Being from Eastern Europe myself (I confirm that it's not very popular), I never understood the appeal of Twitter in the current form (I'm not talking about the original idea of just posting your current status). It's like a forum with a very bad UI: a post is divided into dozens of subposts and the rest of UI leaves a lot to be desired (mostly about navigation). Before the modern social web era, we already had specialized forums where you could have deep discussions with experts on all sorts of things and those servers were already self-hosted/decentralized, while also having a decent UI with search and all. I myself used to frequent a forum which specialized on linguistics - hosted by a Ukrainian guy in Israel, you could have very interesting discussions with professors, students, amateurs on all kinds of linguistics topics. There was also a sense of community. Then people flocked to centralized big tech social networks and old-school forums started to die out but the desire to have meaningful discussions around some topic stayed so people started retrofitting existing social networks and I think that's how Twitter threads/discussions were born - same old discussions but in a very weird unergonomic format. I think reddit comes closest to the old forums, although I miss the old forum's hierarchical tree structure (for example, a subforum to discuss a subfield of linguistics).
What would be awesome if we had those old-school forums back but if they also had some kind of interoperability (same login, search across a fleet of forums, etc.)
I sent my final message (assuming I'm strong) today and I'll use Twitter for nothing other than watching a slow-motion car wreck. I think this is a good thing for the world, and breaking up that global echo chamber on both sides is going to have a net positive effect.
I'm enjoying my time on https://hachyderm.io/ - it feels like those small spaces that we used to inhabit before the world got too big. (@mmastrac@hachyderm.io is my current home)
Once I feel more comfortable in Mastodon, I'll likely try to extract myself into a private server. I'm reminded of the old days of using someone's Fidonet server to participate in small-but-global communities, and how you'd eventually just run your own node to get a little more freedom.
I am willing to bet that you ll tweet again as soon as the new outrage is launched. This is after a cursory look at your twits and style. It is exactly the kind of users that twitter wants to have. Followed, to check if i was right
Your Twitter experience is going to be what you make of it. It's based on the people you chose to follow. Nothing more. Nothing less. The author in this case seems to be politically motivated in his decision to leave Twitter. That's his right. But he definitely seems to be mixing politics with the beauty of Twitter and I'm not sure I agree with that.
That's exactly where you're wrong. Your twitter experience is going to be what Twitter wants it to be. Because twitter has user engagement metrics and it is in their financial interest to keep you hooked on the site's content.
This is something I've had to repeat countless times during the last 2 weeks, when Twitter users end up in the fediverse confused about how to find content. There is no financial interest to keep you on a fediverse instance. You have to make an effort yourself.
The problem for Twitter though is that they are very bad at hooking people. They desperately want to be like Instagram and tiktok in that regard but just will never have those types of numbers. I suspect the reason they can’t boils down to two things- poor engineering and just a lack of content. There just isn’t enough interesting content on the site to suck people in.
Ummm.. that was maybe true a few years ago but hasn’t been the case for a while now.
It’s now very heavily in the angry old man yelling about the degeneracy of society with a heavy political leaning that is a LONG way outside his actual area of professional expertise.
Peterson got banned from Twitter for attacking a public figure and libelling a doctor. After having recently been temp-banned for attacking another public figure. I mean, while it's not a description I'd use myself (I'd be going more for "Peterson is an arsehole with poor self-control") it doesn't seem that unreasonable.
That "home" timeline is admittedly an anti-feature, but
(a) it's fairly simple to turn off.
(b) it's a fairly obvious artefact of being ad-driven, and so needing to increase "engagement" at all cost that Musk has also identified as the main problem and wants to reduce as much as possible.
I guess it depends on how you use it. I just follow accounts that I like and stick to that feed ordered by newest. I have all notifications deactivated and clicked Show Less Often on all recommended posts. Now I see only posts by the users I follow. But there's probably more people who check trending topics and then latch onto whatever the newest outrage is?
That's not true AT ALL. I tried to use Twitter for my friends and their posts. I always got recommended stupid political, inflammatory, and inciteful content. It's clearly what Twitter needs to recommend because it's what drives their engagement. I can't blame Twitter because that's literally it's business model. But to deny this is absurd.
For that same reason, I never could become a Twitter user.
This simply isn't true anymore. It was the case in the past, but nowadays you can no longer avoid Twitter shoving low quality rage- and clickbait content down your throat.
These past months my Twitter timeline contained almost as much spam from people I don't follow (and would never follow) as it did content I sought out (people I was following).
Twitter is all about that "engagement" nowadays, and I as a user am only ~50% in charge of what my Twitter experience is going to be.
Exactly, and while profit was always elusive for Twitter - the biggest cost for Twitter was salaried employees which Musk has already cut by more than half.
As mentioned in the blog post, previous management of Twitter was really REALLY unfocused. Adding NFTs, and a host of other things that never really caught on, while the core product routinely suffered a lack of even basic functionality (edit button anyone?).
Twitter is now highly motivated to find profit and monetize, but I think it's a bit far fetched to assume a debt interest payment - out of everything else that is going on - is going to be the central thing that kills twitter.
I think you are correct about the company getting product focused and that will eventually be great for the product. On the other hand this feels like a Digg->Reddit moment.
I think it has been time to leave the massive American (and now the Chinese one too) "tech" companies for a while. So in a sense, it's great that Elon has shown the world the existence of Mastodon and the ActivityPub beneath it. I know, I know, a lot of you already knew about it and were already on it too, but I sure didn't.
I'm European, Danish to be exact, and I've had this weird feeling about our politicians and public institutions being on things like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and so on, for about a decade now. Not because it's wrong for them to use the social media platforms, but because they rely so much on American advertisement companies in doing so. In that sense, something like Mastodon just makes a lot more sense. Our government could operate a Mastodon server where they house all our elected officials, and nobody would be at a risk of being banned for breaking some American TOS. They would even be able to moderate their comment threads a lot better, by not allowing stuff like American anti-vaxxers to comment on things about Danish vaccine programs without first having to rely on Twitter or Facebook to police it for them. It seems the EU has already gone in that direction, or at least did so back in the spring of 2022 when Elon first announced his plans to buy Twitter, but our local politicians haven't yet followed.
Similarly, our journalist profession has something called a "pressekort" which is basically a certificate that shows the world that you're a Danish journalist. They could come together and build a Mastodon server where a "pressekort" is required to be a member. (There are already some of those springing up, so I guess it's already happening), and it's already limiting the amount of misinformation that happens on their posts by a massive amount.
