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
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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

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.

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.

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.

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...

Please call them Elon's x-crements instead.

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

Xing is short for kissing IE XOXO. So instead of tweeting we are now kissing!

Jamie Kennedy's show is about to become relevant again. You've been X'd!

He's clearly laying the groundwork to sell it to Alphabet (Google's parent company). /s

Yay, another week of higher than normal activity, until the fomo kicks back in and they leave yet again cause "everyone is on X/this is sooo complicated/I just wanna see the fallout/whatever excuse justifies their addiction"

Every time that happens the fedi retains a good chunk of users. There's significant and stable growth throughout.

Ya that’s what happened with me, I deleted my account once Musk took over and started a Mastodon account and now I’m on Lemmy too and haven’t looked back at either platforms

They even stole x.org's logo:

believe it or not its more likely they straight up ripped off U+1D54F MATHEMATICAL DOUBLE-STRUCK CAPITAL X:

𝕏

absolutely no creativity. at least threads drew the ring in @ clockwise instead of the usual anticlockwise

Saw this on Mastodon:

Important sets:

ℂ the complex numbers

ℕ the natural numbers

ℚ the rational numbers

ℝ the real numbers

𝕏 the set of fascists wannabes

ℤ the integers

My favorite comment about this from Mastodon: "X is just a sans serif swastika".

I would argue that ℤ would also be the set of Russian fascist wannabes.

Imagine a billionaire approving that "logo" despite how uncreative it is. Like get a better graphic designer I guess?

only difference between billionaires and normal people is that billionaires have a lot of money. best not to assume they have above-average logo appreciation skills. although they could hire some good advisors i suppose

yeah but then they'd be spending money to be told they might not be 100% right and perfect 100% of the time, and that's just a waste of money

Billionaires wouldn't care if they're wasting money

if that was true then maybe the stingy fuckers would tip wait staff

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I'm just here to spread the good word about old.lemmy.world

Can't wait for Lemmy Enhancement Suite.

Because LES is more.

Honestly my favorite thing about Lemmy so far is that the web UI already has most of the things I wanted RES to have. And it's all open source so we can just improve the UI directly. No need for browser changes!

Or Kbin! Kbin can do both microblogging and link aggregation/discussion. Tbh departing Twitter users coming to Mastodon, and reddit refugees are brought together on Kbin.

The "all-in-one" method acomplished by Kbin is a huge feat, especially when it's built by a single person from scratch (ie; not based on lemmy codebase wise) and still much more ActivityPub compatible.

Kbin is sadly very underrated imo.

I feel that's a feature of Lemmy to not do both. I don't care about microblogs. I want the sites that I use to do one thing and do it as well as possible, so I can mix & match what I use, and not see what I don't want.

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It needs a mobile app to take off, imo.

Additionally, since it is just one guy (that I'm aware of), I'm not sure how sustainable it is for him. I believe he's been surviving off some EU grant and donations, but once the grant runs out and donations slow, the server costs for delivering content to tens of thousands of users every day are going to start being pretty rough to handle. Has he explained what his plan is for long term sustainability?

@ArtemisApp is in beta right now. @hariette has been hard at work. I look forward to trying it soon. Hopefully. I’m not on discord, and that’s where most people are getting beta.

There's a beta sign up form. I got an invite and I was never on the discord. I believe open beta is very soon anyway though.

I’m on the form. Been on there for a bit. Mostly I like pointing out that an app is being actively developed for kbin, and that I have never used it so I cannot tell you more.

I think lemmy people should know that @hariette has previously stated that Artemis will work there too. At least, I’m pretty sure they said that. Children have turned my brain to mush and my memory is about as reliable as a 3 year old.

Great for the fediverse there's many different codebases.

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I opened Twitter page and it shows login page with small x on left and big x in the middle. But only one closes the popup.

I just checked too. And if you close popup it takes you do another login page (also with an X) but that one can't be closed. So apparently there is no way to browse Twitter without an account now, which you could before.

People always used to claim that getting banned from twitter meant you were cut off from important information. It's highly debatable that there was any important information on twitter. That aside it wasn't really true you were cut off entirely, you could still browse tweets, just couldn't post when banned. Now it seems being banned does mean you're cut off from reading it.

Twitter was really good for news media and it kinda still is. Where I come from legacy media have been bought off by plutocrats who are in bed with the government and only reputable source of news are independent media which don't have enough funding or financial backing to appear on satellite TV channels. There's also no incentive for the incumbent to let such media flourish since legacy media is doing their dirty work. So for people like me this is a huge setback.

