As Twitter ditches its iconic branding in favor of owner Elon Musk’s favorite letter “X,” its open source competitor Mastodon is once again seeing usage numbers soar.
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I don’t want to rain on your parade but I’ll do it anyway: The numbers of active posts and members in Lemmy communities, even in the most active ones, are mindbogglingly low in comparison with Reddit, even in comparison to somethingawful what I still consider the dirty cousin of Reddit.
All the numbers are just two sizes lower than Reddit and then there is the atrocious web interface. I have stopped counting how often my posts got eaten, the reply button didn’t react and general stuff didn’t work at all.
Bad choice after bad choice.
Apparently this is all part of some grand master plan. Maybe Elon will pull it off???
His master plan sure does seem massively reactionary for a master plan
I can’t fathom that anybody could be this stupid. Does he have a reason to purposely destroy Twitter?
The decisions he’s making aren’t just bad, they’re the worst possible ones that he could make. As in, he gathered a group of experts and these are the best ways to destroy Twitter that they could think up.
Exactly!
More are more I’ve been thinking - he watches anime, he thinks current social media is incredibly dangerous, and (while he was always a dick in private) he only really showed the current Musk after meeting Trump.
We know musk watches anime - it’s like the zero requiem. First, he becomes a folk hero, a billionaire putting his weight behind important tech for humanity. Then he meets Trump - maybe he realized how dark our prognosis as a species is.
He starts driving away his left-leaning futurist and techy core with bigotry and being a dick. He backs out of a plan to buy Twitter, violates his parole, and makes a big show about trying to get out of it… But what did he actually do besides complain it’s full of bots, then give up?
He walks in with a kitchen sink, drives away anyone who can afford to leave or might resist a stupid order, and settles in.
For months, about every two weeks he’s been doing something to wean users off Twitter, while making a big show of some increasingly obviously dumb ideas. Like seriously, his business is ads - it makes so little sense that he limit users to such low limits - even subscribers could eat through that easily
He lies through his teeth and says it’s working, he’s almost breaking even, that users and advertisers come crawling back… Exactly what u/spez and every other social media guy desperately want to believe - the only thing standing between them and profit is telling their users to suck it
Now he finally admits they’re in terrible shape, making his last fanboys look like idiots, and making himself look not only erratic and out of touch, but like a bad businessman.
To totally parallel the requiem, he needs to topple all the billionaires before staging his death - leaving the world in shape to rebuild, and very wary of the dangers of wealth inequality.
Or at least make us actually unite and change the laws and economic system.
Or maybe he’s just having a midlife crisis, hates Twitter, and is just burning money for the hell of it. And the attention.
He was paid to tank Twitter.
Some people are suggesting he ran up so much debt buying Twitter that he’s now running it into the ground in order to declare bankruptcy and not have to repay the debt. I don’t know how plausible this is.
Totally could be pulling a Sears/Kmart and an Eddie lampert.
I wonder if that would be taken to court if true.
I imagine it would be hard to prove, because he would never admit it was intentional, and he’d never have to tell anyone else that in order to execute the plan. It can look like a series of blunders either way.
name a single grand master plan that elon has ever pulled off
Weren’t all his companies successful in the end?
The companies he took over after they were were founded?
Okay? Taking over a company, growing it, and then selling for huge profit is still good business sense.
He’s a douchebag and takes too much credit for the engineering that has made them successfull, but SpaceX has delivered some next-level rockets and Tesla has been very successful creating a new market niche and selling a ton of cars
Uh, the first one. It’s all downhill after that. It’s the only one he’s ever pulled off. Look at the goals for the master plan part 2 and you’ll see that they haven’t managed to do a single one, but Elon still went ahead a published a part 3. Why actually meet goals when you can just pretend you’ve met them by posting new ones, I guess.
Still waiting for Teslas driving from west to east coast completely autonomously. And Elon flying to mars.
One way ticket to Mars, make it happen!
Financial suicide?
Lol
ain’t no way
Anyone recommend a good iPhone app for Mastodon?
Ice Cubes is great for me, beautiful UI and cute sound effects
Another vote for Ice Cubes.
Gonna go against the grain here and just recommend the default Mastadon app. It’s simple and gets the job done with no Bells and whistles. Not sure there’s much missing
Yeah I’m also on the default and not sure what other apps have going for them that make them better
Ivory is my favorite as long as you don’t mind supporting the developers. But a close second place for me is Ice Cubes.
I second Ice Cubes. I would recommend Mammoth as well, but feed loading can be super slow.
The official app loads super fast, but way too many limitations IMHO.
Third recommendation for Ice Cubes here! It’s simply great
I switched to ice cubes from mammoth because of the lack of a trending tab
I use Tusker and it’s been great so far. More features than the official app, and it’s pretty stable too.
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Ivory is the iOS app I use and absolutely enjoy.
