4 ms·

was there a "mass exodus"? What percentage of people actually left twitter forever to another system and stayed there? What percentage of audience or "influence

was there a "mass exodus"? What percentage of people actually left twitter forever to another system and stayed there? What percentage of audience or "influencers"? Disclaimer - I'm not on Twitter, but my impression is that a few folks made a large amount of noise for leaving but most people shrugged. Other networks mat have seen a temporary large percentage Increase, but a) how much of that stuck and b) a large percentage increase of tiny absolute. Umber can be misleading. Basically, every 4 years, half of America threatens to move to Canada, but here I am in Toronto and I ain't seeing it :->

rcarr 4y ago
Fairly high profile people like Neil Gaiman created mastodon accounts so I think there definitely was the potential for something else to take over if that something else was user friendly enough. Mastodon was never going to be it but there were no other real options.
- rvz 4y ago
  > Fairly high profile people like Neil Gaiman Who? I have to say, that doesn't sound remotely convincing to the 220M+ daily users of Twitter who continue to use the platform since there was no 'mass exodus'. It was more like a leaf falling out of a tree.
  - riffraff 4y ago
    Neil Gaiman had 3M+ followers on Twitter, it is a pretty high profile account. Anyway, I think it's more relevant that many accounts are now also syndicating to Mastodon, which makes it a viable alternative for consuming users. It's far from being an exodus, but they are averaging 200k new users per week, which seems pretty good.
    - NikolaNovak 4y ago
      Right, but that's where absolute and relative come into play. 200k new users per week is... what, 0.05% - 0.1% of Twitter active user base? Not saying one day it might not snowball, but it's been 6 months and I wouldn't call Mastodon an existential threat to Twitter just yet. I am tremendously enjoying and schadenfreuding the twitter melodrama, but even most people making fun of twitter/musk/socialnetworks, seem to be doing it on twitter.
      - sleepybrett 4y ago
        My mastodon timeline has been growing pretty rapidly over the last year. With obvious ratcheting up happening whenever elon steps on yet another rake. 'Let that sink in' nearly doubled the amount of posts per day, 'hardcore mode' another, 'api shutdown' another...
- lenkite 4y ago
  Still seems to be tweeting on Twitter: https://twitter.com/neilhimself https://twitter.com/neilhimself
  - sleepybrett 4y ago
    Many people double-post right now. Though since twitter effectively killed it's API that basically gutted a bunch of tools that would automate that for you. Though maybe you could post to twitter and have a tool that is just plain webscraping your home timeline and reposting.... It looks like neil does quite a bit of boosting (retweeting) on masto: https://mastodon.social/@neilhimself https://mastodon.social/@neilhimself
nemo44x 4y ago
[flagged]
- riffraff 4y ago
  Why would mastodon growth be pedo related? Why would anyone in any illegal content space want to have their content federated outside of it?
  - nemo44x 4y ago
    https://www.secjuice.com/mastodon-child-porn-pedophiles/ https://www.secjuice.com/mastodon-child-porn-pedophiles/
    - rvz 4y ago
      He's right you know. Don't forget the noncery and loli culture that is going on some of the largest Mastodon instances such as pawoo.net, baraag.net, mstdn.jp. Totally illegal explicit content in the majority of countries, only found on Mastodon.
      - commoner 4y ago
        Twitter is the only mainstream social network that is absolutely inundated with hardcore pornography. Also, Twitter has no shortage of child sexual abuse material: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/02/06/technology/twitter-child-sex-abuse.html https://www.nytimes.com/2023/02/06/technology/twitter-child-... On Mastodon, each instance is able to restrict other instances based on their own policies. Unless you specifically choose to join a Mastodon instance that does not restrict pornography, your instance will not synchronize content from the porn-focused instances.
    - NikolaNovak 4y ago
      That's the first I heard about this, but I don't really follow the space (neither Mastodon nor CSAM). Is "SecJuice" a reputable source / how legit is the report? The one instance I have any prior awareness of, the mastodon creator saying search is not desired due to negative social dynamics, everywhere else it was presented as a privacy and anonymity behaviour - crucially, both from those who agreed and disagreed (which makes intuitive sense; on one hand I dislike e.g. Facebook not being publicly searchable some of the time, at the same time I don't want my content crawled by randos all the time either). This is the first place I've seen that frames it as explicitly CSAM related.
drusepth 4y ago
With so many sites designed to track activity (and per-user activity) on Twitter, I'd lean towards "no mass exodus" simply from the fact that I haven't seen any gotcha graphs/charts/data literally showing it. However, anecdotally, my relatively static "following" count dropped from ~1k to ~600 over the course of the back-to-back Elon/Mastodon/Trump/etc events that were supposed to prompt mass exoduses. That could be 40% of the accounts I follow blocking me or getting banned, but deleting their accounts seems more likely in this instance.
- sleepybrett 4y ago
  I mean I kept my twitter account, I just don't use it nearly as much. When he killed the API it killed the only way I could use twitter and stay sane (tweetbot). Now I can go days without opening twitter dot com. Mostly only visiting it through links referencing specific tweets. So follower/following count might not mean much. I'm still following everyone I followed it's just that if they post I'm not actually seeing it.