I hear ya... The advantage that Lemmy and kbin have over Mastodon is that Redditors tend to be more technically inclined than Twitter users, so ditching Reddit for Lemmy was easy, while I only know a grand total of three people on Mastodon, and two of them are tech YouTubers.

Redditors tend to be more technically inclined than Twitter users

This used to be true, but Reddit has been mainstream for years now. Today's average Redditor is likely pretty similar to the average Twitter user.

When a quarter of the replies on Reddit have become "this" or "💯" or "^^," which it feels like it became when I left, I'd agree with you.

I remember when you'd get ripped apart and down voted to hell for daring to use an emoji on Reddit when commenting. People hated it. Then one day it was fine to do it, no one cared anymore. I guess that's around when Reddit became mainstream, maybe.

@Busy @FlyingSquid

Probably cause more and more users gravitated to mobile where it became commonplace to include emojis in posts. I remember too when using emojis was a mortal sin. At most you could use an emoticon but that was it.

Back when I started using Reddit it was frowned upon to post OC. I remember some subs had rules that you would be banned if you more than like 10% of your posts were OC.

I feel like when the Reddit API controversy happened I was more inclined to switch due to the blackout vs Twitter which didn't have nearly as instant of an event that would happen to get me off. Now all of a sudden because of Reddit I'm on various Fediverse projects such as Funkwhale, Mastodon, Kbin, and Lemmy.

Plus there's some staying power to posts on here

I'm replying to what you wrote 10 hours ago. My local feed would be a lot of shit before I ever saw this

And it's 100% relevant to the area of content I wanted to read. Same if I went to a gaming or news related group

But in the other hand lemmy seems much more mature than lemmy.

Don't get me wrong, the experience has been rapidly growing in recent weeks thanks to the proliferation of third party apps 👍 But Mastodon's first party experience feels solid and their new official app just blends in any mainstream app.

I assume you mean Mastodon seems much more mature than Lemmy?

Yeah, I'd agree with you there. I've had zero issues trying to find people and content on Mastodon, while I have had federation issues with Lemmy. And I do use the official Mastodon app.

My only gripe with Mastodon is that it isn't obvious that you should follow hashtags. I didn't know this at first and struggled to get into it with post after post complaining about Elon, but once I figured out to follow hashtags, I like it now. I'm just annoyed that all the artists I follow on Twitter are flocking to Threads and Bluesky instead of Mastodon though.

Interesting. That is a good point

The vast majority of my friends on Twitter are artists, and the older ones ended up there when Angelo Sotira (spyed) got greedy on deviantArt. One of them ended up on mastodon.art, but the rest of them are trying out Threads, unfortunately.

What makes this even better is that apparently Mark Zuckerberg / Mets owns trademark for the X logo.

You know what that means! Millionaire monkey money fight!

I hate to correct you, but it's a billionaire baboon bills brawl.

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This reminds me of the time that the movie XxX came out and it was difficult to find to pirate.

When you name yourself anything with a lot of X's then your search engine results are going to point to adult entertainment over the product

Just googled X, musk isn't on the first page of results, absolute melon of a man.

google is broken anyway after 2 decades of people fucking with the algo by offering SEO services. The search results are basically random now unless you really focus your search term.

Google should have added SEO detection that would allow a site to be near the top for enough time for an SEO consultant to get paid, then drop the site to page 4. SEO would have looked like a scam before long.

When life gives you melon...

And then you add the lead actor to the search terms and it gets even worse

So the rebrand comes with X promising to be an app to replace everything?

X gonna give it to ya, X gonna deliver it to ya.

Well, it sure sounds like X is delivering users to Mastodon.

It sounds like he's trying to copy zombo.com (listen to the audio for at least 30 seconds to a minute - the animation is a little broken by now)

He wants something like WeChat that does everything.

He does know that Wechat is the everything app because of the authoritarian government, right...right?

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I don’t like twitter nor Elon but why would someone leave a platform because they would change their name?

Elon has done more damage before so people who would consider leaving should be long gone.

You're not wrong, but consider that people who justified sticking around for some reason or another might leave because the brand change (to a name that is so brain dead even a little offensive) finally hits home for them that it isn't going to be the same.

A brand name change is about the single most overt thing you can do to send the message that a product isn't going to be the same. And when that happens, people tend to look at the recent trends for that product to get an idea of what to expect. The recent trends for Twitter happen to be right-wing echo chamber.