I know this won't be the "free to say anything without consequences" haven a lot of people here on HN want. We're already seeing right-wing network servers and users completely blocked, but it's sort of how free speech works in a democracy. Before the American advertisement companies gave the village looney a platform, nobody around here listened to them. We still largely don't listen to them in my country, but we sure waste more time on them than we did in the world before Facebook.
So yes, the time has come to leave centralised Social Media companies. The real question is, whether we will actually do it. I'm not going to say that joining Mastodon was hard, because it wasn't. But I spent about a week researching a good server to join, and that's sure "harder" than just pushing my telefonnumber into TikTok.
I think this is a very interesting idea, and I have had similar thoughts. The forum (doesn't have to be Mastodon, but could be) would probably have to be run be a separate entity following "armslængdeprincippet" similar to how DR (the public service tv/radio institution) is run, because a purely state governed service would result in some obvious conflicts of interest. But I think it is time to think about how to foster a healthy public discourse in the digital age, free from the harmful incentives of the adtech industry.
> So, for my part, I’ll be moving on. My account will still exist, and I’ll perhaps use it to share posts from here, to help people migrate elsewhere, or to keep up with the increasingly few people I care about still on the platform. Instead, I’ll be posting in long-form here (subscribe!)
That's the meat of the article if you are looking for it.
I've always enjoyed pwn's content but will take a few $10 bets on them still using Twitter heavily 1 year from now.
Reminds me of election season with all the people moving to Canada frankly, it's predictable as the moon phases.
The majority of my active network on Twitter have now created Mastodon accounts and are posting there more than on Twitter. Maybe it’s my frontend web dev bubble?
The ones that have from mine are just using their accounts to complaining about Twitter. Which doesn't create sustainable communities on Mastodon instances that survive this kind of spike in activity.
I've been on Twitter for 16 years and accumulated 43,000 followers on there.
I've been on Mastodon for 2 weeks and I'm up to 7,900 already.
The numbers on Mastodon are pretty impressive. More importantly, my timeline over there is full of interesting people talking about a variety of interesting things.
Sure, there are a ton of reasons I've been able to grow my audience on Mastodon this quickly.
But despite those reasons, the activity this represents still works as a counter to the claim I was replying to here that "no one is switching to Mastodon".
I think the number of follows does not represent the number of actual readers. E.g. I know you from your long-form posts on Django and such, and considering current buzz might log in to Mastodon just to give you a follow and go back to never checking it.
That, plus Mastodon does not benefit from central spam account squashing authority.
Of course, the discrepancy of follower/actual reader numbers also exists in case of Twitter, but if I had to bet I'd say it has the potential to be stronger on Mastodon.
So you’re happy to have reduced your audience and reach by 80%? Literally 80% of your followers are no longer following you. This isn’t a win. You just marginalized yourself.
The Fediverse isn't trying to be a stand-in alternative, nor should it be used as one. It won't algorithmically serve content to maximize your engagement and attention to sell to advertisers. It's there for those who are interested in it. Some just find it a more libre platform that's useful as they want to move away from Twitter.
I say this as someone who has been on the Fediverse for years but has never in their life used Twitte for more than a day, or ever enjoyed it.
Since last week every person on Twitter whose content I came to appreciate moved over to Mastodon. Science, tech and gamedev/art people are absolutely leaving for Mastodon.
The only part of my follows left on Twitter now are the people producing the average low quality content (gossip, memes, current drama etc.)
The Fediverse doesn't have an algorithm or reason to promote and thus provide any audience for those things, thankfully. Thus they have no reason to be on the Fediverse because they'd just be shouting into a void.
I thought so too but the combination of switching app (to metatext) and importing follower list (https://debirdify.pruvisto.org/) means it’s starting to feel pretty pleasant.
2 million people in the last two weeks is a big nobody. It's tangible as someone who's been on since 2016 through all the smaller waves as subcommunities of Twitter migrated. Something is different this time. My bias is toward a slow growth like we've had so far, so read this as concerned, not crowing.
Elon said it himself in an internal leaked email. It can go bankrupt easily and it seems advertisers are leaving in droves. They might come back once volatility settles down, but it isn’t a given.
The number of ads you are seeing in your feed is them freaking out for the exact reason OP mentioned. The major advertisers who were previously spending millions per year in what was essentially guaranteed revenue.
The ads in my feed have gone from things like my bank to magic brain pills that you might find on Alex Jones almost overnight.
The majority of the staff have left. Tangible fact.
The site is having outages. Tangible fact.
Mastodon usage is significantly up. Tangible fact.
People make vague hand wavey gestures about Twitter having better than ever engagement or usage or whatever… but there are no stats to back it up, so who knows?
Come on! Compared to 6 months ago the service is empirically worse.
It’s unbelievable to me someone can stand here and go “where the proof dude??” with what’s happening.
Is it going to be gone in a year? Who knows? No one’s knows the future.
Is it reasonable to say, given the recent state of the platform is, the probability of the platform being gone in a year is now significantly greater than it was six months ago?
Probably, I would say, yes. The empirical evidence suggests so.
I’m not saying there’s a 100% chance of that; no one is saying that; but it’s greater than it was.
You have to really make an effort to believe otherwise.
You're also omitting the various core feature breakages as Elon cuts infrastructure in an attempt to recoup his investment. 2fa users were locked out of their accounts because he turned off a bunch of microservices.
A week has passed and it seems like they’ve fixed it up. Similarly for the last week I’ve had increasing issues loading tweet details and it peaked yesterday, but today all seems fine.
We’ll have to wait months before we can truly know if this diminished and demoralized crew is able to keep the site running with minimal issues, but for now they do seem to be (slowly) recovering.
Twitter has graduated from “don’t believe it’s plausible that Twitter will fail” to “anecdotally things seem to going badly” to “empirical evidence of service issues and mismanagement”.
I don’t care what you believe, those are the facts, right now.
I think then next month will give us a reasonable ability to forecast as we get spikes in usage during the World Cup and we see if the service goes down and if people keep using it.
Until then… who knows?
More than 0.001%; that’s just random variance. Don’t be ridiculous.
I’m not waving my hands and saying stupid meaningless shit like 0.0001 > 0 so there’s some meaningless increase in the chance Twitter will fail.
I’m saying, there is a tangible increase in the possibility of failure, and already a concrete notable decrease in value of the entire platform.
