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Comment by rcarr | Hacker News Reader

They really needed this to exist about 6 months ago or whenever it was that Musk bought Twitter. There was a mass exodus then to Mastodon, and if they’d have brought this out then I reckon they would have done a good job of immediately dethroning Twitter as I reckon lots of journalists and writers would have jumped on board. Now they’re going to have to do it the long hard way and try and build the audience organically. I reckon they might be able to do it, but it’ll take them at least a few years because they missed the golden goose.

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was there a "mass exodus"? What percentage of people actually left twitter forever to another system and stayed there? What percentage of audience or "influencers"?

Disclaimer - I'm not on Twitter, but my impression is that a few folks made a large amount of noise for leaving but most people shrugged. Other networks mat have seen a temporary large percentage Increase, but a) how much of that stuck and b) a large percentage increase of tiny absolute. Umber can be misleading.

Basically, every 4 years, half of America threatens to move to Canada, but here I am in Toronto and I ain't seeing it :->

Fairly high profile people like Neil Gaiman created mastodon accounts so I think there definitely was the potential for something else to take over if that something else was user friendly enough. Mastodon was never going to be it but there were no other real options.

> Fairly high profile people like Neil Gaiman

Who?

I have to say, that doesn't sound remotely convincing to the 220M+ daily users of Twitter who continue to use the platform since there was no 'mass exodus'.

It was more like a leaf falling out of a tree.

Neil Gaiman had 3M+ followers on Twitter, it is a pretty high profile account.

Anyway, I think it's more relevant that many accounts are now also syndicating to Mastodon, which makes it a viable alternative for consuming users.

It's far from being an exodus, but they are averaging 200k new users per week, which seems pretty good.

Right, but that's where absolute and relative come into play.

200k new users per week is... what, 0.05% - 0.1% of Twitter active user base?

Not saying one day it might not snowball, but it's been 6 months and I wouldn't call Mastodon an existential threat to Twitter just yet. I am tremendously enjoying and schadenfreuding the twitter melodrama, but even most people making fun of twitter/musk/socialnetworks, seem to be doing it on twitter.

My mastodon timeline has been growing pretty rapidly over the last year. With obvious ratcheting up happening whenever elon steps on yet another rake. 'Let that sink in' nearly doubled the amount of posts per day, 'hardcore mode' another, 'api shutdown' another...

Still seems to be tweeting on Twitter: https://twitter.com/neilhimself

Many people double-post right now. Though since twitter effectively killed it's API that basically gutted a bunch of tools that would automate that for you. Though maybe you could post to twitter and have a tool that is just plain webscraping your home timeline and reposting....

It looks like neil does quite a bit of boosting (retweeting) on masto: https://mastodon.social/@neilhimself

With so many sites designed to track activity (and per-user activity) on Twitter, I'd lean towards "no mass exodus" simply from the fact that I haven't seen any gotcha graphs/charts/data literally showing it.

However, anecdotally, my relatively static "following" count dropped from ~1k to ~600 over the course of the back-to-back Elon/Mastodon/Trump/etc events that were supposed to prompt mass exoduses. That could be 40% of the accounts I follow blocking me or getting banned, but deleting their accounts seems more likely in this instance.

I mean I kept my twitter account, I just don't use it nearly as much. When he killed the API it killed the only way I could use twitter and stay sane (tweetbot). Now I can go days without opening twitter dot com. Mostly only visiting it through links referencing specific tweets. So follower/following count might not mean much. I'm still following everyone I followed it's just that if they post I'm not actually seeing it.

There was no mass exodus. The sports and celebrity people are still on twitter. Nobody cares about rando journalists and techies, who are a vanishingly small part of the platform.

On the other hand, it shows they still have some level of influence that people think there was as mass exodus.

Hard disagree with this. The majority don’t care about twitter, the only people who absolutely adore it are journalists and techies which is why it was such a big deal in the news and on forums and everyone in the real world just went about their business. The celebrities are only there for marketing and connecting with the journalists.

Which Mastodon does LeBron James use again?

I wouldn't know. I haven't watched an NBA game in over a decade.

>>×The majority don’t care about twitter

Exactly. Exactly.

Good luck to Substack, though. I'm rooting for them in this scenario.

Substack has attracted so many shrill rightwing kooks (Greenwald being the canary in that particular coalmine) that when I see someone has a substack I roll my eyes.

So here's to them being a more pretentious rumble/truth/parler/etc...

Actually, I'll take that back...

https://www.tiktok.com/t/ZTR35o66A/

I follow mostly techies, very few went to mastodon, and among them were none of the ones I cared about.

Seems like the people doing the most things in my field have no time for drama and are busy doing stuff, while the ones that actually accomplish little have the time and energy for this.

Counterpoint: most of the Cloud Native crowd I follow moved to Hachyderm.

> Seems like the people doing the most things in my field have no time for drama and are busy doing stuff,

Standing up for ethics isn't performative drama. I made my exit very quietly because I didn't have time for the drama of a petulant tyrant. I care that the tech I consume is open source or at the very least is guided by some principal of any good kind.

Sure.

People spent months and a tremendous amount of energy discussing the state of a site that is a glorified animated wall of text, but it's not drama.

Sometimes I wish I could teleport this community to were I lived in Mali and force you to stay there for 6 months to re-calibrate your sense of what's important.

Most people didn't. Some small group of people spent tremendous amount of energy. I think both of you agree on that point.

Same thing with iOS devs, everyone I followed on Twitter is now on Mastodon.

Most of the Python developers I followed are on Mastodon. "Techies" has lots of sub-cultures, so it could be C# or React developers are stuck on Twitter, for example, so if you are in those groups it might seem nobody has left.

I don't follow that much of the sports world, but the celebrities are definitely shifting more towards Instagram. I feel like Twitter is rapidly distilling down to LinkedIn type hustle-culture influencers.

This project was probably started at that time, if I had to guess.

While it would have helped jumpstart Notes, I disagree. A lot of content creators have their feet in both puddles, waiting it out - and with this and the non-stop Musk antics and tantrums, we are looking at an actual stampede away from that hellhole.

This kind of feeling almost always turns out wrong. No one can predict when the big moment happens or if it already happened. Substack has benefited from the the Streisand effect. Also known as what ticked off Elon musk.

And there will be many moments in the future, when Elon musk will have upset more of its users. And substock will be there to benefit just like Mastodon is benefiting every day.

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