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Mastodon gained 70k users after Musk’s Twitter takeover

theguardian.com

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

#161

Post by Kadin »

christkv wrote: post #134
VectorLock wrote: post #26

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…

How do you even know the person you found is the person you wanted? Also if people flock to specific instances it will just keel over and die.

Mastodon has a nice feature where you can prove ownership of a link in your profile by setting a backlink on it (implying you at least control the content of that page).

So, if you don't want to set up your own Mastodon instance under your domain, you can instead link your Mastodon account to your homepage running on a domain of your choice. It's not something I bother to do, because I'm nobody important, but if I was e.g. Taylor Swift or something, I could show that my Mastodon account was affiliated with www.taylorswift.com, and thus give you a pretty good idea that I'm actually the real deal.

From the Edit Profile page on Mastodon (v3.5.3):

> You can verify yourself as the owner of the links in your profile metadata. For that, the linked website must contain a link back to your Mastodon profile. The link back must have a rel="me" attribute. The text content of the link does not matter.

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

#162

Post by kibwen »

lapcat wrote: post #88
kibwen wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it's a mistake to think that Mastodon would necessarily be the beneficiary of any Twitter exodus. I think it's more likely that the beneficiaries would be established, centralized services like Discord or Reddit. The underlying media models may be different, but I suspect people care less about the model than about seeing things they're interested in, and plenty of these people will already have accounts on t…

The biggest beneficiary of a Twitter exodus may be... our free time. There's no reason we have to go anywhere after Twitter. Global social networks like Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, etc., didn't even exist 20 years ago. We're probably better off without them IMO. The best Twitter replacement may be nothing.

Agreed. Now's a good opportunity for Twitter users to consider whether or not having Twitter in their life at all is a net positive.

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

#163

Post by Kadin »

carbonatedmilk wrote: post #131

For comparison, the old, dying, 'legacy' social media platform Facebook added 24MILLION new users in the same period. https://www.statista.com/statistics/264810/number-of-monthly... To rub it in - If Facebook & Mastodon were the only two social networks to 'switch' to, FB captured 99.8% of the 'switchers'. If 24 Million new users had signed up for Mastodon, that would be a story. That only 0.2% of them chose Mastadon…

> Facebook added 24MILLION new users in the same period

Of those 24M users, how many of them are people I care about or want to follow? I.e. not bots, not people on the other side of the planet, not people who don't have a language in common with me, etc. etc.

A network with 10,000 users, 10% of whom are interesting enough for me to want to follow, is much better than a network with 1M users but only 0.1% are people I'd care to interact with.

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

#165

Post by throwayyy479087 »

remram wrote: post #116
jstx1 wrote: 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)

> the fact that this needs to be explained at all should already be a hint that it will never be mainstream Ah yes, because users are incapable of learning anything at all

Yes? If you want to compete with Twitter you have to be usable by the bottom 5%, not just the top 20%

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

#166

Post by throwayyy479087 »

whoooooo123 wrote: post #164
sz4kerto wrote: post #84

Do people remember all the posts about people migrating to GitLab when Microsoft has bought GitHub?

They probably moved to the same place as all the people who said they'd leave the US if Trump got elected.

Austin?

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

#167

Post by mjmsmith »

VectorLock wrote: post #111
_chu1 wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Bad" actors don't need to be dealt with, just block them. Content creators get discovered just like on Twitter, a link.

Block each of a million individual spam bots manually. I'll wait. The obvious retort is "I just block everything by default." You have now closed yourself off and the spambots have won.

Between junk filters and blacklists, I rarely see email spam these days. That doesn't make me feel closed off.

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

#168

Post by wintermutestwin »

Honest question: Can someone who actually uses and gets value from Twit please explain the use case and value? I totally grok interest-based social, but I do not at all understand why I would want to put effort into figuring out personality-based social (beyond family/friends/blogs/etc) - particularly when posts are limited to bumper sticker lengths (unless they are just URLS to rich posts hosted elsewhere, but that's just link aggregation, which Reddit does better). Bumper stickers back and forth are not real conversations either - why wouldn't I just go to reddit or forums or even IRC (which I guess is now Discord)?

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

#169

Post by anotherrandom »

VectorLock wrote: post #26

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…

The technical barrier to entry ensures "normies" will not be able to use or understand (or at least enjoy) Mastodon. This will prevent it from becoming as huge as Twitter

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

#170

Post by theGnuMe »

ilyt wrote: post #52
VectorLock wrote: post #26

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…

> People used to think the network effect for MySpace and Friendster were insurmountable. That was also long time ago and it was much easier to compete back then. I think now only way for that to happen is if big network fucks up, not if the better competition comes up

I dunno, it is probably easier these days. A one person army can build the site, have it auto-scale.
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