I spend hours a day on Twitter, and today has been by far the best in the few weeks. Things deteriorated temporarily but I’m missing where the concrete decrease in value is.
The only operable probabilities are "Never", "Sometimes", and "Always". Since Musk took over, the chance of imminent nonrecoverable catastrophe has gone from "No" to "Maybe".
I think what's going on in those cases is that people are heavily invested in Twitter, believing their bulk audience is there, but (understandably) want to hedge their bets. Lots of them are posting the same stuff to both Twitter and Mastodon (tooling exists) and they'll wait and see how it pans out. As they see more interaction on Mastodon, perhaps they'll migrate their focus, too.
Seems very silly to me. There is no big difference before and after Musk except that people are talking a lot about Musk - it'll die down in a bit.
I love Twitter and use it a lot. I hope it doesn't die though I acknowledge that's possible. It certainly hasn't died yet though - despite much waiting and gnashing of teeth.
I see full movies and TV shows on YouTube pretty frequently and have for years. Is YouTube likewise breaking? Won't this tweet just get a DMCA takedown rather than break the platform?
Just search for "full movie" and filter for videos > 20minutes and you'll find some immediately. Youtube is falling apart!!! Google will not exist 6 months from now, the cracks are showing!!
I searched "full movie" on YouTube and the first result I had was for Home Alone. Looks like it is the full movie and the account that posted it does not seem connected to Fox or Warner Bros or any "official" movie studio. Seems like a random person who claims in the video description that uploading Home Alone is "fair use".
I am not a copyright or intellectual property or legal expert - but my intuition says that Home Alone is probably as copyrighted as the movie Hackers (both older movies). Home Alone has been up for 3 weeks on YouTube with 435k views. By contrast, the tweet linked above showing that "Twitter is breaking" has already been removed (less than a day).
Perhaps Home Alone is public domain or something, or whoever owns the intellectual property wants it shared like this. Not sure how I would check that, but I have seen lots of movies and TV shows like this on YouTube (sometimes with modifications to the sound or image to avoid automatic filtering). If Home Alone is free I'm sure I could find another example.
Partisans are worried he'll let Trump come back... and as of a few hours ago he did just that. This is nothing more than a last act of political posturing by insiders and their allies who got thrown out. The furor will die down after a while and things will go back to normal... at least for Twitter, anyway. The Fediverse, OTOH, will be invaded by virulent activists who will lash out and anyone and everyone who doesn't violently agree with them on everything. I'm sure that will be fun to watch.
I am reading lot of people are moving to mastodon. I never thought federation was the future but the more I think about it the more it is starting to make sense.
The good part is federated alternatives do not look like massive echo chambers like Twitter is. Even if certain server does turn into an echo chamber the rest of network can just leave that server alone. Federation is closer to our actual societies. People don't clash on daily basis in our societies at least not as much as they do on Twitter. In real life, we avoid certain topics or getting involved with certain groups or going to regions/squares in cities where we know there is possibility of conflict. All these aspects are already well replicated into fediverse.
A few thousand out of millions is not a lot. The fact that it took them until now to leave, just a few weeks after Musk took over, shows that it's not anything policy-related and motivated entirely by the removal of insiders from positions of influence within Twitter. Now they want to go infest the Fediverse. I think they'll find they're just as unwelcome there as they are on Twitter.
A few million, in contrast, is a lot. I partially agree that there were already several reasons to leave and that only leaving now means many will return. However, as someone who's been on the Fediverse for years and never found Twitter even usable, I must say the following:
I don't really see how those users were in positions of power or influence, not do I see how they would be an infestation to the Fediverse. I also have not seen much unwelcoming content to the Twitter refugees in my area of the Fediverse. Though it is very hard to make judgments about the Fediverse since it's not even centralized or monolithic.
There's an aspect of quality vs quantity. At this point, most of the people I'm actually bothered about following are on Mastodon (this may a feature of my bubble, of course, but it works for me). There are, granted, a lot fewer first-name-bunch-of-numbers weirdos hassling people in the replies, but, I mean, I can live with that.
Was thinking along these lines earlier when I saw that Mastodon now has something north of 7M users (including bots? are there many bots there? some, for sure, but probably not a lot).
7M is the population of a good-size city. Twitter has something like 24M/day active (including bots. lots of bots!).
The difference is that Twitter is just one big, wide-open agora, lots of touts shouting at the tops of their voices, and heard over all the space. Mastodon instances are natural neighbourhoods. You eventually find one that suits you and settle there. You don't like it after a while, or you find somewhere better, you move. You can very easily avoid the dodgy parts of the city (or visit them if that's your thing) and just hang out where you're comfortable. For me that's the key difference between the two.
> 7M is the population of a good-size city. Twitter has something like 24M/day active (including bots. lots of bots!).
According to Statista [1], you're off by an order of magnitude (237.8m mDAU), and that number should exclude bots (though I don't know how accurate it is).
This ferver demonstrates to me that Musk was right. Some people want Twitter to be exclusive to their own politics. They don't care about who they follow, they care about who other people are following.
I don't think that is the case. The problem is Twitter pushes things your way that you have nothing to do about. They send you notifications to random actor's birthday. Then they push Tweets in your feed to maximize engagement. I know that can be turned off but way too many people don't and then they end up engaging in topics they know nothing about. This then make stupid things trend on Twitter.
People are not leaving Twitter because of politics, they are leaving because they are finally seeing the cesspool that Twitter is.
I never could JOIN Twitter for that reason. I tried to use it a year ago and I couldn't turn off all of the annoying inflammatory and inciteful comment not only in my feeds but in my NOTIFICATIONS. I just found it unusable and never became a regular user.
I don’t see what that has to do with Elon Musk or Donald Trump, which the blog post was about. What you describe was true long before Musk bought Twitter or Trump ran for president.
Did you notice that you again talked about how other people view tweets, not that you personally couldn't switch to chronological view and enjoy only tweets from people you follow?
I dont even have Twitter. I noticed how it drags us into things that we dont care about so I ditched it after brief use. I applaud your ability to only stick to your feed and not wonder off anywhere else on that site.
This is the salient point getting lost in a lot of conversations about Twitter and free speech.
There seem to be a lot of people who not only want to control what they see on Twitter (understandable) but also want to control what others see.
> But although Trump was a serial “main character”, as president he was unlike the all main characters who went before: he was fundamentally unavoidable.
I encourage people who want to mould their own experience or echo chambers to use the block button.
No. There should be red lines. There should be consequences.