rcarr 4y ago

Fairly high profile people like Neil Gaiman created mastodon accounts so I think there definitely was the potential for something else to take over if that something else was user friendly enough. Mastodon was never going to be it but there were no other real options.

rvz 4y ago
> Fairly high profile people like Neil Gaiman Who? I have to say, that doesn't sound remotely convincing to the 220M+ daily users of Twitter who continue to use the platform since there was no 'mass exodus'. It was more like a leaf falling out of a tree.
- riffraff 4y ago
  Neil Gaiman had 3M+ followers on Twitter, it is a pretty high profile account. Anyway, I think it's more relevant that many accounts are now also syndicating to Mastodon, which makes it a viable alternative for consuming users. It's far from being an exodus, but they are averaging 200k new users per week, which seems pretty good.
  - NikolaNovak 4y ago
    Right, but that's where absolute and relative come into play. 200k new users per week is... what, 0.05% - 0.1% of Twitter active user base? Not saying one day it might not snowball, but it's been 6 months and I wouldn't call Mastodon an existential threat to Twitter just yet. I am tremendously enjoying and schadenfreuding the twitter melodrama, but even most people making fun of twitter/musk/socialnetworks, seem to be doing it on twitter.
    - sleepybrett 4y ago
      My mastodon timeline has been growing pretty rapidly over the last year. With obvious ratcheting up happening whenever elon steps on yet another rake. 'Let that sink in' nearly doubled the amount of posts per day, 'hardcore mode' another, 'api shutdown' another...
lenkite 4y ago
Still seems to be tweeting on Twitter: https://twitter.com/neilhimself https://twitter.com/neilhimself
- sleepybrett 4y ago
  Many people double-post right now. Though since twitter effectively killed it's API that basically gutted a bunch of tools that would automate that for you. Though maybe you could post to twitter and have a tool that is just plain webscraping your home timeline and reposting.... It looks like neil does quite a bit of boosting (retweeting) on masto: https://mastodon.social/@neilhimself https://mastodon.social/@neilhimself

nemo44x 4y ago

[flagged]

riffraff 4y ago
Why would mastodon growth be pedo related? Why would anyone in any illegal content space want to have their content federated outside of it?
- nemo44x 4y ago
  https://www.secjuice.com/mastodon-child-porn-pedophiles/ https://www.secjuice.com/mastodon-child-porn-pedophiles/
  - rvz 4y ago
    He's right you know. Don't forget the noncery and loli culture that is going on some of the largest Mastodon instances such as pawoo.net, baraag.net, mstdn.jp. Totally illegal explicit content in the majority of countries, only found on Mastodon.
    - commoner 4y ago
      Twitter is the only mainstream social network that is absolutely inundated with hardcore pornography. Also, Twitter has no shortage of child sexual abuse material: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/02/06/technology/twitter-child-sex-abuse.html https://www.nytimes.com/2023/02/06/technology/twitter-child-... On Mastodon, each instance is able to restrict other instances based on their own policies. Unless you specifically choose to join a Mastodon instance that does not restrict pornography, your instance will not synchronize content from the porn-focused instances.
  - NikolaNovak 4y ago
    That's the first I heard about this, but I don't really follow the space (neither Mastodon nor CSAM). Is "SecJuice" a reputable source / how legit is the report? The one instance I have any prior awareness of, the mastodon creator saying search is not desired due to negative social dynamics, everywhere else it was presented as a privacy and anonymity behaviour - crucially, both from those who agreed and disagreed (which makes intuitive sense; on one hand I dislike e.g. Facebook not being publicly searchable some of the time, at the same time I don't want my content crawled by randos all the time either). This is the first place I've seen that frames it as explicitly CSAM related.

drusepth 4y ago

With so many sites designed to track activity (and per-user activity) on Twitter, I'd lean towards "no mass exodus" simply from the fact that I haven't seen any gotcha graphs/charts/data literally showing it. However, anecdotally, my relatively static "following" count dropped from ~1k to ~600 over the course of the back-to-back Elon/Mastodon/Trump/etc events that were supposed to prompt mass exoduses. That could be 40% of the accounts I follow blocking me or getting banned, but deleting their accounts seems more likely in this instance.

sleepybrett 4y ago
I mean I kept my twitter account, I just don't use it nearly as much. When he killed the API it killed the only way I could use twitter and stay sane (tweetbot). Now I can go days without opening twitter dot com. Mostly only visiting it through links referencing specific tweets. So follower/following count might not mean much. I'm still following everyone I followed it's just that if they post I'm not actually seeing it.