So yeah, the people who were going to leave have largely already left. But this brand change is going to be effective at galvanizing those who remain.

You could make the argument that all his previous outrageous behaviors were desperate attempts to squeeze more money out of a business he didn't understand. But this... this is unhinged. It's so bafflingly pointless and dumb it's become clear that what was once a reliable dopamine delivery system could, without warning or reason, just... disappear one day. Even the people who rely on Twitter like addicts are starting to come up with exit strategies.

I'd argue as well that all the past dumb decisions, (Twitter Blue, anybody being able to name themselves anything they want, bugs everywhere, not being able to see anything without an account), all of that was just stuff you only had to passively bear. Now, it's a brand change that will at least have you typing something different into Google to reach "X," but it is still an active change you have to make.

If I had a Twitter account that was connected to my business, already had a whole bunch of followers, and was somewhat addicted to Twitter, I could understand having a hard time leaving. At the very least inertia would be a good enough reason for people to stay. But switching the brand recognition?

  • First off, you've disrupted the Twitter addictions of everyone on the site, because you'd have to know that blue bird logo is associated with a lot of people's dopamine responses
  • Second off, now that people are already being forced to make a change, there's less opportunity cost to jump ship to elsewhere

It's a "final straw" situation. No individual straw broke the back of the proverbial camel. One straw after another was placed atop it until finally the back broke. It's not the final straw that broke said back, but the load of all the straws including the final that did it.

So they're not necessarily quitting because of the name change. They're quitting because of everything else plus the name change. That was the thing that pushed the go/no-go decision into "go".

Maybe because this new decision is so unbelievably idiotic either it is the last straw or maybe some people realize twitter x is lost cause? Idk.

I don’t like twitter nor Elon but why would someone leave a platform because they would change their name?

Twitter has been around for so long, many are attached to it on an emotional level. It's older than my eldest niece; she's known about it since she could memorize the damn word.

So as dumb as it is that THIS is what pushes people to leave, I'm glad more are leaving regardless.

This is probably a stupid question, but for those of you that use Mastodon — how did you find people to follow?

I tried it out a few months ago but I didn’t like the few accounts they recommended, and searching for users or keywords didn’t get me too far either…

There is an account called Fedi Follows on Mastodon that shares accounts according to their topics. Hope it helps.

Thank you, that looks like a great place to start!

It helps if you can find a half-dozen people involved in something you like to follow at the start. Other than that, try joining a mid-sized (~1,000-3,000 users) Mastodon server based around a hobby, interest, or social group you're a part of. Most Mastodon clients allow you to keep a column open for the people you follow as well as the people on the "Local Timeline" who are a part of your server.

It's a new social network. If you see someone pop up who's made a pithy post or two, give 'em a follow. If they're not working out a week later, un-follow them. Don't feel afraid to follow a ton of people when you first get started to liven up your feed until you find a good circle of folks.

What I did in the very beginning:

  • don't worry about the instance that you are on. My server is quite generic and is meant to be a simple entrypoint to the fediverse, not a "community in itself".

  • Go to the mastodon directory to find the list of servers based on interests. fosstodon is one for FOSS enthusiasts, beekeeping is for those interesting in gardening, mountains.social is for those that like hiking, etc. The important thing here is to find servers that are not huge, but that have an active userbase.

  • Now, the real trick: for all these servers you found that could be interesting, you go browse at the federated timeline. This will give not only the activity from people in the server, but you will also see what they are following, boosting, etc. To me this was a way to find not just interesting people, but who the interesting people are following as well.

  • Be very generous when browsing these timelines, and follow as many as you can possibly can. During the first week, try to add 50 a day.

  • Follow hashtags. This will also make your timeline more lively and will bring different people who might be interesting to you.

  • Write an intro post, and pin it to your profile. Usually pinned profiles are always visible between servers, so it will make it easy for people to interact with you.

  • (Somewhat controversial, but I do it) If you have people that you like to follow on Twitter, follow them on Mastodon as well via a BirdSite mirror. You won't be able to do it from the larger instances, but if you join a more chill instance (like mine ;)) it should be fine.

  • Evangelize: if you have friends on Twitter, ask them to join as well. Most Mastodon servers have a way to let you send invites to others.

When you start getting the feeling that you are getting overwhelmed, it's the time to cull down the list. Feel free to unfollow any person or hashtag that you think is too noisy or not really interesting.

You need to follow hashtags but primary groups. You will find groups boosting toots about your topics. It's the first accounts to follow then you will find others.