I stayed up until now. Clearly the new owner doesn't want us around. I won't stay where I'm not wanted. Since most of my friends already made the jump to Mastodon the decision isn't very hard...
The socially mediated announcing their departure. Where have i seen this before.
> healthy medium for serious communication.
Maybe i m crazy but i ve never met "serious communication" even though i am very proactive to seek it. It s 100% emotional outbursts, very opinionated opinions and hot takes. It's fun but not serious. This article is like that, too
I enjoy "learning the distribution". It's ok if it is high variance if we can have a decent sample size. You learn about all the crazy things but that creates a map that is useful later.
I feel the same about the strengths of old twitter, and how it has mostly been replaced with meaningless yammer, bots and whatever "engagement" means.
I recently dusted off my old mastadon account, and it reminded me of the early days of twitter. I am sure people will find a way to screw up this one too, but for now I am happy to have something that resembles the good old days of twitter.
Sceptics are talking about low usage and how it will never be as big as twitter. But for me that's just positive. In fact, mastadon does certain things a bit differently specifically to reduce meaningless "engagement". Hopefully this will also discourage "influencers" from joining :)
Feel free to leave and don't let the door stop you on the way out.
Most of the so-called Twitter 'exodus' are people unhappy with the decision that Twitter will host different opinions from what Twitter used to in the past ~decade. And that's fine, but signalling your disapproval based on unfounded perceptions and speculations is disingenuous BECAUSE those same people used to champion everything about diversity and inclusivity. That's pretty hypocritical if nothing else.
Can't speak of anyone else, but personally I decided to close my twitter account because the amount of "twitter drama" has just gone through the roof. Twitter has always been a bit too much of a egg-throwing contest. Which I have been mostly been able to avoid by choosing to not follow people who's feeds is not quote tweeting people who the hate. But that doesn't work anymore, the drama slips through from sensible people too.
I don't think mastodon will be any better, the whole microblogging idea just encourages stupid hot takes and misunderstanding others. It's just not good for humankind, and I'm glad I was able to get over my addiction.
I stay on Twitter, because there are a ton of accounts I follow that post things that interest me and that I learn from, in particular Python and related frameworks. But also programming in general plus much more interesting things like machinelearning and AI.
I love the Godot project, and it's super fun to follow the #GodotEngine tag, you see so much amazing creations and tutorials people post. And Blender3D.
Those are just a few examples and only IT, I also follow up on things that happen in cities where friends live, what is going on in their lives and what is happening in their cities.
To me Twitter is a huge treasure trove of information.
And this is probably going to sound arrogant, but I really don't care for your high-horse posts about departing Twitter (or any platform), because from where I stand it's because of your own inability to filter the things you like and dislike.
I don't care who owns Twitter, I care about the people who create content that interest and inspire me. As long as they keep doing that, I will continue to be a happy follower.
For me, as someone who tried to use Twitter but never got into it:
I never could filter out the political, inflammatory, and inciteful side of Twitter. It was never useful for me in that way.
I just never understood how to, if you could. Though I'd think it's difficult to, considering that's the whole business model.
exactly, filtering Trump, Putin, Russia, Ukraine, Zelensky, Elisabeth, Queen, etc. helps a lot with annoying popular topics I'm not interested to hear about from others at all
plus then there is megablock - find topic you have very clear opinion about and block everyone who likes completely crazy opinion to stop wasting time potentially reading tweets from people who like such opinion. does it create echo chamber? sure, but it's way healthier than wasting your own time getting angry about some crazies whatever side you are on
Switch from algorithmic to chronlogical feed (via the stars icon on the startpage of the app). Then, if you have your followings curated (which you likely already have anyway), you should not get much crap in your feed.
The root problem is that there is a troubled subset of our population who delight in smearing shit on the walls. We’ve all seen it in real life public toilets, in that literal fashion, but it also comes in the form of ratfucking, like Stone, and in QAnon-style promotion of crazy conspiracy theories, and in many variations in-between. They engage in acts of destruction against the public good; they are destroyers of peace, of reason, of society. Some are legit mentally ill, but other are very savvy and are doing it with deliberation. Social media has broadened their reach and increased the volume of their smear.
I thought so too and yet I had to create a mastodon account because all the sudden some people moved I wanted to continue to follow. That didn’t happen at any point before.
If a platform is huge enough, there are lots of humans there, including lots of humans who post very interesting content. Even LinkedIn, I used to think it was a pure waste of time to be on LinkedIn, but I recently realized I was completely wrong and depending on the subject you are interested in - but probably not programming - there are niches on LinkedIn that are incredibly interesting.
The scary thought is that we may loose track of those content creators that inspire us for a dumb reason like Elon Musk sabotaging it from the top, and our favorite content creators not being readily available anymore.
I hope if that happens that we do the effort to google the handles of those people and find them on whatever place of the web they migrated.
> To me Twitter is a huge treasure trove of information.
For thousands of years people did not need continuous feed of information to survive. I am not trying to undermine your comment. Just an observation that I wanted to share.
This is why I'm leaving. Pretty much everyone I follow moved to Mastodon and the conversation in Twitter really deteriorated. I kept the account and I use https://moa.party/ to auto-tweet my Mastodon posts. But it's just more fun and informative on Mastodon at the moment.
As I see it, it was "special" as long as "A" set of "species" had control. Now that they have lost control, they do their best to destroy it. This to me is a clear sign that they are unable to handle alternative narratives - a.k.a "My way or the highway".
I for one, plan to continue staying here to see how Twitter evolves. In fact, I had started migrating out of here while it had it's previous avatar/mind-set. So long as multiple perspectives (the real definition of being liberal to my mind) are welcome in a respectful setting, I'm good. I'd actually like to hear from both sides rather than be inside an echo chamber.
I ran the tag search on an instance I hope most matches what you're looking for. It's a game development focused instance. Searching elsewhere could produce different results.
Given such a division of opinions on Twitter and other platforms, I can't help but think that we need the 2 of everything: 2 Twitters, 2 Facebooks, 2 Googles, 2 Apples, 2 Netflixes, etc... Some people will be on Twitter 1 and be happy. Others will be on Twitter 2 and be just as content. The additional wrinkle is that the majority of "engagement" is coming from Group 1 and Group 2 mudslinging each other. If we separate them on two different platforms, the temperature of the conversations will go down. We already do exactly the same thing at the international football (soccer) competitions: you always sit the fans from opposing sides separately.
