’s just a new form of messaging called X-communication.
oh wait.
It’s inspired by all the X-Twitter employees
We’re witnessing an X-tinction event in real time.
And a tweet becomes an “X-cretion”
X-crement
And retweet it become
X-Forwarded-Forit
Destroying the brand and ruining twitter was always the goal. There’s a good reason why Saudi Arabia fronted half of the bill…
The little blue bird on every shop window, website, and business card becomes a stylized letter that, hopefully, doesn’t look so threatening on the next iteration?
Haha, I know the most appropriate iteration, a red background with the X in a white circle.
Perhaps with each corner of the X at a 90 degree angle clockwise? You know, to add style points.
It makes the X go faster, everyone knows that.
“Hey, check out this X video”
Its a terrible rebrand that pretty much comes because of Elon’s impulses, or in other words, for shits and giggles. Regardless of this hilarious trashing of such a powerful brand, I’ll have fun calling tweets “xeets” for a good week.
It must be so horrible working “with” him. You’re trying to build something and every morning you must be frightened to see Elon hanging on a ladder because he thought it was so funny to draw dicks everywhere on the building, which would have you cancel everything you are working on.
I’ve worked in a founder led business and this is why I quit.
I’d spend forever working on a project to build a satellite site then suddenly we don’t want that anymore - bin the recipes we want a full main site redbrand.
Bye.
Feel you, I’ve been working with this kind of person but he was pushed away a few weeks after my arrival. He still had time to make an impression though, his genius move was to tell each team that the others hated them, which had no effect because we talked to each others…
Please call them Elon’s x-crements instead.
“Hey bros wanna see me light $40 billion on fire?”
The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia spent good money to never have an Arab Spring again.
Which is nuts because they have a nationwide content filter and could just blacklist Twitter and be done with it in 5 minutes.
He’s clearly laying the groundwork to sell it to Alphabet (Google’s parent company). /s
He’s just a fan of Laurie Anderson. Give him some slack!
Watch out… language is a virus!
Here is an alternative Piped link(s): https://piped.video/watch?v=UfOK0evCqZY
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source, check me out at GitHub.
I should X that sounds like I should delete/close that. How apt.
xvideos twitter videos? lmao
sounds sus
it’s lesser evil compare to amont of other memes after elon deside to name twitter “X” … xbox series x on x platform… sounds even more sus in my mind…
X video…
lol there has got to be a better cadence to deliver this joke. like “Twitter, now called X, has launched a new video sharing service at xvideos.com”
Risky click of the day, but turns out its benign and family-friendly. Thanks for sharing.
i think the mildly techy sounding waffle is the right way to set it up personally, it lulls you into a false sense of security thinking this is just some random tech nonsense and then bam, porn
I don’t like twitter nor Elon but why would someone leave a platform because they would change their name?
Elon has done more damage before so people who would consider leaving should be long gone.
You’re not wrong, but consider that people who justified sticking around for some reason or another might leave because the brand change (to a name that is so brain dead even a little offensive) finally hits home for them that it isn’t going to be the same.
A brand name change is about the single most overt thing you can do to send the message that a product isn’t going to be the same. And when that happens, people tend to look at the recent trends for that product to get an idea of what to expect. The recent trends for Twitter happen to be right-wing echo chamber.
So yeah, the people who were going to leave have largely already left. But this brand change is going to be effective at galvanizing those who remain.
You could make the argument that all his previous outrageous behaviors were desperate attempts to squeeze more money out of a business he didn’t understand. But this… this is unhinged. It’s so bafflingly pointless and dumb it’s become clear that what was once a reliable dopamine delivery system could, without warning or reason, just… disappear one day. Even the people who rely on Twitter like addicts are starting to come up with exit strategies.
I’d argue as well that all the past dumb decisions, (Twitter Blue, anybody being able to name themselves anything they want, bugs everywhere, not being able to see anything without an account), all of that was just stuff you only had to passively bear. Now, it’s a brand change that will at least have you typing something different into Google to reach “X,” but it is still an active change you have to make.