It's not that hard. People have to keep in mind, it's not Twitter and so it works differently.

That’s kind of the problem I think. I was able to find like 2 people there I want to follow. Lemmy is going to be far more successful at displacing its alternative because all the communities you’d want to subscribe to are here.

I joined up before you could subscribe to hashtags, so my approach was:

  1. Read my local instance feed and click on content that interested me.
  2. Checked the users that made the interesting content to see if they had more.
  3. If they did, followed.

Nowadays I would add this step:

  1. Subscribe to hashtags on topics I'm interested in and follow people who regularly contribute good material to them.

how did you find people to follow?

Find tags that you like; follow the tags.

Eventually you'll find people posting in those tags that you end up liking; follow them.

And repeat. =)

I mainly used it for news till the rate limiting but i just followed news sources and have since found users to follow.

I used a site that let's you follow the same accounts on Masto as you did on Twitter.

He didn't want to buy the company. So, he's turning it into a pet project. The end. The oxymoron here of this story: The winners of the 44 billion Musk payed for it probably don't care that their creation is being run into the ground while the users of the platform are obviously in an uproar. In the end, the creators and founders, etc. did it for the money, not the cultural impact they would have on the world. Twitter's former CEO has allowed himself to be interviewed from time to time to say what he thinks Musk is doing wrong, but he doesn't seem to have any hurt feelings or express any kind of extreme regrets for the company being sold. From what I've seen in the news, he's pretty dry. The drama comes from the user end. This tells me something about how, in the end, it's just rich people doing business and doing as they please with what they please. It's kind of sad. Like, let's say I made something really cool with my own two hands and my creation got turned into something monstrous. I'd be upset. The people who made twitter are happy with their riches. In the end, the outrage and scandal is kind of pointless because it's just a thing that makes more money for big business rich tech people and it always was just that.

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.

Serious question, isn't this going to force them to release their trademark on the word "tweet"?

Quick, someone create a Mastodon Frontend Twatter that uses different logos than X yet seems oddly familiar...

I wonder if they'll renew the twitter.com domain name

It would be hilarious if a random got that domain and threw a mastodon instance on it. They'll probably keep it though lol

Given how shamelessly stupid musks whole takeover has been I guarantee they wont won't. He'll probably assign someone to keep it renewed and then fire them.

Gonna play devil's advocate here.

If Elon is truly able to turn The App Formerly Known As Twitter into an 'everything app' that's actually worth using, this could be a bone-headed move that pays off in dividends. It depends on what he plans to introduce to X within the next year or two. Transforming X into a messaging app won't be enough.

Musk's line of thought here isn't completely asinine. Let's not deny that superapps like LINE, WeChat, Alipay, Taobao and others exist, and absolutely dominate the digital landscape in their own regions.

Problem is, Twitter already has stiff competition. Threads is by far its largest competitor, and the moment Zuckerberg implements hashtags and trending topics, X is going to hemorrhage users.

This is honestly the direction Steve Huffman should've taken with Reddit instead of jacking up API prices and gouging every third-party app out of existence. Imagine if RPAN became a legitimate monetized mobile livestreaming platform instead of some dumb social experiment with seriously limited broadcasting times/broadcasters at once, or if Spez allowed content creators to sell access to premium content á la Tumblr Post+, Fansly, Patreon or OnlyFans. Enough e-girls have been astroturfing the shit out of Reddit to plug their paywalled collection of nudes, so may as well cut out the middle-man and drive OF out of business.

Facebook already tried to do the "everything app" and it failed in the US.

And Mark Zuckerberg is a million times more competent at business than Elon.

especially since mark doesn't fire all the compentent people the second they bring up a problem

Yeah, you know what those have in common? They all started providing one service more successfully than anyone else on that market and slowly accreted functionality in the absence of a popular local dedicated service. Twitter is not that, was never going to be that, and it is not becoming that, certainly not with a skeleton crew. The same goes for Reddit, which was certainly bigger than people think but not big enough to pull that move. It may have grown into a OF alternative specifically, just from having a foot on that business already, but that's about it.

We do have one of those "everything apps" here, though. It's called Facebook. Terminally online people don't realize, but there are millions of people right now buying and selling used stuff, dating, watching videos and exchanging business information over it, even without accounting for the rest of the Meta ecosystem.

That makes sense until you realize he already made a company called x.com that failed, and it's the source of his fortune

Musk’s line of thought here isn’t completely asinine. Let’s not deny that superapps like LINE, WeChat, Alipay, Taobao and others exist, and absolutely dominate the digital landscape in their own regions.