God no, one Twitter was already too many but it at least served it's role well as a quarantine to keep the rest of the internet safe from its users. Now that it can't even perform that role well, I don't see what use one, much less two, could possibly have.
I suspect that Group 1 and Group 2 will have very different ideas on what is means to keep Internet safe for their corresponding constituents. Depending on whether you belong to Group 1 or Group 2, you should feel safe on your own corresponding platform. Now, if someone insists on telling the opposing group how they should be running their lives, this particular ability will be greatly reduced.
I don't understand the problem with telling people how to live their lives. I don't see what's wrong with vegans, pro-lifers, and many groups from all parts of the spectrum trying to stop people from doing things they believe to be wrong. I'd rather people try to stop people from doing things they see to be wrong rather than nobody stop people from doing bad things. I say this as someone who isn't a member of either of those groups. Their premises may be wrong but that's not a good reason to not fight against what one sees as immoral.
I don't know what you mean by “safe” either. I'm just referring to the unbearable culture of Twitter being contained on Twitter. Though I recently have started to suspect that it's really only sustainable by the algorithms of Twitter and not people alone.
I first joined Twitter to follow a couple of people who did not publish blogs regularly so Twitter was where they were.
Overtime I started finding other interesting people and I strated following them.
But also overtime people were getting suspended for publishing unapproved opinions, so a lot of the interesting people I was following were practicing self-censorship and reducing the amount/frequency of content they post.
The last week has been probably the most interesting week in terms of amount of content/interaction people are having and also just sighs of relief. People are no longer practicing self-censorship.
Some of the engagment is really "meta" in that people are on Twitter to talk about Twitter, which is a weird thing and can't last for too long, but it's still interesting.
It feels like the old school internet. You can login and always find something new and interesting.
You can change to chronological order in timeline settings. The interesting thing is that if you do that you’ll quickly realize that most content is shit and you’ll still get suggested tweets filling the void
Lots of people are saying “you’ll come back” and “nobody is migrating for real”, and I have had the same opinion back when the Twitter deal was first announced and a few people moved over to Mastodon.
But this time, it was very different: When the deal went through, a large part of my bubble really did move to Mastodon. This happened over a few days, and after the second or third day, my Twitter timeline was noticeably empty, and Mastodon is very alive instead.
Of course I can’t predict if this sticks over the medium or long term, but for me, the situation is very clear: the people I care about are now on Mastodon.
(I spent 10 years on Twitter, with over 4000 followers.)
This was probably written with only the English-speaking part of Twitter in the writer's field of view. English in Twitter doesn't comprise even a third of all tweets ( https://www.vicinitas.io/blog/twitter-social-media-strategy-... ); in fact, for pure tweets that aren't RTs nor replies, the above data even shows there are more Japanese tweets than there are in English, albeit by a slim margin.
So, I agree it's about the people, but I don't see the people leaving, at least in the languages I use.
I think anyone who spoke Japanese and was going to move already did during the series of Japanese migrations. Some of the biggest instances are from Japan.
To me this whole thing is pretty simple if you understand Elon’s history. He’s a master pumper/promoter much like P.T. Barnum. He’s currently attempting to inflate twitter’s perceived value after being forced to buy it by going on and on about how “alive” the site is now (despite no real changes) with much higher engagement.
I’m betting he takes the site public again in <6 months. What’s amazing though is the endless obsession with Elon by people who should know better and how they will blindly believe any and all things he says. Not even a hint of skepticism. So I imagine the IPO will garner a ton of interest and buyers who will overpay. Still Elon will probably take a massive loss on this deal unless the market recovers a great deal by then.
Both things can be true by the way- Twitter was a massive dumpster fire due to having no leadership for a long time AND Elon could be trying to pump and dump it. I think in general Twitter’s value is overestimated by its users by a huge factor. If it vanished it might leave a void in people’s day but it would not have any meaningful impact on society.
FWIW I don’t think it will vanish because while it’s a relatively small portion of society who use it regularly those users are incredibly sticky and aren’t going anywhere. After all this is over and it’s taken public again I suspect it will be largely the same site.
Agreed. He has explicitly said he intends to take it public once it starts making money at the same levels of other tech companies (I.e. via reducing headcount and increasing income from users)
I don't think he is worried about any loss it might make if it doesn't work out, people are putting too much value on that but only as it would impact the ability to get funds for future endeavours.
Why on earth would you say that someone is not worried about losing a $44 billion investment?
That’s really not based on reality and the number of random changes they are currently pushing with zero strategic foresight makes it very clear that despite the blistering they are very much concerned.
Yep and if you look at it through that lens it all becomes fairly predictable. Bringing trump back presumably increases controversy and engagement. Everything he does between now and taking it public will be to maximize attention no matter what. Expect many more off the cuff decisions/announcements in the coming weeks.
As an aside it would be interesting if after all this football spiking by the Elon fans about how dispensable Twitter engineers are (I don’t have a strong opinion on this not really knowing the answer) the site does end up suffering a major outage due to a hack or something else. Given the number of personnel and policy changes that have seemingly been made with no planning or thought the odds of that would seem better than zero.
I find the general negativity towards Mastodon in HN quite intriguing, considering that:
- ActivityPub is basically a two-way RSS (which is the most beloved tech in this community)
- It's open source and you can setup your own server in one afternoon
- No sorting algorithms, no tracking, no ads
- Relatively easy to customize/hack
And to add to this, during this past month I have seen the majority of the infosec, astronomy, psychics, maths, biology, ecology communities migrating to Mastodon and for whatever reason my timeline is currently way more interesting and engaging than what Twitter offered to me.
I'm not a big social network user and I guess that's why I don't understand the sentiment in this comment section, but I do enjoy using Mastodon at the moment and I hope it stays as cool as it is now :)
There's a daily thread of "Twitter is terrible, I'm moving to Mastodon" with lots of "yeah, Mastodon is great, Twitter will not exist 12 months from now" comments.
I think maybe you have fallen prey to the misconception that there is a single "HN crowd" or an "official" HN community position on anything. That may have been the case in the beginning, but as far as I can see, any position on any topic can find a sizeable following here, to a large degree depending on the title of the article, what comments gets the top spots, and how the conversation develops from there in each case.
If at all anything of the sort, the HN crowd might be critical thinkers, and so will tend to upvote anything that picks any popular notion apart, laser focused on the negative aspects. Just a reflection.
> With Musk sucking the oxygen out of Twitter, the conversations are quickly moving elsewhere
Actually, the organic traffic on twitter.com shows an upward trajectory over the last weeks [0]. So unless there is something wrong with the stats on semrush, this writer seems to be confusing facts with wishful thinking.