If I had a Twitter account that was connected to my business, already had a whole bunch of followers, and was somewhat addicted to Twitter, I could understand having a hard time leaving. At the very least inertia would be a good enough reason for people to stay. But switching the brand recognition?
- First off, you’ve disrupted the Twitter addictions of everyone on the site, because you’d have to know that blue bird logo is associated with a lot of people’s dopamine responses
- Second off, now that people are already being forced to make a change, there’s less opportunity cost to jump ship to elsewhere
Make sense.
I don’t like twitter nor Elon but why would someone leave a platform because they would change their name?
Twitter has been around for so long, many are attached to it on an emotional level. It’s older than my eldest niece; she’s known about it since she could memorize the damn word.
So as dumb as it is that THIS is what pushes people to leave, I’m glad more are leaving regardless.
It’s a “final straw” situation. No individual straw broke the back of the proverbial camel. One straw after another was placed atop it until finally the back broke. It’s not the final straw that broke said back, but the load of all the straws including the final that did it.
So they’re not necessarily quitting because of the name change. They’re quitting because of everything else plus the name change. That was the thing that pushed the go/no-go decision into “go”.
Maybe because this new decision is so unbelievably idiotic either it is the last straw or maybe some people realize
twitterx is lost cause? Idk.
Anyone recommend a good iPhone app for Mastodon?
Ice Cubes is great for me, beautiful UI and cute sound effects
I use Tusker and it’s been great so far. More features than the official app, and it’s pretty stable too.
This is probably a stupid question, but for those of you that use Mastodon — how did you find people to follow?
I tried it out a few months ago but I didn’t like the few accounts they recommended, and searching for users or keywords didn’t get me too far either…
I wrote since stuff to help new Mastodon users: https://babylon4.com/mastodon
I joined up before you could subscribe to hashtags, so my approach was:
- Read my local instance feed and click on content that interested me.
- Checked the users that made the interesting content to see if they had more.
- If they did, followed.
Nowadays I would add this step:
- Subscribe to hashtags on topics I’m interested in and follow people who regularly contribute good material to them.
It helps if you can find a half-dozen people involved in something you like to follow at the start. Other than that, try joining a mid-sized (~1,000-3,000 users) Mastodon server based around a hobby, interest, or social group you’re a part of. Most Mastodon clients allow you to keep a column open for the people you follow as well as the people on the “Local Timeline” who are a part of your server.
It’s a new social network. If you see someone pop up who’s made a pithy post or two, give 'em a follow. If they’re not working out a week later, un-follow them. Don’t feel afraid to follow a ton of people when you first get started to liven up your feed until you find a good circle of folks.
You need to follow hashtags but primary groups. You will find groups boosting toots about your topics. It’s the first accounts to follow then you will find others.
It’s not that hard. People have to keep in mind, it’s not Twitter and so it works differently.
boosting toots
I don’t think they call it TOOTS anymore.
I’m a grandpa of mastodon.
Toots despite the proximity with tweet is good for the community aspect.
There is an account called Fedi Follows on Mastodon that shares accounts according to their topics. Hope it helps.
I joined via fosstodon.org much better recommendations
That’s kind of the problem I think. I was able to find like 2 people there I want to follow. Lemmy is going to be far more successful at displacing its alternative because all the communities you’d want to subscribe to are here.
What I did in the very beginning:
-
don’t worry about the instance that you are on. My server is quite generic and is meant to be a simple entrypoint to the fediverse, not a “community in itself”.
-
Go to the mastodon directory to find the list of servers based on interests. fosstodon is one for FOSS enthusiasts, beekeeping is for those interesting in gardening, mountains.social is for those that like hiking, etc. The important thing here is to find servers that are not huge, but that have an active userbase.
-
Now, the real trick: for all these servers you found that could be interesting, you go browse at the federated timeline. This will give not only the activity from people in the server, but you will also see what they are following, boosting, etc. To me this was a way to find not just interesting people, but who the interesting people are following as well.
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Be very generous when browsing these timelines, and follow as many as you can possibly can. During the first week, try to add 50 a day.
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Follow hashtags. This will also make your timeline more lively and will bring different people who might be interesting to you.
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Write an intro post, and pin it to your profile. Usually pinned profiles are always visible between servers, so it will make it easy for people to interact with you.
