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Mastodon gained 70k users after Musk’s Twitter takeover

theguardian.com

91–100 of 276 posts

Re: Mastodon gained 70k users after Musk’s Twitter takeover

#92
post #20

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.

The term "Blue Check" or "Blue Checkmark" is not exactly a term of endearment so seeing those move to other networks certainly will have an effect. As to whether that effect is a positive or negative for Mastodon remains to be seen.

Re: Mastodon gained 70k users after Musk’s Twitter takeover

#95

People 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…

I don't think these are just ergonomic wrinkles. I was surprised to learn that it seems to matter which instance you join. I assumed "decentralized" means "it doesn't matter where you're located". To me this is rather a basic, philosophical flaw. I would also expect a decentralized network to easily support multiple identities. At least the default client seemingly does not. Twitter on the other hand allows switching…

You should think of it more as multiple places joined together rather than as one place spread out.

It's more like the old BBS networks of old, like FidoNET, etc. And it has a similar vibe to that.

I like it for this reason. If you go in expecting Twitter, you will be disappointed. That's not what it is.

Re: Mastodon gained 70k users after Musk’s Twitter takeover

#96
post #29
post #10

That'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…

A big chunk of the $TSLAQ community moved to Discord, but the experience is very different. For context these are the people who took early bets against Tesla and have been calling out its unethical practices. A lot of people are understandably nervous about continuing that research on a platform owned by its CEO.

Re: Mastodon gained 70k users after Musk’s Twitter takeover

#97
post #29
post #10

That'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…

[deleted]

Re: Mastodon gained 70k users after Musk’s Twitter takeover

#98
post #82
post #77

Can someone explain how Mastodon works? Right now I can sign up at twitter.com and get to see and talk to everyone else who has signed up - where do I sign up for Mastodon and do I get to interact with everyone else who has done the same? (the fact that this needs to be explained at all should already be a hint that it will never be mainstream)

Mastodon.tech and yes (unless they've been banned) There's no reason the answer needs to be more complicated than Twitter. Options exist, but in the literal ELI5 explanation people can already figure out "how do I message my friend who uses a different phone manufacturer than I do" without a long detailing of the inner workings of signal, or iMessage or whatsapp

The irony here is that Mastodon.tech is not running Mastodon. It's running Pleroma.

That's fine though. Pleroma speaks ActivityPub so you can network with everyone who's using Mastodon, but calling it "Mastodon.tech" is weird.

Re: Mastodon gained 70k users after Musk’s Twitter takeover

#99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think these are just ergonomic wrinkles. I was surprised to learn that it seems to matter which instance you join. I assumed "decentralized" means "it doesn't matter where you're located". To me this is rather a basic, philosophical flaw. I would also expect a decentralized network to easily support multiple identities. At least the default client seemingly does not. Twitter on the other hand allows switching…

> I would also expect a decentralized network to easily support multiple identities. At least the default client seemingly does not. The official iOS client certainly does. Long press on the profile icon at the bottom right to switch/add.

oh well. speak about discoverability. many thanks for this hint.

Re: Mastodon gained 70k users after Musk’s Twitter takeover

#100

People 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…

"Bad" actors don't need to be dealt with, just block them.

Content creators get discovered just like on Twitter, a link.

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