170 comments
[ 2.7 ms ] story [ 236 ms ] threadWhat would be awesome if we had those old-school forums back but if they also had some kind of interoperability (same login, search across a fleet of forums, etc.)
I'm enjoying my time on https://hachyderm.io/ - it feels like those small spaces that we used to inhabit before the world got too big. (@mmastrac@hachyderm.io is my current home)
Once I feel more comfortable in Mastodon, I'll likely try to extract myself into a private server. I'm reminded of the old days of using someone's Fidonet server to participate in small-but-global communities, and how you'd eventually just run your own node to get a little more freedom.
This is something I've had to repeat countless times during the last 2 weeks, when Twitter users end up in the fediverse confused about how to find content. There is no financial interest to keep you on a fediverse instance. You have to make an effort yourself.
My dog has a Twitter account.
She keeps getting push notifications from people she doesn't follow, usually rage bait.
She had to block Jordan Peterson!
It’s now very heavily in the angry old man yelling about the degeneracy of society with a heavy political leaning that is a LONG way outside his actual area of professional expertise.
The tweet is question is easily searchable:
> Remember when pride was a sin? And Ellen Page just had her breasts removed by a criminal physician.
(a) it's fairly simple to turn off.
(b) it's a fairly obvious artefact of being ad-driven, and so needing to increase "engagement" at all cost that Musk has also identified as the main problem and wants to reduce as much as possible.
These tweets showed up as notifications that were delivered by push notification!
These past months my Twitter timeline contained almost as much spam from people I don't follow (and would never follow) as it did content I sought out (people I was following).
Twitter is all about that "engagement" nowadays, and I as a user am only ~50% in charge of what my Twitter experience is going to be.
Before the acquisition, Twitter's revenue was over 4 times that.
As mentioned in the blog post, previous management of Twitter was really REALLY unfocused. Adding NFTs, and a host of other things that never really caught on, while the core product routinely suffered a lack of even basic functionality (edit button anyone?).
Twitter is now highly motivated to find profit and monetize, but I think it's a bit far fetched to assume a debt interest payment - out of everything else that is going on - is going to be the central thing that kills twitter.
I'm European, Danish to be exact, and I've had this weird feeling about our politicians and public institutions being on things like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and so on, for about a decade now. Not because it's wrong for them to use the social media platforms, but because they rely so much on American advertisement companies in doing so. In that sense, something like Mastodon just makes a lot more sense. Our government could operate a Mastodon server where they house all our elected officials, and nobody would be at a risk of being banned for breaking some American TOS. They would even be able to moderate their comment threads a lot better, by not allowing stuff like American anti-vaxxers to comment on things about Danish vaccine programs without first having to rely on Twitter or Facebook to police it for them. It seems the EU has already gone in that direction, or at least did so back in the spring of 2022 when Elon first announced his plans to buy Twitter, but our local politicians haven't yet followed.
Similarly, our journalist profession has something called a "pressekort" which is basically a certificate that shows the world that you're a Danish journalist. They could come together and build a Mastodon server where a "pressekort" is required to be a member. (There are already some of those springing up, so I guess it's already happening), and it's already limiting the amount of misinformation that happens on their posts by a massive amount.
I know this won't be the "free to say anything without consequences" haven a lot of people here on HN want. We're already seeing right-wing network servers and users completely blocked, but it's sort of how free speech works in a democracy. Before the American advertisement companies gave the village looney a platform, nobody around here listened to them. We still largely don't listen to them in my country, but we sure waste more time on them than we did in the world before Facebook.
So yes, the time has come to leave centralised Social Media companies. The real question is, whether we will actually do it. I'm not going to say that joining Mastodon was hard, because it wasn't. But I spent about a week researching a good server to join, and that's sure "harder" than just pushing my telefonnumber into TikTok.
That's the meat of the article if you are looking for it.
I've always enjoyed pwn's content but will take a few $10 bets on them still using Twitter heavily 1 year from now.
Reminds me of election season with all the people moving to Canada frankly, it's predictable as the moon phases.
I've been on Mastodon for 2 weeks and I'm up to 7,900 already.
The numbers on Mastodon are pretty impressive. More importantly, my timeline over there is full of interesting people talking about a variety of interesting things.
He tweeted his mastodon link that got 44 retweets.
He talked about mastodon (no link) and got another 59 retweets.
He also put mastodon link on his profile.
I mean those should help build his followers on mastodon by a large margin.
But despite those reasons, the activity this represents still works as a counter to the claim I was replying to here that "no one is switching to Mastodon".
That, plus Mastodon does not benefit from central spam account squashing authority.
Of course, the discrepancy of follower/actual reader numbers also exists in case of Twitter, but if I had to bet I'd say it has the potential to be stronger on Mastodon.
Let's not kid ourselves. You are already famous with followers. That is the biggest reason you can grow followers quickly on Mastodon.
I had Mastodon and tweeted about it too. And I have 5 followers compared to 200 something followers on twitter.
The numbers don't matter to me as much as whether or not I get to do that.
The only part of my follows left on Twitter now are the people producing the average low quality content (gossip, memes, current drama etc.)
The ads in my feed have gone from things like my bank to magic brain pills that you might find on Alex Jones almost overnight.
They are in deep trouble here.
The majority of the staff have left. Tangible fact.
The site is having outages. Tangible fact.
Mastodon usage is significantly up. Tangible fact.
People make vague hand wavey gestures about Twitter having better than ever engagement or usage or whatever… but there are no stats to back it up, so who knows?
Come on! Compared to 6 months ago the service is empirically worse.
It’s unbelievable to me someone can stand here and go “where the proof dude??” with what’s happening.
Is it going to be gone in a year? Who knows? No one’s knows the future.
Is it reasonable to say, given the recent state of the platform is, the probability of the platform being gone in a year is now significantly greater than it was six months ago?
Probably, I would say, yes. The empirical evidence suggests so.
I’m not saying there’s a 100% chance of that; no one is saying that; but it’s greater than it was.
You have to really make an effort to believe otherwise.
We’ll have to wait months before we can truly know if this diminished and demoralized crew is able to keep the site running with minimal issues, but for now they do seem to be (slowly) recovering.
Okay, but going from 0% to 0.0001% is also "greater than it was". What are you saying? Is it 90%, 50%, 20%, 10%, 1%?