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(Somewhat controversial, but I do it) If you have people that you like to follow on Twitter, follow them on Mastodon as well via a BirdSite mirror. You won’t be able to do it from the larger instances, but if you join a more chill instance (like mine ;)) it should be fine.
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Evangelize: if you have friends on Twitter, ask them to join as well. Most Mastodon servers have a way to let you send invites to others.
When you start getting the feeling that you are getting overwhelmed, it’s the time to cull down the list. Feel free to unfollow any person or hashtag that you think is too noisy or not really interesting.
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This is just another of Elon’s stunt to increase traffic to Twitter.
Or is he flushing Twitter down the Xitter?
In B4 Musk tweets this
So the rebrand comes with X promising to be an app to replace everything?
X gonna give it to ya, X gonna deliver it to ya.
He wants something like WeChat that does everything.
Less than 1% of twitter users signed up to pay for twitter blue. And less than 1% of twitter users are going to do their banking through a social media site run by a megalomaniac. This is doomed to failure, just like it was 20 years ago.
As painful as it might be for him, this dude really needs to let go of his obsession with the letter X.
Source it was 1%?
That’s going to be challenging. The latest metrics show that only 0.2 percent of Twitter users are paying for Twitter Blue. Twitter Blue did have an estimated 116,000 confirmed signups on the web in March, up 138 percent from the month before, according to Similarweb. Still, that’s not nearly enough to make up for the lost money in advertising dollars.
https://www.vox.com/technology/2023/4/15/23683554/twitter-dying-elon-musk-x-company
Well, it sure sounds like X is delivering users to Mastodon.
It sounds like he’s trying to copy zombo.com (listen to the audio for at least 30 seconds to a minute - the animation is a little broken by now)
oh that’s the straw?
I wonder if they’ll renew the twitter.com domain name
It would be hilarious if a random got that domain and threw a mastodon instance on it. They’ll probably keep it though lol
Given how shamelessly stupid musks whole takeover has been I guarantee they wont won’t. He’ll probably assign someone to keep it renewed and then fire them.
Serious question, isn’t this going to force them to release their trademark on the word “tweet”?
Quick, someone create a Mastodon Frontend Twatter that uses different logos than X yet seems oddly familiar…
Can anyone help explain how to find content worth following on Mastodon? I made an account today and despite going through the #explore category I’m finding it difficult to find content or people I want to follow. The few things I’ve found end up just being Lemmy communities which kind of defeats the purpose of having a mastadon account at all… maybe it’s because I never had a Twitter, but the Lemmy/reddit/forum layout makes much more sense to me
I’m interested to know which accounts to follow for lemmy news. Seems like a natural place to go when having trouble connecting like I did with fmhy before and shit just works recently.
Unfortunately this is not the fault of mastodon, its community or tech behind it as much as … nobody from twitter actually moving to mastodon. There aren’t many big influencers, companies or content creators on mastodon so your feed is just random people talking about random stuff. The lack of algorithm doesn’t help either since someone’s random showerthoughts have the same chance of showing up for you as does something trending that you’d actually be interested in.
Follow / pin active hashtags. I have 4, #news #nintendo #xbox and #playstation. I’m a simple man
And then I get even more random irrelevant crap because everyone talking about their latest rp adventures in stardew valley tags steam, gaming, indiegaming and other general hashtags.
There’s some of that, but I prefer it for something like micro blogging. I want to see different things, points of view. By contrast, I’ll go to a news site for specific info. I love Mastodon because there’s a unvarnished stream of information that isn’t curated by algorithms. :D
It takes some effort to build up and shape your Home feed on Mastodon. One good starting point is to search for hashtags that you’re interested in, like #sports or #gamedev or whatever. It may take some trial and error to find the most popular hashtags being used in your topics of interest. Once you find the hashtags with stuff that’s interest to you, follow those hashtags so you will continue to discover new people and posts in those topics in your Home feed. Once you find interesting people posting in those hashtags, follow them. The name of the game on Mastodon is to follow, follow, follow. I’ve heard it said that your feed will get pretty good when you follow around 200 people or so.
