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.

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.

  • Clbull@lemmy.world
    0·
    11 months ago

    Gonna play devil’s advocate here.

    If Elon is truly able to turn The App Formerly Known As Twitter into an ‘everything app’ that’s actually worth using, this could be a bone-headed move that pays off in dividends. It depends on what he plans to introduce to X within the next year or two. Transforming X into a messaging app won’t be enough.

    Musk’s line of thought here isn’t completely asinine. Let’s not deny that superapps like LINE, WeChat, Alipay, Taobao and others exist, and absolutely dominate the digital landscape in their own regions.

    Problem is, Twitter already has stiff competition. Threads is by far its largest competitor, and the moment Zuckerberg implements hashtags and trending topics, X is going to hemorrhage users.

    This is honestly the direction Steve Huffman should’ve taken with Reddit instead of jacking up API prices and gouging every third-party app out of existence. Imagine if RPAN became a legitimate monetized mobile livestreaming platform instead of some dumb social experiment with seriously limited broadcasting times/broadcasters at once, or if Spez allowed content creators to sell access to premium content á la Tumblr Post+, Fansly, Patreon or OnlyFans. Enough e-girls have been astroturfing the shit out of Reddit to plug their paywalled collection of nudes, so may as well cut out the middle-man and drive OF out of business.

    • assassin_aragorn@lemmy.world
      1·
      11 months ago

      Musk’s line of thought here isn’t completely asinine. Let’s not deny that superapps like LINE, WeChat, Alipay, Taobao and others exist, and absolutely dominate the digital landscape in their own regions.

      It isn’t a bad thought, but it should be quickly apparent that an American equivalent might not work. The West isn’t the same as those regions. There’s a complex interplay of culture, history, and the current market scene. A good business person would recognize the possibility that it might not work and just do exploratory work. Musk in his arrogance thinks he can make it happen regardless

    • katy ✨@lemmy.blahaj.zone
      2·
      11 months ago

      Facebook already tried to do the “everything app” and it failed in the US.

      And Mark Zuckerberg is a million times more competent at business than Elon.

    • ttmrichter@lemmy.world
      1·
      11 months ago

      If Elon is truly able to turn The App Formerly Known As Twitter into an ‘everything app’ that’s actually worth using…

      That opening conditional (emphasis added) is carrying a whole lot of weight…

  • Roundcat@kbin.social
    432·
    11 months ago

    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”

    • Sam@lemmy.ca
      16·
      11 months ago

      Every time that happens the fedi retains a good chunk of users. There’s significant and stable growth throughout.

      • Conowelle@lemmy.caEnglish
        5·
        11 months ago

        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

  • User_4272894@lemmy.world
    46·
    11 months ago

    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.

  • samokosik@lemmynsfw.com
    2·
    11 months ago

    Maybe if twitter keeps fucking shit up, mastodon will become mainstream haha. I would certainly love to see that.

  • deleted@lemmy.world
    1·
    11 months ago

    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.

    • Seasoned_Greetings@lemmy.world
      6·
      11 months ago

      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.

      • sundrei@lemmy.sdf.orgEnglish
        3·
        11 months ago

        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.

        • Uno@monyet.ccEnglish
          3·
          11 months ago

          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
    • ttmrichter@lemmy.world
      4·
      11 months ago

      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”.

    • Cryptic Fawn@lemmy.dbzer0.com
      3·
      11 months ago

      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.

    • agent_flounder@lemmy.one
      3·
      11 months ago

      Maybe because this new decision is so unbelievably idiotic either it is the last straw or maybe some people realize twitter x is lost cause? Idk.

  • Crass Spektakel@lemmy.worldEnglish
    3·
    11 months ago

    I don’t want to rain on your parade but I’ll do it anyway: The numbers of active posts and members in Lemmy communities, even in the most active ones, are mindbogglingly low in comparison with Reddit, even in comparison to somethingawful what I still consider the dirty cousin of Reddit.

    All the numbers are just two sizes lower than Reddit and then there is the atrocious web interface. I have stopped counting how often my posts got eaten, the reply button didn’t react and general stuff didn’t work at all.

    • adonis@kbin.socialOP
      31·
      11 months ago

      we willget there eventually.
      you can’t compare a product that is decades old wuth something that’s fairly new.

  • CharlieAus@lemmy.worldEnglish
    7·
    11 months ago

    Addiction it is. They think they are advocating for health and social justice. But they’re not. They’re just addicted to Twitter/X. I mean… it’s owned by someone who pays fascists to post on there, but they are still there? WTAF?

  • CharlieAus@lemmy.worldEnglish
    61·
    11 months ago

    Mastadon is where the smart people hang out… X is the fascist site and Facebook/Threads is the frivolous and stupid site.

    • Ktheone@lemmy.worldEnglish
      3·
      11 months ago

      Nah, Facebook and x are both fascistic sides because of the amount of qanons and magats I’ve seen on facebook

  • cmrn@lemmy.world
    2·
    11 months ago

    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…

    • ttmrichter@lemmy.world
      1·
      11 months ago

      I joined up before you could subscribe to hashtags, so my approach was:

      1. Read my local instance feed and click on content that interested me.
      2. Checked the users that made the interesting content to see if they had more.
      3. If they did, followed.

      Nowadays I would add this step:

      1. Subscribe to hashtags on topics I’m interested in and follow people who regularly contribute good material to them.
    • moitoi@lemmy.world
      2·
      11 months ago

      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.

    • rglullis@communick.news
      1·
      11 months ago

      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.

      • 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.

      • Follow hashtags. This will also make your timeline more lively and will bring different people who might be interesting to you.

      • 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.

      • (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.

      • 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.

    • mookulator@lemmy.world
      1·
      11 months ago

      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.

    • FlatFootFox@lemmy.world
      1·
      11 months ago

      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.

  • kaotic@lemmy.world
    13·
    11 months ago

    Elon has no idea how to run a social media company. At this point he’s just trying random shit hoping it will work. Get the platform operating successfully again and then worry about branding…

    • BingoBangoBongo@midwest.social
      6·
      11 months ago

      I honestly think that he believes himself to be some sort of super genius that only has good ideas, just cause he wrote some software and sold it for alot of money when he was younger.

    • jantin@lemmy.world
      4·
      11 months ago

      gossip that Elon has no idea about running anything was circulating for a long time but since Tesla/SpaceX were not social media it was easier to manage the PR to make Musk seem like “tech and business genius, also twitter troll” regardless of what was going on behind the scenes. On Twitter every single decision hits millions of people and businesses within an hour and managing that is impossible for any PR department so we get to see the man as who he really is.

    • Hyphlosion@donphan.social
      231·
      11 months ago

      You mean, are we a part of the same Fediverse? Yes. I’m actually replying to you right now from my Mastodon account! Still not over how cool that is!

      But yeah, there’s a character limit. The instance I’m from is donphan.social. Our character limit is 1,008.

      • Elevator7009@kbin.cafe
        1·
        11 months ago

        Username checks out. I just checked out that instance because of the name, even though I have no intent of using Mastodon because I never liked Twitter. It’s like the perfect name for a Pokémon-themed Mastodon instance.

    • jantin@lemmy.world
      81·
      11 months ago

      I tried Mastodon and failed. Lemmy is different IMO in that you can freely access, write on and read all lemmy communities from any Lemmy instance (and apparently from Mastodon). On Masto you’re quite siloed-in, can’t follow “local” from a thematic instance with an account on another (and in Lemmy you can follow thematic communities from all around the threadiverse), people won’t see your content unless they either actively follow you or read the local/global feed. Curating feed is a necessary effort and not too easy one since you only get to follow individual users.