The problem with Mastodon is that they don’t have very many major entities actively making posts. The main thing I track on twitter is OSINT and US politics, and that community basically doesn’t exist on Mastodon right now
It takes a while to get it going. I go to the full federation feed and follow different users that I discover there, and also sometimes people that they follow.. And I also follow some big news sources like Reuters. Eventually my followed feed has built up - it's almost too many posts.
I follow some major news sources on Mastodon (Reuters, NYT, WaPo, Guardian, and more). Im in NYC so I also follow transit alerts, one of the main reasons I had previously used Twitter.
If more Twitter users had found Calckey or Misskey back in November, more would have stuck around. A lot more, I wager. It's just such a better user experience in so many ways. And it's gotten so much better in the last 6 months.
But even with prolonged discussions with some of them, they wouldn't even look at it, because it was "Mastodon vs Twitter", and Calckey wasn't listed in that title fight.
I think we shouldn't expect to see the same sort of migration from Twitter to Mastodon like we did for Reddit to Lemmy. Because of network effects, Mastodon will have a much harder time attracting refugees. What you can hope for is more of a slow drip as Twitter users get fed up with the platform. Every migrant to Mastodon makes it that much easier for the remaining Twitter users to move as well.
This is the thing, it is much harder to replicate your network on mastodon.
Lemmy is easy, you just look for communities of interest and join them. It's largely a one sided affair (you the user), sure, people do have relationships in smaller communities but it's the exception rather than the norm.
Twitter I follow about 500-600 people, and have a shade over 4000 followers. This is a lot harder to rebuild on a new platform. And many of those connections are (online) relationships built up on the platform over many years.
Moving from Twitter is a bit like leaving school. You might maintain relationships with a few of your closest friends, but on the whole, you will not see most of those people again, however much you enjoyed your time with them
They went from 500 new users an hour to 4000 new users an hour in the past day. Im sure it's all due to Twitter. Now, how many people will stick with it and become active users is anyone's guess.
At least small artists have been really signing up since last night/this morning on mastodon.art. It is already causing a wave. Calckey is trying to grab more people, but half the shit doesn't load for me right now so they can't take the brunt of it.
I don't see how it doesn't. I think the scenario in which Twitter survives through the end of the year is pretty much impossible at this point without significant outside financial intervention.
I believe this will increase the fediverse population, but ultimately I see a new centralized service emerging soon. Though, I do hope the fediverse becomes the prominent place for social content!
A lot of people seem to be going to blue sky, but I don't really see what the point is of moving to something else that's run by a single company again. Mastodon seems better when it comes to future proofing.
Their resistance to anything that resembles a discovery algorithm kind of sucks tho. I know they can be bad in the wrong hands, but it would be nice to see who else is on there and what everyone is talking about.
It’ll definitely happen, but it remains to be seen whether people will actually stay. For all we know, this latest Twitter thing could be resolved this week and people will come crawling back because they’ve built up a network/following there. Something like that is really hard to destroy, and even then I think it’s far more likely that a commercial product with a large budget and fancy apps takes in most of the users.
I also feel like the Twitter brand is still too well known to die forever. Even if it goes away for a while, someone else will buy it and bring it back.
Friendster was a flash in the pan and didn’t really have much buy-in from corporations, etc. Myspace was only truly popular for about 4-5 years, and even at its peak it never reached Twitter levels of popularity. Even still, the brand was strong enough to be sold and it still exists today. There’s even a streaming service that uses the Napster brand. Sometimes a brand becomes too valuable on its own to let die completely.
I’d say no, honestly. It’s just as matter of when Elon finally breaches the Trust Thermocline. That’s when people who had the most invested finally get fed up and leave. Judging by how many people who made Mastodon accounts but decided to start with Twitter are using them today, I’d say if he hasn’t breached it with this, it’s coming sooner rather than later.
I doubt it, at least for the people that actually "matter" and have huge followings or use twitter for promotion and their businesses. However, I hope it's enough to at least get them to crosspost to mastodon? I've seen smaller content creators start to do it so maybe it catches on.
Twitter wont die overnight (no matter how funny that would be), the best we can hope for is gradual shifting elsewhere.
I think the issue with the Twitter->Mastodon conversion is that this style of social media is about following people and therefore people will stay where the people they want to follow are. So it becomes a bit of a difficult situation where people won't move as a person they want to keep in touch with won't move which means more people won't move.
Reddit->Lemmy likely won't have the same problem as this style is about following content rather than people.
Calckey should absolutely be pushed for potential replacement, since it mirrors more closely the experience that Twitter users are used to.
I don't think we'll see a major migration, though. I think Twitter falling will just result in more fragmentation. I don't think we'll ever have a case like before where there's ONE major social media platform that everyone goes to (which is why ActivityPub is so important).