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Comment by TobyTheDog123 | Hacker News Reader

It seems Mastodon and NextCloud don't seem to understand is that the only people still using Twitter are people who want to be outraged, and people who want to be outraged but claim they only follow people tailored to their interests ("I only follow tech people!")

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We've been told for ages, implicitly by FAANG algos and explicitly by people who misread research, that we prefer to be outraged.

Very Online (TM) people with large Twitter followings like Marcus Hutchins are coming to realise that it made Twitter a compulsion, and given an alternative are willing to ditch the Skinner button [0].

Compulsion and addiction is different from desire or pleasure. When we're offered meaningful alternatives, people often find more peace and happiness when they adopt them.

[0] https://infosec.exchange/@malwaretech/109368403091846997

There are plenty of people who just use twitter for art or science or what have you. They, by their very nature, won't be what you see the most.

There's a lot of outrage in those niches too.

On the contrary, the people I've recently seen leave Twitter were all waiting for the network effect to lessen. Switching communication stacks suck, especially if not everyone you want to follow is on your new stack.

I've set up my own BirdsiteLive instance that only my own Mastodon server can access, but it's slowly seeing less and less activity as people switch over to Mastodon or something I can't bridge.

Plenty of people are going to keep Twitter as their cesspool, but it'll be a while before everyone who wants to switch has switched. Musk's behaviour and the following downward trend for Twitter is still recent news, it's only been a few weeks.

There's still plenty of left-wing tech people on Twitter, althought they recently created their Mastodon account. I think they're waiting for the final nail in the coffin (a big outage ?), which may or may not come. And I'm on Twitter to follow them. Outrage is mainly not part of my feed unless those same tech people start ranting on Musk or what have you.

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