Twitter has graduated from “don’t believe it’s plausible that Twitter will fail” to “anecdotally things seem to going badly” to “empirical evidence of service issues and mismanagement”.
I don’t care what you believe, those are the facts, right now.
I think then next month will give us a reasonable ability to forecast as we get spikes in usage during the World Cup and we see if the service goes down and if people keep using it.
Until then… who knows?
More than 0.001%; that’s just random variance. Don’t be ridiculous.
I’m not waving my hands and saying stupid meaningless shit like 0.0001 > 0 so there’s some meaningless increase in the chance Twitter will fail.
I’m saying, there is a tangible increase in the possibility of failure, and already a concrete notable decrease in value of the entire platform.
The only operable probabilities are "Never", "Sometimes", and "Always". Since Musk took over, the chance of imminent nonrecoverable catastrophe has gone from "No" to "Maybe".
"Twitter's copyright strike system is no longer working. People are tweeting entire movies."
https://twitter.com/chadloder/status/1594139381727916033?s=2...
As for not deleting accounts, did people actually delete their MySpace accounts? Or just slowly start using them less over time?
(FWIW I have just unfollowed everyone I was following and will keep an account purely to reduce login nagging when following a Twitter link.)
Interesting time, for sure.
I love Twitter and use it a lot. I hope it doesn't die though I acknowledge that's possible. It certainly hasn't died yet though - despite much waiting and gnashing of teeth.
It is breaking.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=owDd4zify-A
I am not a copyright or intellectual property or legal expert - but my intuition says that Home Alone is probably as copyrighted as the movie Hackers (both older movies). Home Alone has been up for 3 weeks on YouTube with 435k views. By contrast, the tweet linked above showing that "Twitter is breaking" has already been removed (less than a day).
Perhaps Home Alone is public domain or something, or whoever owns the intellectual property wants it shared like this. Not sure how I would check that, but I have seen lots of movies and TV shows like this on YouTube (sometimes with modifications to the sound or image to avoid automatic filtering). If Home Alone is free I'm sure I could find another example.
The good part is federated alternatives do not look like massive echo chambers like Twitter is. Even if certain server does turn into an echo chamber the rest of network can just leave that server alone. Federation is closer to our actual societies. People don't clash on daily basis in our societies at least not as much as they do on Twitter. In real life, we avoid certain topics or getting involved with certain groups or going to regions/squares in cities where we know there is possibility of conflict. All these aspects are already well replicated into fediverse.
A few thousand out of millions is not a lot. The fact that it took them until now to leave, just a few weeks after Musk took over, shows that it's not anything policy-related and motivated entirely by the removal of insiders from positions of influence within Twitter. Now they want to go infest the Fediverse. I think they'll find they're just as unwelcome there as they are on Twitter.
It's around 5000 per hour, well over a million new active users this month.
https://mastodon.social/@atomicpoet/109368148529393065
A few million, in contrast, is a lot. I partially agree that there were already several reasons to leave and that only leaving now means many will return. However, as someone who's been on the Fediverse for years and never found Twitter even usable, I must say the following: I don't really see how those users were in positions of power or influence, not do I see how they would be an infestation to the Fediverse. I also have not seen much unwelcoming content to the Twitter refugees in my area of the Fediverse. Though it is very hard to make judgments about the Fediverse since it's not even centralized or monolithic.
https://pleroma.miguelcr.me/notice/APk4LL8HJtqJIoA2m8
For example the World Wide Web.
It's not a global network like twitter; you are under the mercy of the admins of the node you are on.
You might get suspended without an option to pull your data and migrate to a different node.
Nodes can cut each other off if they don't like each other's politics.
So you can't just joina a node and be on the network. You have to find an instance that aligns with your politics.
7M is the population of a good-size city. Twitter has something like 24M/day active (including bots. lots of bots!).
The difference is that Twitter is just one big, wide-open agora, lots of touts shouting at the tops of their voices, and heard over all the space. Mastodon instances are natural neighbourhoods. You eventually find one that suits you and settle there. You don't like it after a while, or you find somewhere better, you move. You can very easily avoid the dodgy parts of the city (or visit them if that's your thing) and just hang out where you're comfortable. For me that's the key difference between the two.
According to Statista [1], you're off by an order of magnitude (237.8m mDAU), and that number should exclude bots (though I don't know how accurate it is).
[1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/970920/monetizable-daily...
People are not leaving Twitter because of politics, they are leaving because they are finally seeing the cesspool that Twitter is.
This is 95% of social media, including HN.
There seem to be a lot of people who not only want to control what they see on Twitter (understandable) but also want to control what others see.
> But although Trump was a serial “main character”, as president he was unlike the all main characters who went before: he was fundamentally unavoidable.
I encourage people who want to mould their own experience or echo chambers to use the block button.
I stayed up until now. Clearly the new owner doesn't want us around. I won't stay where I'm not wanted. Since most of my friends already made the jump to Mastodon the decision isn't very hard...
> healthy medium for serious communication.
Maybe i m crazy but i ve never met "serious communication" even though i am very proactive to seek it. It s 100% emotional outbursts, very opinionated opinions and hot takes. It's fun but not serious. This article is like that, too
I recently dusted off my old mastadon account, and it reminded me of the early days of twitter. I am sure people will find a way to screw up this one too, but for now I am happy to have something that resembles the good old days of twitter.
Sceptics are talking about low usage and how it will never be as big as twitter. But for me that's just positive. In fact, mastadon does certain things a bit differently specifically to reduce meaningless "engagement". Hopefully this will also discourage "influencers" from joining :)
"TEN things you didn't know about managing upwards. A thread."
on Mastodon every 10 posts.
Most of the so-called Twitter 'exodus' are people unhappy with the decision that Twitter will host different opinions from what Twitter used to in the past ~decade. And that's fine, but signalling your disapproval based on unfounded perceptions and speculations is disingenuous BECAUSE those same people used to champion everything about diversity and inclusivity. That's pretty hypocritical if nothing else.
I don't think mastodon will be any better, the whole microblogging idea just encourages stupid hot takes and misunderstanding others. It's just not good for humankind, and I'm glad I was able to get over my addiction.
I stay on Twitter, because there are a ton of accounts I follow that post things that interest me and that I learn from, in particular Python and related frameworks. But also programming in general plus much more interesting things like machinelearning and AI.
I love the Godot project, and it's super fun to follow the #GodotEngine tag, you see so much amazing creations and tutorials people post. And Blender3D.
