this post was submitted on 15 Sep 2024
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I don't know why you guys keep pretending X is Truth Social levels of dead. Is this just copium or are you really that far removed from reality? X is absolutely in a significant decline but it's still the dominant microblogging platform by a mile. All politicians, all media organisations, all celebrities use X. And ultimately these are the accounts that will determine whether X remains relevant in mainstream society.
Even assuming 25% of Twitter users are bots (probably a significant over estimate), and even if half of Twitter's users quit in the next year, it would still be 150x bigger than mastodon
(Mastodon has ~1m MAUs, compared to ~421m for Twitter)
From my understanding, Bluesky (despite its recent growth) isn't particularly big either. Threads claims to have a lot of users and I assume it would have the easiest time attracting normies, but I am still sceptical of its long-term viability. I feel like the people leaving X would have quite a bit of crossover with people who despise Meta.
So that leaves us with a fourth competitor, which is nothing at all. Anecdotally I think this is what I am seeing the most - people who leave X are just abandoning the entire concept of microblogging, since the point of it is to speak to a large audience and none of the competitors can really deliver that right now. The appeal of Twitter was that everyone (who was interested in microblogging) was on it; smaller, niche communities are fine for discussion boards and group chats but microbloggers don't really want to be screaming into a void where most people will never hear them. Microblogging was never even particularly popular anyway (when compared with other forms of social media) and I wouldn't be particularly surprised if the downfall of X eventually kills the concept for most people in society.
iirc when you sign up for threads it links your Facebook/Insta account and there's no way to delete your threads account without deleting the whole thing, so their numbers are likely inflated
Only if we're talking about total users.The number of monthly active users (MAU) shouldn't be affected by this, unless Meta is counting an active Facebook/Instagram who has opened a Threads account as an active Threads user (regardless of their Threads usage).
All true.
With that said, Bluesky has had one hell of a growth month - not just from Brazil - and that's nice.
I prefer Mastodon to what is ultimately still a for-profit corporation ("public benefit" notwithstanding), but both are better than Twatter.
I'd like to like Mastodon better. I'd like it - ot a simular open, decentralized platform - to be the one that everyone uses, if anything.
However, I do not like it as much. And Bluesky is getting the momentum, which is important.
They're also at least theoretically relatively open and decentralized (but we do all know how that would go long-term)
But like you said, either is dramatically better than Twitter. Heck, just having many healthy options is good.
It's my perpetual gripe with many of those open tools that I love ideologically, but practically find lacking in some respects, typically UI/UX (including the pre-experience of the decision whether to use them). I don't have all the skills or knowledge to fix the issues that bother me, as it's often far eaiser to know what's wrong than how to fix it.
I understand and endorse the philosophy that it's unfair to demand things of volunteers already donating their time and skills to the public, but it creates some interdisciplinary problems. Even if capable UX designers were to tackle the issue and propose solutions or improvements, they might not all have the skills to actually implement them, so they'd have to rely on developers to indulge their requests.
And from my own experience, devs tend to prioritise function over form, because techy people are often adept enough at navigating less-polished interfaces. Creating a pretty frontend takes away time from creating stuff I'd find useful.
I don't know if there's an easy solution. The intersection between "People that can approach software from the perspective of a non-tech user", "People that are willing to approach techy Software" and "People that are tech-savy enough to be able to fix the usability issues" is probably very small.
NPR quits Twitter after being falsely labeled as 'state-affiliated media'