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

Fediverse@lemmy.world – 2196 points – 12 months ago

As Twitter ditches its iconic branding in favor of owner Elon Musk's favorite letter "X," its open source competitor Mastodon is once again seeing usage numbers soar.

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I can fathom no world where you'd want to trade away a multi billion dollar brand for a new brand you literally can't SEO. What, you think your brand is gonna be more impressive that the generic variable, and a part of the alphabet?

"Follow me on Twitter" becomes "follow me on X"? "You should tweet that" becomes "you should X that"? The little blue bird on every shop window, website, and business card becomes a stylized letter that, hopefully, doesn't look so threatening on the next iteration?

It's a textbook case of brand destruction. I almost regret never making a Twitter in the first place, just so I could quit today, or at any of the hundred days in the past year where it got inexplicably worse without reason.

“You should tweet that” becomes “you should X that”

"You should X-create" that

And a tweet becomes an "X-cretion"

X-crement

And retweet it become X-Forwarded-For it

It’s just a new form of messaging called X-communication.

oh wait.

It's inspired by all the X-Twitter employees

We're witnessing an X-tinction event in real time.

Ain’t X-ing a term for cutting something out of your life ?

Yes, and I was thinking how confusing it could be. A: "Hey, did you see that trend on X?" B: "What? No, I don't talk to my ex anymore."

I should X that sounds like I should delete/close that. How apt.

Twitter is my ex

To me it sounds like axe.

"Yep, brilliant. Axe it."

The little blue bird on every shop window, website, and business card becomes a stylized letter that, hopefully, doesn’t look so threatening on the next iteration?

Haha, I know the most appropriate iteration, a red background with the X in a white circle.

Perhaps with each corner of the X at a 90 degree angle clockwise? You know, to add style points.

It makes the X go faster, everyone knows that.

Its a terrible rebrand that pretty much comes because of Elon's impulses, or in other words, for shits and giggles. Regardless of this hilarious trashing of such a powerful brand, I'll have fun calling tweets "xeets" for a good week.

“Hey bros wanna see me light $40 billion on fire?”

The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia spent good money to never have an Arab Spring again.

Which is nuts because they have a nationwide content filter and could just blacklist Twitter and be done with it in 5 minutes.

Please call them Elon's x-crements instead.

It must be so horrible working "with" him. You're trying to build something and every morning you must be frightened to see Elon hanging on a ladder because he thought it was so funny to draw dicks everywhere on the building, which would have you cancel everything you are working on.

I've worked in a founder led business and this is why I quit.

I'd spend forever working on a project to build a satellite site then suddenly we don't want that anymore - bin the recipes we want a full main site redbrand.

Bye.

Feel you, I've been working with this kind of person but he was pushed away a few weeks after my arrival. He still had time to make an impression though, his genius move was to tell each team that the others hated them, which had no effect because we talked to each others...

Follow me on ten.

Destroying the brand and ruining twitter was always the goal. There's a good reason why Saudi Arabia fronted half of the bill....