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Bluesky, Mastodon, and what's left of Twitter/X are all pretty much dead in my experience. There's just so much fragmentation or migration away generally that n

by ghaff 2y ago

Bluesky, Mastodon, and what's left of Twitter/X are all pretty much dead in my experience. There's just so much fragmentation or migration away generally that none of it is very interesting. I think a lot of people took the Musk Twitter takeover as an excuse to re-evaluate their whole relationship to that sort of platform which basically led to a death spiral.

BeetleB 2y ago
> Bluesky, Mastodon, and what's left of Twitter/X are all pretty much dead in my experience. Define "alive" and "dead". As a Mastodon user, it certainly is very much alive to me. I follow a lot of well known people, and that number isn't dropping. This reminds of almost every Emacs thread here. People claiming it's dead/dying because of VSCode, whereas if you're active in the Emacs community, all you can see is growth. Mastodon is going to hit a peak - it may already have. But as long as it maintains a healthy number of users, it will always be alive. At the moment it's more resilient than Bluesky, where almost all the users are on one instance.
- ghaff 2y ago
  I don't care about well known people. I could perhaps rebuild networks but I really haven't and I like many others I've thrown my arms up in the air and said whatever.
  - mycall 2y ago
    You are but one generation and the next won't have your same baggage.
  - BeetleB 2y ago
    I understand what you're saying, but you're not addressing the concern on what is alive or dead. Just because it sucks for you doesn't mean it sucks for everyone. Even if it sucks for 90% of folks, 10% of the Internet population is probably 10-100x what's needed for a network to survive and thrive. Not everyone has the same goals as you.
glzone1 2y ago
I feel like twitter / x being called dead has happened a lot since Elon's purchase (they fired folks which lead to claims to was going to be going down etc etc). Is this really the case now that it's dead (for real)? Are folks going back to NBC/MSNBC etc for news?
- ghaff 2y ago
  I'm not sure that NBC/MSNBC news was ever the primary reason people went to Twitter. There are no shortages of mainstream news sources. That was never my interest in Twitter.
- DecoySalamander 2y ago
  It isn't dead in any meaningful way. Every time there's an issue with a service (Musk writes something obnoxious, 2 day outage, rules change) people create accounts on competing services, but are back within a week because those places don't have content or engagement. Some people do migrate, and it's possible to get the impression that Twitter is dead if this happens to your social circle, but to me it seems as active as ever.
  - ghaff 2y ago
    Dead is probably an overstatement and I agree that the alternative services don't seem to have a lot of traction, at least among people I've followed. However, in my tech circles, it seems like a lot of people (and organizations) just checked out of or way dialed down their usage of Twitter/X and relations. YMMV of course but Musk seems to have been a forcing function for a lot of people to reevaluate their use of such services in general. To the degree that there's a commercial winner, it's probably LinkedIn.
amatecha 2y ago
Mastodon is absolutely not dead, and will outlast both Twitter and Bluesky as far as I can tell -- as someone who has been an early adopter in every single social media platform (or precursor thereof) since the mid-90's. Why? There isn't some top-down capitalistic motive to destroy the platform. It will continue to exist, because it is a protocol defined/evolved by the community with zero incentive for profitability or pleasing of rich shareholders. It keeps plodding along, no noise, no ads, no algorithm, just people communicating with each other. Especially as communities evolve and gain greater trust amongst each other, the platform will actually strengthen as far as I can tell -- this is already happening, as there are servers we know we can "trust" and those we know we can't (mastodon.social) because they have open-door policy and poor moderation. I could go on about it all day, but ActivityPub is so far the absolute best technology for social communities I've ever seen/used (not that there aren't things that can be improved, of course).
- MichaelZuo 2y ago
  I don’t see how it can be a Twitter replacement, at best a reddit/Discord/IRC replacement but even that seems very unlikely. e.g. Are there even guarantees that a bad admin can’t mess with someone’s previous posts?
  - amatecha 2y ago
    I know the admin of my server and all moderators personally. I'm not sure what your point is. The people who run services you use can mess with your stuff - in WoW a GM stole items from my guild's guild bank using the account of a guildmate who was permabanned, for example.
    - MichaelZuo 2y ago
      It’s simply not credible to expect tens of thousands of random people to be scrupulous 100% of the time. Centralized services try to solve the issue by simply never giving out such authority outside of a small handpicked group. (And even then a reddit admin was caught red handed doing it a while back) Edit: And so the trust that takes years to build up can be lost in a few seconds of bad decisions…

