70k is a grain of sand relatively.
It depends on the kind of users. Twitter has only 300k users with a blue check. If 70k of them would switch to Mastodon it would have a bigger effect.
If my mother had wheels she would’ve been a bike.
Mastodon gained 70k users after Musk’s Twitter takeover
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Re: Mastodon gained 70k users after Musk’s Twitter takeover
#22That's 0.003% of Twitter's "monetizable" daily active users.
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Re: Mastodon gained 70k users after Musk’s Twitter takeover
#23I joined mastodon. Every instance I joined was full of posts about how good mastodon is, but there was no other content or conversations. I quit mastodon.
Re: Mastodon gained 70k users after Musk’s Twitter takeover
#24It's difficult to see the value in spending time on Mastodon, compared to other services. For example, just checking joinmastodon.org gives the following top 10 recommended options: " GENERAL INVITE ONLY snabelen.no Ein norsk tenar for den desentraliserte sosiale media platformen Mastodon Get on waitlist 1.8K GENERAL INVITE ONLY mastodontti.fi Tämä on suomenkielinen Mastodon-instanssi. Julkisten päivitysten tulisi ol…
You're forgetting that Mastodon runs on ActivityPub, which means that the point is to divide users into different servers. For example, when everyone joined mastodon.social, the balance tipped and a lot of users lost access. Concentrating users into a single instance is not what's supposed to happen. Ideally, you wouldn't want to go through joinmastodon.org and join the highest ranking server since that would central…
So if it serves a different use case then Twitter, why is it even advertised, or talked about, as a replacement?
Re: Mastodon gained 70k users after Musk’s Twitter takeover
#25It's difficult to see the value in spending time on Mastodon, compared to other services. For example, just checking joinmastodon.org gives the following top 10 recommended options: " GENERAL INVITE ONLY snabelen.no Ein norsk tenar for den desentraliserte sosiale media platformen Mastodon Get on waitlist 1.8K GENERAL INVITE ONLY mastodontti.fi Tämä on suomenkielinen Mastodon-instanssi. Julkisten päivitysten tulisi ol…
Different between Mastodon and the other platforms you linked is that Mastodon facilitates communication between the various instances (if they agree to that). So you can join instance X and still communicate with people on instance Y, and it's easy for the administrators to set that up. It's possible with IRC/Discord as well but it's hacky and requires "bridges" while that functionality is "native" in Mastodon.
Re: Mastodon gained 70k users after Musk’s Twitter takeover
#26People used to think the network effect for MySpace and Friendster were insurmountable.
I played around with Mastodon last night and I think it has some bad but not insurmountable ergonomic wrinkles, but I worry its decentralization will prevent it from ever becoming mainstream. Centralization makes it easier to deal with "bad" actors. Also Discovery is a huge problem: how do I discover people I know? How do content creators who want to build an audience (and so create content that would attract users to the platform) get discovered? I think discovery is a bigger catch 22 than "nobody is on it."
Re: Mastodon gained 70k users after Musk’s Twitter takeover
#27The most important quality I hear people are looking for in a replacement for Twitter is "Everyone else is on it" so they're all stuck in a catch 22. I don't think this energy to get off Twitter is going to go anywhere.
Like with everything else that is large, any shift will be slow and gradual. You are right saying that any “surge” is not going to last, but it does not mean the change won’t happen. Everyone else was stuck on Facebook 5-8 years ago, but many people from my age group rarely go there anymore.
Re: Mastodon gained 70k users after Musk’s Twitter takeover
#28Earlier quoted context omitted.
You're forgetting that Mastodon runs on ActivityPub, which means that the point is to divide users into different servers. For example, when everyone joined mastodon.social, the balance tipped and a lot of users lost access. Concentrating users into a single instance is not what's supposed to happen. Ideally, you wouldn't want to go through joinmastodon.org and join the highest ranking server since that would central…
So if it serves a different use case then Twitter, why is it even advertised, or talked about, as a replacement?
Because it’s a microblogging platform.
Re: Mastodon gained 70k users after Musk’s Twitter takeover
#29That's 0.003% of Twitter's "monetizable" daily active users.
Rather than counting users, I'll be more interested to see if any specific communities actually manage to collectively transition to another service. It's not 2006 anymore, nobody makes an account on Twitter because they want to "microblog" about the sandwich they had for lunch; no, you make an account on Twitter because, say, you're a ML researcher and all the prominent ML researchers are talking on Twitter. If the prominent ML researchers leave, then to an ML researcher doesn't matter how many users Twitter retains, because the ML crowd will follow the core. Conversely, even if Twitter were to lose 99% of its users, if the core ML researchers stick around then the ML community would also stick around.
Re: Mastodon gained 70k users after Musk’s Twitter takeover
#30How many conservatives are still on Twitter complaining about censorship, rather than using Gettr or Parler or Truth Social? Network effects are WAY stronger than we think. Also, if you built a following on Twitter over 10-15 years, leaving it is a massive sacrifice. I wouldn't bet on an actual twitter exodus.
I feel like if people truly cared about what you had to say they would seek you out regardless of the platform. Follower numbers are glorified internet points meant to keep you engaged/chained to the platform.
Yes but how many Twitter accounts are truly in that category?
One former president has kinda sorta managed it, and he was in the news every single day for years. Who else could achieve even his limited level of success? Maybe Barack Obama?