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I like Mastodon but it is a different experience than Twitter. I follow non-famous people with my interests on Mastodon and famous tech people with my interests on Twitter. It is almost like the two services are complementary.
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I think this is precisely a scenario that suits Mastodon.

Users will organically flock to instances close to their interests. Celebrities will surely have their own instances and niche interests/non-famous people will have their own (to reduce the noise). And users will have the ability to follow whichever they want (including both).

Guess I should reopen Mastodon and see what's up there... annoying how if you don't visit for a while though it doesn't have your timeline ready for it... it makes sense for efficiency but it is weird.
Even if Mastodon grows exponentially and destroys Twitter completely and Musk’s investment goes to zero…he still wins by having destroyed the cesspool of twitter and pushing people to a decentralized platform.
Exactly, this is a win-win.
well, that's a Pyrrhic victory. Still a victory, true.
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This seems pointless. Mastodon stocks aren't publicly traded, are they?

What's the difference, from a principle perspective, from a private Twitter and Mastodon?

Mastodon has no stocks. Mastodon is an open source project funded by donations.

You can run a Mastodon server of your very own, with your own rules. You can’t do that with Twitter. You can even do things like block posts from free speech absolutist servers if you don’t want to have an environment free of any decorum like noted pedo guy Musk will probably be pushing for.

Well, Mastodon isn't "one" site. It's federated, so you can pick whichever mastodon server you want to be on.
About 0.004% of twitter’s monthly active users switched to mastadoon.social. Enough to write a news article I guess, but it doesn’t represent any sort of big society wide shift
Small surge to Mastadon -- other than that this is a non-story.
Agreed - I also looked into Mastadon a few years ago when I thought Twitter was too politically run and found it confusing, didn’t know what to join, etc. A few tech savvy folks will do it but most will leave confused like me and go back to twitter.
I think the key points are:

Twitter has 217 million daily active users.

Mastodon has about 250,000 monthly active users out of 3 million registered users, according to Rochko’s estimates.

.004% of twitter’s monthly active users switched

This article seems like a bit fluff to make Elon look bad.

After 6+ years and this is the result. That is a complete slow-moving failure for Mastodon and somehow, this is 'news' when 0.004% of Twitter's monthly actives switched to Mastodon.

Is this a new low in frivolous, mediocre and low quality tech articles?

You might as well move your chair 1 metre forwards and write an article declaring that you are more closer to the Sun than the 0.00000001% of other people.

yeah, good job. i recently installed pleroma (which is similar to mastodon but less resource hungry) and currently its just now 3 family members. thats all. this is a great thing because i can invite and deny invitation to anyone in the family and just the family so we are not exposed to the cesspool that is facebook/twitter.

i run the server so i have to keep it updated, pay for hosting but it is still a good investment. looking at backblaze b2 pricing, if i move to that, my media hosting costs would still be miniscule compared to the benefit i get from literally owning this own piece of internet

Comments on that article are quite juicy.
If by juicy you mean deranged, then yes. It was bizarre reading that kind of crap on pcmag.com.
Especially considering how Mastodon/fediverse has a considerable history of hosting extremist content. Seeing people complain about "liberals afraid of free speech" have obviously never visited it before...
This will end up like every other mass migration away from social media platforms. Remember when everyone was headed to Diaspora after Facebook did something unpalatable for users? Remember the “1,000,000 strong for the old Facebook” groups? It never works. Social media’s power is in its momentum.
> Remember when everyone was headed to Diaspora after Facebook did something unpalatable for users? Remember the “1,000,000 strong for the old Facebook” groups? It never works. Social media’s power is in its momentum.

I guess you don't remember Digg?

For me it boils down to that people are looking for alternatives because of a risk that Twitter allows more different opinions.

Weird times.

The risk is that Twitter will become owned by a single person with a strong personality. You may agree with Musk's agenda. But he does have an agenda.
Not to mention: media relations, community management & risk exposure are all really really hard problems. Hard problems that an entity like twitter has to sink huge effort into just to be bad at it.

Musk brings absolutely nothing to the table in any of these arenas and has been publicly terrible at at least two of them.

The internet is full of agendas, opinions and viewpoints. All this move shows is that there's also at least one idiot will to watch 45billion evaporate.

Ok, ok, it's Elon. So he's willing to talk about it and anything substantiative coming out of this will probably arrive just after full autonomous self driving vehicles.

Wanna bet Elon will try to shut down the account tracking his flights?

To think this is about freedom of speech is naive. This is about restricting and allowing different speech, but I can promisee you it'll be just as limited.

People are looking for alternatives because they don't like the idea of their speech being controlled by an unstable manchild that calls people that point out his ideas are bad "pedo"

You are right - the status quo right now with things like suspending people because they think biological males shouldn’t compete with biological females is obviously the best way to go. I mean why be allowed to have an opinion on something?
This, my friend, is called a straw man argument.
How is straw man to state a fact.
You tried to frame things as if I said I supported the status quo. I never said such a thing. You are arguing with a straw man you built.
Just like a year ago or so when people left WhatsApp for Signal.

I did and am still missing the interaction with 98% of my contacts.