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Comment by gfodor | Hacker News Reader

It seems like fan out social media will just be in a cycle of consolidation and then a shock event eventually breaks it up a bit. Given that Twitter/X seems to have survived this shock, most likely to me in 5 years or so the next reconsolidation will be people migrating back there to access the network in the usual kinds of feedback loop. There was a window where this wasn’t assured (bluesky had a pretty clear opportunity to disrupt here imo) but that phase seems over and the next cycle seems pretty locked in.

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I've been around long enough to see X's trajectory. It's headed here (List of defunct social networking services, Wikipedia):

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_defunct_social_network...

side note but Fowler's organization runs an employee Mastodon instance. This is the "correct" model that should have been applied to social networking from the beginning (interoperability, not silos)

https://toot.thoughtworks.com/@mfowler

Did any of these ever have 300 million users?

without doing any further research I assume AOL Instant Messenger got pretty close.

Windows Live Messenger, on the list, had 330 million active monthly users

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Live_Messenger

India TV claims Orkut was exactly that popular (300 m)

https://www.indiatvnews.com/technology/news-orkut-farewell-m...

Orkut didn't really die a natural death, though. It was cannibalized to juice Google+, which subsequently collapsed.

"X" is definitely running right into a similar problem that Google+ faced: a good name can't save you but an awful name can sink you. I've never heard even the most ardent Musk fans defending the name change. It's ridiculous.

Google+ had 540 million active users

Active is very debatable there, I think Google counted anyone who was signed into Google.

Google+ had a lot of active users, which is especially observable if you join the right communities. The demise of Google+ marked the loss of those communities, which I still sorely miss to this day.

Those communities, plus stable infrastructure, great integration with photos, publicly viewable profiles without requiring sign-in, transparent moderation that I never knew I missed until I joined Diaspora, and no ads. It was a real shame.

They removed google chat and replaced it with Hangouts locked behind Google+. A majority of users might have been just using that.

"active"

Per Elon Musk, those are mostly bots.

Did Twitter?

Even Musk was trying to argue it was all bots before he got stuck with the bill.

Mastodon can't scale and centralizes too much power into the largest home nodes, Bluesky is a much better, more 'correct' approach as you put it.

But ultimately it doesn't matter, I don't think your first point is correct - the window of opportunity for this cycle is behind us for a decentralization of social media imo. The network effects of X are too strong, eventually people will come back.

You're viewing the Mastodon vs. Bluesky problem from very different temporal points of observation, so your conclusions are not really meaningful. Mastodon is installed on hundreds of servers, how many instances of Bluesky are there? Until it's adopted more widely it can't be "more correct".

I think the amount of money that was bankrolled into Twitter is sustaining the impression of survival.

For me the most useful part of Twitter was real time news trends. I don't even open that tab anymore.

Next most useful thing was the network of scientists from my field. It is also non existent now. I saved a lot of tweets about new papers over the years. When I went back to read them during literature review for my dissertation, I found most of them gone and accounts deleted.

What has increased drastically is verified accounts spewing either sensationalism without any care for engagement, or outright misinformation, sometimes taken down hilariously by community notes.

Right so what I'm suggesting is the current situation is not a stable state. If I'm right, what you should expect is that those people will, slowly, return to posting their content on X. If I'm wrong, you should expect more and more people migrating off of X and less and less active users on there. The reason I think I am right is because the size and connectivity of the X social graph.

> There was a window where this wasn’t assured

You're living in a fantasy bubble if you think anything in this comment is insightful or representative of the current state of Twitter.

The only thing that was in doubt during the various recent Twitter changes was how rapidly it would decline - people have underestimated network inertia, which is why Mastodon and now Bsky have failed to capture sufficient impressions to convince everyone they're the "next Twitter". Which ultimately brings people back to Twitter - noone is going to Twitter because Mastodon/Bsky don't work, they're coming back because with each migration they overestimate the finality & are disappointed.

Ultimately though, slow as Twitter's decline is, it is continuing to decline steadily & will inevitably cross the critical threshold where one can consider it first irrelevant (Facebook's currenly approaching this state, a process which has been slow), then eventually "defunct".

TL;DR: declines always take longer than everyone predicts, but ultimately still happen. Comebacks generally speaking don't.

Mastodon has no algorithm, if one guy posts 30 things you get them sequentially so it is dominated by who types the most until they eventually annoy you enough to unfollow them. No algorithm also means you don't filter out their meal photos etc. based on clicking not interested.

Twitter is maybe even worse now though, no matter how many times you click not interested on hard right content, street fights, etc. it just forces it on you. They have stop letting you adjust aspects of your feed.

> Twitter is maybe even worse now though, no matter how many times you click not interested on hard right content, street fights, etc. it just forces it on you.

I have literally never seen this stuff in my feed. Are you commenting on or reposting far right content or street fights? Even if you're commenting or reposting to say how awful the content is, that still counts as "engagement" and will cause the algorithm to give you more of it.

Anecdotally I've never seen these before. However it keeps pushing AI related posts to me (I never comment or reposting them). I feel it just push a specific topic to a specific account for a while and see if it 'clicks'.

I clicked not interested every time until I gave up and left the site. I never engage with it with likes or comments.

It’s not just that person! I logged back into my long-unused Twitter within the past year (to delete my account) and was presented the same type of content they mentioned above. This despite the fact that my ancient account was dedicated to Animal Crossing memes and whatever books I was reading at the time, never used for anything political. The feed pushed a whole slew of far-right “thinkers,” which was pretty shocking to see.

> Mastodon has no algorithm

This isn't about whether Mastodon is better or any other existing alternative though: people as a group are less interested in individual rational concerns like these and will ultimately go where the network is, and wherever it's going to (yet to be decided) it's clearly moving away from Twitter. Slowly, but surely.

"Comeback" vs "decline" is just a rhetorical frame. Ultimately what I see is that Twitter has a unsurpassed level of social graph in terms of metcalfe connectivity, and that the value of the network itself seems to provide a significant force for people to come back. It's not hard to understand why: Fowler's post shows it. The fact he can't sever his connection to X because there are people on there shows that this is an unstable state. The question is which way things will tip given that networks inevitably consolidate. The next stable state of consolidation is either some new network with dense connectivity or an existing one. So, you have to be able to point at what that network is to say if you're making an actual alternative prediction.

> you have to be able to point at what that network is

You don't really. In fact, historically, migrations away from a large declining platform don't tend to have a unified destination. Consolidation doesn't happen directly, it's usually a later stage of any given social network (immediately preceding decline).

e.g. people didn't move from MySpace to Facebook en masse. They went to LastFm, Bebo, Orkut, many other places. It wasn't until long after Myspace's decline that Facebook started to be a singular dominant force (at which stage Snapchat/Vine/Instagram/others started seeping in).

> The next stable state of consolidation

This "stable consolidation" tends to follow mass abandonment of a network to disparate places, it doesn't precede it.

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