"They need us. We don't need them:" The fall of Twitter is making the trolls and grifters desperate
The business model depends on "triggering" liberals — but they're running out of progressives to bait
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Mastodon would be my personal preference, but Bluesky seems pretty noisy to me, which seems like what people want from microblogging sites (I'm more of a reddit/lemmy/kbin style person, myself.) The question is whether Bluesky pulls a Google+ and stays invite-only for so long that they miss their own hype train.
Keep in mind that I barely use it and only follow a few people I followed from TwiX.
People seemed friendly enough but there is a lot of self-serving navel gazing, and it seems like the "Discover" feed is full of inside jokes/references that I don't use the app enough to get.
My first day the big thing was complaining about how terrible and bigoted the devs of bluesky were, for something they said that I never did figure out, and the subsequent complaining about people complaining about the devs. Very dramatic.
To be fair, I'm sure if you just followed the people you cared about, and avoided the discover feed, it would be pretty Twitter-like.
Also, there's a character limit and you can't edit. These aren't technical limitations anymore, like they were for Twitter at the beginning, so they must be design decisions.
If I had an invite left I'd give you one.
Also, there's a character limit and you can't edit.
That kills any interest I might have had. I make embarrassing typos often enough that editing is a must-have feature.
I would expect that to be an upcoming feature, similar to how Threads is bolting on things like DMs. That's probably part of why it still requires an invite.
I have tried all the things! And I recently saw that article you're referencing.
In my own experience, I haven't seen one single person being rude or mean or blowing off newcomers. I suspect the bar to entry is slightly higher because you have to get your head around how the fediverse works, so the types of people coming here trend more patient. It's also a slower pace here, which can be good or bad depending on what you like.
The nicest feature for my use is that you can follow just about anyone anywhere. On kbin especially. There you can follow users from any Lemmy instance, or an entire instance, as well as users at Mastodon. The downside is that it can be a little tricky at first to figure out how to follow someone who's on another instance. It's not hard, but it's something new if you're coming from a single entity site like Twitter.
It's also no big deal to make an account on multiple instances if you're not sure where to go. My approach with all of them was to browse the local server (e.g., lemmy.world, mastodon.social) rather than the federated feed. The local feed gives you an idea of who's on that instance, what topics come up a lot, how the users act, etc. I'd also check out the "about" section. That will show you who the moderators are and what their focus and approach is. Some are laissez-faire and others are much more curated, so there's something for everyone.
The neat thing about this system is that you can find more niche instances if you have a particular interest -- gaming, software development, climate, science, memes, etc. You can make that your main instance and still see everything going on across all instances. That helps eliminate a lot of FOMO.
I was never on Twitter and not on most social media except Reddit, which I thought I'd miss. But I've enjoyed using Mastodon, Firefish, and Lemmy/kbin a lot. It's a smaller group but still plenty to see and lots of interesting people and topics. Everyone has been very nice, but it's easy to mute or block people or subs that you're not interested in. After that you won't see them in your feed at all.
Ha, sorry! I guess being on them hasn't improved my reading skills. :-D
existing users are rude about newbies because they want it to themselves
Huh. The irony, considering that this is basically what people who jumped to BlueSky said about Mastodon.
They weren't strictly wrong about entrenched Mastodon users, but turning around to pull a reverse-Uno card about the whole thing is entertaining to me.
It was because most instances were invite only. It wasn't because they weren't wanted, but because most instances are humble small servers paid or run by individuals. Unlike the massive data centers that most social media companies have at their disposal. Only a few instances had the capacity to receive the waves of massive exodus. The limitation was technical, not ideological. Guess they took it personal and confused why something was being done.
No, there was a lot of pushback against new users coming in and "acting like it's Twitter". General interest instances grew, people, for the most part, operated within the rules of the instances they were on, and a bunch of the old guard got on peoples cases over things like content warnings, language policing, and threats to defederate their small, niche instance that no one was going to miss from big and growing servers (which, when you have absolutely no idea about the lay of the land, sounds really threatening and consequential).
People who were used to having almost the whole yard as their own tailored safe space did what they could to try and make the new folks get in line and adhere to the social conventions they were accustomed to, attempting to hold sway over behaviour on servers they didn't really want around anyway. It made the space hostile for new folks coming in.