I’ve been using ivory, it’s nice
I second this, super stable, fresh design, lots of features. I didn’t even need to try a different app it fit everything I wanted
I personally like Mona.
Yay, another week of higher than normal activity, until the fomo kicks back in and they leave yet again cause “everyone is on X/this is sooo complicated/I just wanna see the fallout/whatever excuse justifies their addiction”
Every time that happens the fedi retains a good chunk of users. There’s significant and stable growth throughout.
Ya that’s what happened with me, I deleted my account once Musk took over and started a Mastodon account and now I’m on Lemmy too and haven’t looked back at either platforms
I’m just here to spread the good word about old.lemmy.world
Can’t wait for Lemmy Enhancement Suite.
Because LES is more.
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Same!
Though I do miss the content/comment filters that RES could do!
Or Kbin! Kbin can do both microblogging and link aggregation/discussion. Tbh departing Twitter users coming to Mastodon, and reddit refugees are brought together on Kbin.
The “all-in-one” method acomplished by Kbin is a huge feat, especially when it’s built by a single person from scratch (ie; not based on lemmy codebase wise) and still much more ActivityPub compatible.
Kbin is sadly very underrated imo.
I feel that’s a feature of Lemmy to not do both. I don’t care about microblogs. I want the sites that I use to do one thing and do it as well as possible, so I can mix & match what I use, and not see what I don’t want.
The thing is, it’s not forced into your feed or anything. If you want to see microblogs, you have to go to the microblogs tab
Great for the fediverse there’s many different codebases.
It needs a mobile app to take off, imo.
Additionally, since it is just one guy (that I’m aware of), I’m not sure how sustainable it is for him. I believe he’s been surviving off some EU grant and donations, but once the grant runs out and donations slow, the server costs for delivering content to tens of thousands of users every day are going to start being pretty rough to handle. Has he explained what his plan is for long term sustainability?
It was one guy until recently. But now if you look at the Kbin commits, it looks like 3 or 4 people. It’s growing.
@ArtemisApp is in beta right now. @hariette has been hard at work. I look forward to trying it soon. Hopefully. I’m not on discord, and that’s where most people are getting beta.
There’s a beta sign up form. I got an invite and I was never on the discord. I believe open beta is very soon anyway though.
I’m on the form. Been on there for a bit. Mostly I like pointing out that an app is being actively developed for kbin, and that I have never used it so I cannot tell you more.
I think lemmy people should know that @hariette has previously stated that Artemis will work there too. At least, I’m pretty sure they said that. Children have turned my brain to mush and my memory is about as reliable as a 3 year old.
That’s exactly it. I saw a lot of people on Twitter today saying they’re only staying the fallout. It’s dumb, and yes, I’m part of the problem, though I’m staying only to update some connections on where I’m going.
Those same people have “only been staying for the fallout” since musk bought it, still tweeting away dozens of times a day. They’re the same people that said they’d leave Reddit on July 1 yet are still there.
Completely agree. I think people are so engrained that they just don’t want to try something else.
I can fathom no world where you’d want to trade away a multi billion dollar brand for a new brand you literally can’t SEO. What, you think your brand is gonna be more impressive that the generic variable, and a part of the alphabet?
“Follow me on Twitter” becomes “follow me on X”? “You should tweet that” becomes “you should X that”? The little blue bird on every shop window, website, and business card becomes a stylized letter that, hopefully, doesn’t look so threatening on the next iteration?
It’s a textbook case of brand destruction. I almost regret never making a Twitter in the first place, just so I could quit today, or at any of the hundred days in the past year where it got inexplicably worse without reason.
Xing is short for kissing IE XOXO. So instead of tweeting we are now kissing!
Follow me on ten.
Jamie Kennedy’s show is about to become relevant again. You’ve been X’d!
The little blue bird on every shop window, website, and business card becomes a stylized letter that, hopefully, doesn’t look so threatening on the next iteration?
Haha, I know the most appropriate iteration, a red background with the X in a white circle.
Perhaps with each corner of the X at a 90 degree angle clockwise? You know, to add style points.
It makes the X go faster, everyone knows that.
“You should tweet that” becomes “you should X that”
“You should X-create” that
And a tweet becomes an “X-cretion”
X-crement
And retweet it become
X-Forwarded-Forit
Ain’t X-ing a term for cutting something out of your life ?
Yes, and I was thinking how confusing it could be. A: “Hey, did you see that trend on X?” B: “What? No, I don’t talk to my ex anymore.”
It’s just a new form of messaging called X-communication.
oh wait.
It’s inspired by all the X-Twitter employees
We’re witnessing an X-tinction event in real time.
He’s just a fan of Laurie Anderson. Give him some slack!
Here is an alternative Piped link(s): https://piped.video/watch?v=UfOK0evCqZY
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source, check me out at GitHub.
Watch out… language is a virus!
I should X that sounds like I should delete/close that. How apt.
To me it sounds like axe.
“Yep, brilliant. Axe it.”