Those are just a few examples and only IT, I also follow up on things that happen in cities where friends live, what is going on in their lives and what is happening in their cities.
To me Twitter is a huge treasure trove of information.
And this is probably going to sound arrogant, but I really don't care for your high-horse posts about departing Twitter (or any platform), because from where I stand it's because of your own inability to filter the things you like and dislike.
I don't care who owns Twitter, I care about the people who create content that interest and inspire me. As long as they keep doing that, I will continue to be a happy follower.
plus then there is megablock - find topic you have very clear opinion about and block everyone who likes completely crazy opinion to stop wasting time potentially reading tweets from people who like such opinion. does it create echo chamber? sure, but it's way healthier than wasting your own time getting angry about some crazies whatever side you are on
https://megablock.xyz
The root of the problem is not twitter.
Something _is_ different this time around.
If a platform is huge enough, there are lots of humans there, including lots of humans who post very interesting content. Even LinkedIn, I used to think it was a pure waste of time to be on LinkedIn, but I recently realized I was completely wrong and depending on the subject you are interested in - but probably not programming - there are niches on LinkedIn that are incredibly interesting.
The scary thought is that we may loose track of those content creators that inspire us for a dumb reason like Elon Musk sabotaging it from the top, and our favorite content creators not being readily available anymore.
I hope if that happens that we do the effort to google the handles of those people and find them on whatever place of the web they migrated.
For thousands of years people did not need continuous feed of information to survive. I am not trying to undermine your comment. Just an observation that I wanted to share.
I for one, plan to continue staying here to see how Twitter evolves. In fact, I had started migrating out of here while it had it's previous avatar/mind-set. So long as multiple perspectives (the real definition of being liberal to my mind) are welcome in a respectful setting, I'm good. I'd actually like to hear from both sides rather than be inside an echo chamber.
https://mastodon.gamedev.place/@godotengine
https://mastodon.gamedev.place/tags/GodotEngine
https://mastodon.social/@Blender
https://mastodon.gamedev.place/tags/b3d
I ran the tag search on an instance I hope most matches what you're looking for. It's a game development focused instance. Searching elsewhere could produce different results.
I don't know what you mean by “safe” either. I'm just referring to the unbearable culture of Twitter being contained on Twitter. Though I recently have started to suspect that it's really only sustainable by the algorithms of Twitter and not people alone.
I first joined Twitter to follow a couple of people who did not publish blogs regularly so Twitter was where they were.
Overtime I started finding other interesting people and I strated following them.
But also overtime people were getting suspended for publishing unapproved opinions, so a lot of the interesting people I was following were practicing self-censorship and reducing the amount/frequency of content they post.
The last week has been probably the most interesting week in terms of amount of content/interaction people are having and also just sighs of relief. People are no longer practicing self-censorship.
Some of the engagment is really "meta" in that people are on Twitter to talk about Twitter, which is a weird thing and can't last for too long, but it's still interesting.
It feels like the old school internet. You can login and always find something new and interesting.
I've never been more excited about Twitter.
But this time, it was very different: When the deal went through, a large part of my bubble really did move to Mastodon. This happened over a few days, and after the second or third day, my Twitter timeline was noticeably empty, and Mastodon is very alive instead.
Of course I can’t predict if this sticks over the medium or long term, but for me, the situation is very clear: the people I care about are now on Mastodon.
(I spent 10 years on Twitter, with over 4000 followers.)
So, I agree it's about the people, but I don't see the people leaving, at least in the languages I use.
I’m betting he takes the site public again in <6 months. What’s amazing though is the endless obsession with Elon by people who should know better and how they will blindly believe any and all things he says. Not even a hint of skepticism. So I imagine the IPO will garner a ton of interest and buyers who will overpay. Still Elon will probably take a massive loss on this deal unless the market recovers a great deal by then.
Both things can be true by the way- Twitter was a massive dumpster fire due to having no leadership for a long time AND Elon could be trying to pump and dump it. I think in general Twitter’s value is overestimated by its users by a huge factor. If it vanished it might leave a void in people’s day but it would not have any meaningful impact on society.
FWIW I don’t think it will vanish because while it’s a relatively small portion of society who use it regularly those users are incredibly sticky and aren’t going anywhere. After all this is over and it’s taken public again I suspect it will be largely the same site.
I don't think he is worried about any loss it might make if it doesn't work out, people are putting too much value on that but only as it would impact the ability to get funds for future endeavours.
That’s really not based on reality and the number of random changes they are currently pushing with zero strategic foresight makes it very clear that despite the blistering they are very much concerned.
As an aside it would be interesting if after all this football spiking by the Elon fans about how dispensable Twitter engineers are (I don’t have a strong opinion on this not really knowing the answer) the site does end up suffering a major outage due to a hack or something else. Given the number of personnel and policy changes that have seemingly been made with no planning or thought the odds of that would seem better than zero.
They have in just 3 weeks:
- Become one of the least desirable tech companies to work for.
- Poisoned (probably beyond repair) their primary revenue source which I think was as high as 90% of their incoming cash.
- Developed a reputation as being a new home for the worst people on the internet.
- Lost many of their biggest content creators.
- Lost a huge part of their critical workforce with lots of incredible hard to replace people.
- Attracted a lot of attention from lawmakers around the world about their supposed non compliance with various laws.
This isn’t the kind of situation they are going to magically just “hardcore” their way out of. These were almost certainly fatal mistakes.
- ActivityPub is basically a two-way RSS (which is the most beloved tech in this community)
- It's open source and you can setup your own server in one afternoon
- No sorting algorithms, no tracking, no ads
- Relatively easy to customize/hack
And to add to this, during this past month I have seen the majority of the infosec, astronomy, psychics, maths, biology, ecology communities migrating to Mastodon and for whatever reason my timeline is currently way more interesting and engaging than what Twitter offered to me.
I'm not a big social network user and I guess that's why I don't understand the sentiment in this comment section, but I do enjoy using Mastodon at the moment and I hope it stays as cool as it is now :)
What general negativity are you talking about?
If at all anything of the sort, the HN crowd might be critical thinkers, and so will tend to upvote anything that picks any popular notion apart, laser focused on the negative aspects. Just a reflection.
Actually, the organic traffic on twitter.com shows an upward trajectory over the last weeks [0]. So unless there is something wrong with the stats on semrush, this writer seems to be confusing facts with wishful thinking.
[0] https://www.semrush.com/analytics/overview/?q=twitter.com&se...
That’s a terrible metric to use when you think about it.