It isn't a bad thought, but it should be quickly apparent that an American equivalent might not work. The West isn't the same as those regions. There's a complex interplay of culture, history, and the current market scene. A good business person would recognize the possibility that it might not work and just do exploratory work. Musk in his arrogance thinks he can make it happen regardless

If Elon is truly able to turn The App Formerly Known As Twitter into an ‘everything app’ that’s actually worth using...

That opening conditional (emphasis added) is carrying a whole lot of weight...

How many people would trust Elon Musk with their banking details? I doubt enough to make the $44 billion worth it.

Yeah, how bad does it reflect on someone's credit report if they don't pay their rent and other bills for many months?

Maybe that sort of thing doesn't count on the credit report for a billionaire (because they don't have to follow any rules), but it counts for most people.

I wouldn't even trust a thin dime with Elon Musk given the way he operates.

I wouldn't trust Musk to tell me the time of day without double-checking on at least three other clocks to make sure.

Fellas, it's time to pay respects to Larry the Bird. He was only caught doing what he did best: tweeting.

At least Mastodon doesn't risk getting bought by a multi billionaire.

It's like Elon has read every book with an evil corporation in it and decided to make it his whole ascetic. X corp, sounds like the big bad that some plucky band of YA book protagonists have to team up to take down.

Can anyone help explain how to find content worth following on Mastodon? I made an account today and despite going through the #explore category I'm finding it difficult to find content or people I want to follow. The few things I've found end up just being Lemmy communities which kind of defeats the purpose of having a mastadon account at all.. maybe it's because I never had a Twitter, but the Lemmy/reddit/forum layout makes much more sense to me

Unfortunately this is not the fault of mastodon, its community or tech behind it as much as ... nobody from twitter actually moving to mastodon. There aren't many big influencers, companies or content creators on mastodon so your feed is just random people talking about random stuff. The lack of algorithm doesn't help either since someone's random showerthoughts have the same chance of showing up for you as does something trending that you'd actually be interested in.

Follow / pin active hashtags. I have 4, #news #nintendo #xbox and #playstation. I’m a simple man

And then I get even more random irrelevant crap because everyone talking about their latest rp adventures in stardew valley tags steam, gaming, indiegaming and other general hashtags.

There's some of that, but I prefer it for something like micro blogging. I want to see different things, points of view. By contrast, I'll go to a news site for specific info. I love Mastodon because there's a unvarnished stream of information that isn't curated by algorithms. :D

Yep, everyone I followed on Twitter went to Bluesky, some made accounts on Mastodon, but none of them stuck around

One idea is to browse the hashtag #introduction and follow people whose introductions sound promising to you. The hashtag #FediTips might also be useful. If you want to follow scholars and scientists, there is this list grouped by discipline: https://github.com/nathanlesage/academics-on-mastodon And in general, you can follow hashtags on Mastodon, e.g. "#bloomscrolling" for pictures of plants.

@Squidquid Option #1: Search for a hashtag. If it exists, and it's halfway active, follow it. No, I'm not kidding you, you can do that on Mastodon.

Option #2: the people section on fediverse.info.

Option #3: No matter which instance you're on, go to mastodon.social with your Web browser and search it for interesting hashtags. This may reveal to you more people who are interested in those topics/write about those topics.

Also, if you want to learn more about the Fediverse beyond Lemmy (and beyond Mastodon, for that matter), go follow fediversenews@venera.social. It's a public forum on Friendica. You'll learn soon enough what Friendica is.

It depends on what you are into. If you like anime (for example) you could try something broad like # (anime) [no spaces and such] & then see what other hashtags people are using from there. The same with music or something. That's what I do at least. There might be better ways but a lot of times people are into similar stuff and that can lead down different paths as well.

Sportsbots.xyz host mirrors of the popular sports writers. I follow thurrott from twit apple insider and 9 to 5 max. Tech meme is good for tech news headlines. I fill krebs on security as well. It’s better than twitter because it’s chronological and not algorithm fed

It takes some effort to build up and shape your Home feed on Mastodon. One good starting point is to search for hashtags that you're interested in, like #sports or #gamedev or whatever. It may take some trial and error to find the most popular hashtags being used in your topics of interest. Once you find the hashtags with stuff that's interest to you, follow those hashtags so you will continue to discover new people and posts in those topics in your Home feed. Once you find interesting people posting in those hashtags, follow them. The name of the game on Mastodon is to follow, follow, follow. I've heard it said that your feed will get pretty good when you follow around 200 people or so.