by ghaff 2y ago

BeetleB 2y ago

> Bluesky, Mastodon, and what's left of Twitter/X are all pretty much dead in my experience. Define "alive" and "dead". As a Mastodon user, it certainly is very much alive to me. I follow a lot of well known people, and that number isn't dropping. This reminds of almost every Emacs thread here. People claiming it's dead/dying because of VSCode, whereas if you're active in the Emacs community, all you can see is growth. Mastodon is going to hit a peak - it may already have. But as long as it maintains a healthy number of users, it will always be alive. At the moment it's more resilient than Bluesky, where almost all the users are on one instance.

ghaff 2y ago
I don't care about well known people. I could perhaps rebuild networks but I really haven't and I like many others I've thrown my arms up in the air and said whatever.
- mycall 2y ago
  You are but one generation and the next won't have your same baggage.
- BeetleB 2y ago
  I understand what you're saying, but you're not addressing the concern on what is alive or dead. Just because it sucks for you doesn't mean it sucks for everyone. Even if it sucks for 90% of folks, 10% of the Internet population is probably 10-100x what's needed for a network to survive and thrive. Not everyone has the same goals as you.

glzone1 2y ago

I feel like twitter / x being called dead has happened a lot since Elon's purchase (they fired folks which lead to claims to was going to be going down etc etc). Is this really the case now that it's dead (for real)? Are folks going back to NBC/MSNBC etc for news?

ghaff 2y ago
I'm not sure that NBC/MSNBC news was ever the primary reason people went to Twitter. There are no shortages of mainstream news sources. That was never my interest in Twitter.
DecoySalamander 2y ago
It isn't dead in any meaningful way. Every time there's an issue with a service (Musk writes something obnoxious, 2 day outage, rules change) people create accounts on competing services, but are back within a week because those places don't have content or engagement. Some people do migrate, and it's possible to get the impression that Twitter is dead if this happens to your social circle, but to me it seems as active as ever.
- ghaff 2y ago
  Dead is probably an overstatement and I agree that the alternative services don't seem to have a lot of traction, at least among people I've followed. However, in my tech circles, it seems like a lot of people (and organizations) just checked out of or way dialed down their usage of Twitter/X and relations. YMMV of course but Musk seems to have been a forcing function for a lot of people to reevaluate their use of such services in general. To the degree that there's a commercial winner, it's probably LinkedIn.

amatecha 2y ago

Mastodon is absolutely not dead, and will outlast both Twitter and Bluesky as far as I can tell -- as someone who has been an early adopter in every single social media platform (or precursor thereof) since the mid-90's. Why? There isn't some top-down capitalistic motive to destroy the platform. It will continue to exist, because it is a protocol defined/evolved by the community with zero incentive for profitability or pleasing of rich shareholders. It keeps plodding along, no noise, no ads, no algorithm, just people communicating with each other. Especially as communities evolve and gain greater trust amongst each other, the platform will actually strengthen as far as I can tell -- this is already happening, as there are servers we know we can "trust" and those we know we can't (mastodon.social) because they have open-door policy and poor moderation. I could go on about it all day, but ActivityPub is so far the absolute best technology for social communities I've ever seen/used (not that there aren't things that can be improved, of course).

MichaelZuo 2y ago
I don’t see how it can be a Twitter replacement, at best a reddit/Discord/IRC replacement but even that seems very unlikely. e.g. Are there even guarantees that a bad admin can’t mess with someone’s previous posts?
- amatecha 2y ago
  I know the admin of my server and all moderators personally. I'm not sure what your point is. The people who run services you use can mess with your stuff - in WoW a GM stole items from my guild's guild bank using the account of a guildmate who was permabanned, for example.
  - MichaelZuo 2y ago
    It’s simply not credible to expect tens of thousands of random people to be scrupulous 100% of the time. Centralized services try to solve the issue by simply never giving out such authority outside of a small handpicked group. (And even then a reddit admin was caught red handed doing it a while back) Edit: And so the trust that takes years to build up can be lost in a few seconds of bad decisions…