As Twitter destroys its brand by renaming itself X, Mastodon user numbers are again soaring | TechCrunch

Lmao "Spez's world" will be so funny though

Narcissists like him would never seek failure intentionally.

To what end, though? The man blew 44b on a site that apparently was only worth 5-10b, and that was before he ran it into the ground. He also destroyed his reputation and the mystique as "genius entrepreneur" which the world can now clearly see he never was.

I can't think of a single net positive. I think it's an age old tale with people with too much money: he fell victim to an over inflated ego and too many yes men aiming to please. He started to believe he really was brilliant.

Sad thing is the man has so much money he still can't fail, personally. He'll have destroyed Twitter and even more people will lose their jobs. And autocrats around the world will be pleased. Musk will just shrug, tell himself it wasn't his fault, "it was the libs" or something, and move on.

Eta: the only winners here, as per usual, are the shareholders.

Actually the number of Twitter users increased

tweXit

Xitting the Xitter (shit-ter)

I wonder if previous twitter execs are feeling a bit bad to have sold him twitter to see it destroyed like that.

I mean it certainly proves Elon is an idiot as he used fraud to manipulate the price and got played instead.

But was it worth it to let him destroy Twitter just because he tried to defraud it?

To be honest, for me it absolutely was the rebranding that made me delete the app.

I'd recommend following the hashtags you want to see. It's sort of a build-your-own algorithm

Tools help, and because the Fediverse API is completely accessible, folks have already come up with awesome stuff.

• Populate your following list by finding friends, the Fedifinder still appears to work and helps find friends from Twitter on Masto: https://fedifinder.glitch.me/
• Now find friends of friends, the wider social graph. Followgraph works wonders: https://followgraph.vercel.app/
• Now you will likely miss posts, so try following updates of people if you really enjoy their content, plus of course pinning hashtags. PLUS. Up your game with an algorithm, either in the dedicated Mastodon app (trending posts) or with more customisation through the app Fediview: https://fediview.com/ Using Mastodon Digest (GitHub), you could also set up your own automation script.
• Folks have created lists and groups you can mass subscribe. The most successful one I know is from and for academics, perhaps there is a field for you in there. Journalists have similar stuff. See https://github.com/nathanlesage/academics-on-mastodon
• There are many awesome apps out there to access your content, improving the experience. I recommend Phanpy because of its unique and sleek design, see https://phanpy.social/. If you miss Quote Tweets and other stuff, try an app like Elk.
• Mastodon is only one option, if you want all of Twitter's tools and more cool stuff, try Firefish. You can migrate followers and posts. This way, you can skip many external tools.

And that's just the beginning.

I agree... it feels like the Fediverse doesn't quite have the same algorithms that the single-corporation services have, and I feel it most in the search to broaden the content I see. Hopefully the exploratory element picks up as time goes on!

have a look here https://lemmyverse.net/communities

The more i see and recognize the use of the term "Federation", the more my inner geek hopes this is how IRL Star Trek starts.

"The federation started as a group of loosely associated social media and information hubs where people would share ideas, porn and memes. The ideals and social structure would eventually spread to a much larger and more dynamic series of instances that built up to and even greater federation of the human online colonies. As it grew, first contact was made and the inter galactic trade federation was established to trade porn and memes, would eventually go onto to much more larger, important, totally not porn related causes. To explore strange new worlds, and seek out new......"

I got it and I'm trapped in a weird bubble of shit that doesn't really interest me and I don't like microblogging I think

I was finally super duper permabanned from Reddit, and decided to give up. No more workarounds, new accounts, new emails, spoofing MAC addresses, multihop VPNs... And I've got to say, I have gotten more done in the past few weeks than in the last year combined.

I never used Twitter save for occasionally hearing about tweets, but I have been enjoying using Mastodon because in practice it's basically just a way for me to have a feed of cool astronomy pictures.

Try using a smaller instance. I recently switched from lemmy.world to lemmy.zip and it's lightning fast. While you still get all the content from lemmy.world :)

Hopefully they can fix that issue and the communist communities stop having hissy fits.

You have pretty skin.

Give him some more time. It's not that simple keeping up with Elon's adventures

I feel that reddit is already at this stage. It started feeling more like a half-bombed corporate minefield so I decided to flee the site one week ago. This site feels much more like things should be. You can even browse on a decent site on your phone.

It's ok to get information from places like X/Twitter or Reddit. It's even fine to have an account. But it's better to post your OWN material to platforms that best align with your sensibilities.

My issue with Mastodon is that many big companies still use Twitter/X as their main way to publish news outside of of their websites and press releases.

I use the historical name, twitter, because to the extent future historians will have to talk about it, that's the name they'll use. I cannot imagine it will do anything of relevance from this point forwards except as a glaring example of the failures of capitalism.

That Twitter had essentially become accepted as an official source of communication and Elon's purchase of Twitter so near to the time that he was experimenting with his ability to perform market manipulation on his own companies using Twitter, those things combined made me assume a large part of his reason for purchasing Twitter was to see how far he could take market manipulation and if he could influence other companies. In my darkest version of this scenario, I think Elon was just testing how far his reach is.

Maybe the verified checkmark debacle really was created by incompetence and Twitter tried quickly to fix it, or maybe it was a nefarious way to undermine legitimacy and cause a multi-billion dollar blip on the stock market. Either way, I could easily imagine Musk telling politicians and CEOs after that, "look at what I was able to do just by moving a single finger. Now imagine what I could do to you if I really wanted to."

I feel the same about Mastodon. I just want to be social with my friends, not on broadcast to a bunch of randos. It makes sense for brands and I guess people who commercialize their identity. But I don't really care about trying to keep up with the lives of brands or really people i don't know, so i haven't want or need for such a site. Also I prefer to catch up with someone for real. Like tell me what you did when we hang out next. I don't want to sit there and pretend like your trip to wherever is news because i already casually saw all the pictures you posted a month ago. And if we are never going to meet again, then I don't need to know what you do with the rest of your life. I like this format much better. Ego is much less in effect and people can just bounce ideas and jokes around. Reddit though... most of the user base is still over there. I've stopped posting and voting entirely. Full lurk mode.

It was a corporation. Corporations exist to get shareholders paid. You can't expect those to not be for sale for the right price, which in this case was more than it was worth. If you want the people running companies to make decisions based on ethics, you should ban publicly traded corporations first otherwise it's just not happening.

I recall Dorsey publicly coming out in support of Elon's Twitter well after the sale. Maybe there was no ethical conflict for Dorsey and he likes what he sees.

Yeah, maybe all of this wouldn't have happened if the equity was split among the employees.

I just don't understand how he's shaped that way.