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

adonis@kbin.social to Fediverse@lemmy.world – 2196 points –
As Twitter destroys its brand by renaming itself X, Mastodon user numbers are again soaring | TechCrunch
techcrunch.com

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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He didn’t want to buy the company. So, he’s turning it into a pet project.

That's a good point, and one that had not occurred to me. For all we know, he's already mentally written off the $44 billion as a loss and is just having fun with it, with no expectation of success.

That would explain a lot.

The fact that he did not want to buy it for the price he had to buy it for is enough for me to conclude that he doesn't give two shits about it. The ones he bought it from don't give two shits, either. It's just money. For Musk, money lost. For the former owners of Twitter, money gained. The rest is just blah blah blah to them. This is not so for the users of Twitter. It means much more to them socially than it does to the people who bought it and sold it. This, for me, is fascinating as a social phenomenon. Fascinatingly sad in a lot of ways.

Just to add in, X.com was something Elon wanted to do all the way back in PayPal days, basically a line/wechat with PayPal abilities.

It's not his $44 billion, though.

The people who ACTUALLY paid for it are going to have a few words with him, probably, at some point.