Twitter is my ex
“Hey, check out this X video”
Destroying the brand and ruining twitter was always the goal. There’s a good reason why Saudi Arabia fronted half of the bill…
Its a terrible rebrand that pretty much comes because of Elon’s impulses, or in other words, for shits and giggles. Regardless of this hilarious trashing of such a powerful brand, I’ll have fun calling tweets “xeets” for a good week.
Please call them Elon’s x-crements instead.
It must be so horrible working “with” him. You’re trying to build something and every morning you must be frightened to see Elon hanging on a ladder because he thought it was so funny to draw dicks everywhere on the building, which would have you cancel everything you are working on.
I’ve worked in a founder led business and this is why I quit.
I’d spend forever working on a project to build a satellite site then suddenly we don’t want that anymore - bin the recipes we want a full main site redbrand.
Bye.
Feel you, I’ve been working with this kind of person but he was pushed away a few weeks after my arrival. He still had time to make an impression though, his genius move was to tell each team that the others hated them, which had no effect because we talked to each others…
“Hey bros wanna see me light $40 billion on fire?”
The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia spent good money to never have an Arab Spring again.
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He’s clearly laying the groundwork to sell it to Alphabet (Google’s parent company). /s
you should X that
You should x-crete that
I opened Twitter page and it shows login page with small x on left and big x in the middle. But only one closes the popup.
I just checked too. And if you close popup it takes you do another login page (also with an X) but that one can’t be closed. So apparently there is no way to browse Twitter without an account now, which you could before.
People always used to claim that getting banned from twitter meant you were cut off from important information. It’s highly debatable that there was any important information on twitter. That aside it wasn’t really true you were cut off entirely, you could still browse tweets, just couldn’t post when banned. Now it seems being banned does mean you’re cut off from reading it.
Twitter was really good for news media and it kinda still is. Where I come from legacy media have been bought off by plutocrats who are in bed with the government and only reputable source of news are independent media which don’t have enough funding or financial backing to appear on satellite TV channels. There’s also no incentive for the incumbent to let such media flourish since legacy media is doing their dirty work. So for people like me this is a huge setback.
Yeah, that’s a change from while back.
I wonder how much x.com cost to purchase, or if it was just a domain twitter/Musk had lying around.
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Curious if he sold it to twitter, I can’t imagine parting with a single character domain for free.
He is twitter.
Twitter hasn’t even rebranded yet and an article like this comes out? Jumping the gun a bit don’t they think?
99% of the people that were leaving twitter when musk took over are still there. They’re too invested to leave. People like Steven King just keep making fools of themselves by still being there 12 months later complaining about how bad Twitter is.
Check out the app or webpage, they’ve already put in the temp X logo
The app is still called twitter with the twitter logo, at least on iOS.
Well they started taking down the Twitter sign at HQ, so it’s happening
I’m not denying that it’s happening, I’m simply saying that the rebrand hasn’t even happened on the main way people interact with twitter, yet we have article after article saying that people are leaving in droves because of the rebrand…that they haven’t seen yet.
These people are addicted to such a degree that they’re functionally on the same level as literal junkies, just without the physical damage. Social media was such a fucking mistake, and I don’t think we’re ever going to recover from it within our lifetime.
Ted Kaczynski was right.
These people are addicted to such a degree that they’re functionally on the same level as literal junkies, just without the physical damage. Social media was such a fucking mistake,
- Onii-Chan@kbin.social
I mean, yeah. The only ‘social media’ I have is kbin, and I check it once or twice a day. If it went anywhere, I wouldn’t really give a shit, as I left all the major platforms years ago and adding one more to that list wouldn’t bother me. Don’t group me in with Twitter (x?) users because I called them out on their addiction, when I’ve already done what they seemingly can’t.
It did though? Twitter.com no longer shows the bird (replaced by an X). It’s loading screen is a stylised X. And x.com points to the same server.
The app is still called twitter with the bird logo, at least on iOS.
Also what it’s called is irrelevant. It’s still twitter, it’ll still behave the same, it’s still got the 500 million users. Why would anyone leave a platform simply because it changed names and url?
What it’s called isn’t irrelevant. Twitter blue, tweeting, Twitter and tweets are all linked to Twitter and not to X. And X is what it’s called now. So post on X and follow me on X.
Just because the App on iOS and or android haven’t been updated to reflect that change doesn’t mean it hasn’t been rebranded yet.
How it will affect the users? Well that’s to be seen. The first waves of Userscripts surely will follow soon to replace X with the bird in browsers.
Edit: just checked the twitter App on the android play store may still be named by such but is now owned by X Corp. The most generic name ever.
Why is what it’s named relevant? Twitter blue will be renamed. Functionally nothing will change.
Usually a rebrand signifies a change in the direction or focus of the brand. I don’t keep up with it much, so on a surface level this rebrand seems like more of a “I like it better this way” on Elon’s part than a true rebrand with a point and reason.
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