And it was meant to.
I didn't experience any of that, and I'm in a rather small instance that grew exponentially. People posted customary reminders of etiquette. But I've never ever seen anyone hostile or drama stirring about culture policing. But I guess it helps that I was never into the whole Twitter's rage baiting circlejerk that people liked to participate in.
People are insane to not want tech like the Fediverse to grow. I guess people have their hang ups though.
Looking at who's involved with blue sky, though, I can't help wondering how many times the users need to be taught the same lesson.
I have come over a few Reddit communities who moved to Discord of all things. I don't get why. That isn't even remotely the same type of discussion platform.
I'm really not a fan of Discord. Why would anyone use a platform that's not accessible without making an account and requires an invite to each group? If it wasn't branded towards gamers I don't think it would have much appeal.
Imo it's because sites like reddit make communities too open. It's common knowledge that once a sub regularly makes it to r/all, it loses all identity and joins the vague soup of r/all content which everyone upvotes with no regard for the source.
A lot of people don't want one big page with all the biggest communities thrown together. They just want to follow what they like and nothing else.
That said, the chat room format of discord is a pretty awkward stand-in for a forum type of community.
Discord has its uses but it's very much not the same. I often can't even find my question I asked an hour later.
At least for me, Mastodon replaced Twitter and Lemmy replaced Reddit. But then, I'm not "normal" and find the Fediverse to be endlessly fascinating.
I mean i moved to misskey/firefish which was awesome, but in my friend groups many of them just quit twitter & spent more time on discord, instagram, tiktok, etc. other places which they engaged w/ ppl 🤷🏿♂️ (fg age range: late millenial/gen z)
Most folks I follow went to Mastodon. I even met some new folks, including some that are local!
Some are still on twitter even though a small number of us begged/pleaded with them.
One went to blue sky.
Don’t forget Threads.
Imo reports of the death of threads are more hype and sensationalism. “Threads is booming” was a good tech headline, “Threads is dying” was a good tech headline. It would be perfectly expected for a ton of people to check it out at first and then use it if they want, or not. It reminds me of how in the lame city I lived in Olive Garden opened and was reservation-only for 4 months. Just because they didn’t stay reservation only doesn’t mean their launch or normal business was unsuccessful. Meta has a huge advantage in using the IG account base.
Personally, I haven’t been on FB in years, only go to IG to message people, and the content there is good for one account I have and so awful for another one. I have no interest in another meta product but what has stopped me from even looking at it is the lack of a full web interface. I will not install their app. 95% of people don’t care about that, though.
That's never even reaching booming status
Absolute crap obviously, because it was a very dumb idea and never even started to gain popularity. People don’t really want to buy a $400 strap-on game console to play a substandard video game where you don’t do anything. A Twitter rip-off was a much better idea for them.
It definitely seemed rushed. Not sure why they couldn’t have thrown another 100 engineers and another month or two at it. Seems like an FU at Musk as much as anything, which is fine with me.
It’s fun to snark on threads but yes, it had 100 million signups in a week and 50 million people still using it.
I don’t support Meta and they’re not a good company. I was merely answering the question about where people went.
Meta is a public company though so they could get in legal trouble for false reports, and there’s also a bunch of ways advertisers can check metrics.
A big chunk of those would be bots/fake/spam accounts, ie not real users. Marketing companies have already started selling fake followers for Thread influencers.
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/yes-already-buy-fake-followers-145053836.html
How many people do you think are on lemmy compared to threads lol
This is speculation but I suspect people are already oversubscribed to social media and just spending a bit longer in other places they already go. So if they're on Discord, they're probably just spending more time there.
"Normal" people who use Facebook will use Threads.
It is pretty dead in my social circles and age group, but I also know people who still use it. Old people are a major segment. Also after meta was lamenting that it was dying with Gen Z, oddly people younger than that are using facebook in surprising numbers. Another thing though is that it's popular in other countries. Meta isn't just about facebook or instagram, though, they also have a gigantic asset in WhatsApp - it's huge in South America, Africa and India.
Offline?
If your main social network is on fire, you're probably just going to put the phone down and do something else, especially if you're not on another social network.
The learning curve with getting used to a new one might be a more than what most people really want to do with their time and energy, so they might just be curbing their Twitter use.