I'm interested to know which accounts to follow for lemmy news. Seems like a natural place to go when having trouble connecting like I did with fmhy before and shit just works recently.

Serious question: Are Mastadon users just like kbin and Lemmy users, but with a character limit?

You mean, are we a part of the same Fediverse? Yes. I’m actually replying to you right now from my Mastodon account! Still not over how cool that is!

But yeah, there’s a character limit. The instance I’m from is donphan.social. Our character limit is 1,008.

Username checks out. I just checked out that instance because of the name, even though I have no intent of using Mastodon because I never liked Twitter. It’s like the perfect name for a Pokémon-themed Mastodon instance.

I tried Mastodon and failed. Lemmy is different IMO in that you can freely access, write on and read all lemmy communities from any Lemmy instance (and apparently from Mastodon). On Masto you're quite siloed-in, can't follow "local" from a thematic instance with an account on another (and in Lemmy you can follow thematic communities from all around the threadiverse), people won't see your content unless they either actively follow you or read the local/global feed. Curating feed is a necessary effort and not too easy one since you only get to follow individual users.

xvideos twitter videos? lmao

lol there has got to be a better cadence to deliver this joke. like "Twitter, now called X, has launched a new video sharing service at xvideos.com"

i think the mildly techy sounding waffle is the right way to set it up personally, it lulls you into a false sense of security thinking this is just some random tech nonsense and then bam, porn

Risky click of the day, but turns out its benign and family-friendly. Thanks for sharing.

sounds sus

it's lesser evil compare to amont of other memes after elon deside to name twitter "X" ... xbox series x on x platform... sounds even more sus in my mind..

X video.....

Anyone recommend a good iPhone app for Mastodon?

Gonna go against the grain here and just recommend the default Mastadon app. It’s simple and gets the job done with no Bells and whistles. Not sure there’s much missing

Yeah I’m also on the default and not sure what other apps have going for them that make them better

Ivory is my favorite as long as you don’t mind supporting the developers. But a close second place for me is Ice Cubes.

I second Ice Cubes. I would recommend Mammoth as well, but feed loading can be super slow.

The official app loads super fast, but way too many limitations IMHO.

Third recommendation for Ice Cubes here! It’s simply great

I switched to ice cubes from mammoth because of the lack of a trending tab

I've been using ivory, it's nice

I second this, super stable, fresh design, lots of features. I didn’t even need to try a different app it fit everything I wanted

I use Tusker and it's been great so far. More features than the official app, and it's pretty stable too.

1 more...

Ivory is the iOS app I use and absolutely enjoy.

1 more...

If you want greater adoption, especially for Twitter users, then we should be evangelising Misskey and Calckey/Firefish over Mastodon, especially given the feature set more closely mirrors Twitter.

Calckey/Firefish

Much more beautiful than mastodon IMHO

Thanks for the info about the other projects.

I just have no idea these platforms are out there or how to get to them from lemmy

i never got into twitter, and the longer this goes on, the more glad i am about that

Elon has no idea how to run a social media company. At this point he's just trying random shit hoping it will work. Get the platform operating successfully again and then worry about branding...

I honestly think that he believes himself to be some sort of super genius that only has good ideas, just cause he wrote some software and sold it for alot of money when he was younger.

The guy actually wrote software? Like he coded it?

He wrote something called zip2 and sold it. Then he wrote get this... x.com, which became PayPal.

Edit, because I didn't really answer your question: yes he did code it, as far as anyone seems to know.

Assuming "hoping it works" is really part of his plan for the platform.

gossip that Elon has no idea about running anything was circulating for a long time but since Tesla/SpaceX were not social media it was easier to manage the PR to make Musk seem like "tech and business genius, also twitter troll" regardless of what was going on behind the scenes. On Twitter every single decision hits millions of people and businesses within an hour and managing that is impossible for any PR department so we get to see the man as who he really is.

That's a bummer, hang in there Mastodon, keep bloomscrollin

Hopefully a massive influx of Twitter jerks doesn't kill what makes Mastodon a nice place in the first place.

Is that why I've seen more people today wanting to bitch about politics in completely random threads?

Why aren't posts on mastodon called "toots"?

TL;DR: The lead dev is German and had no idea at the time that toot was American slang for farting, he thought it was just an elephant/mastodon noise.

But they...were?

https://gizmodo.com/mastodon-toot-retired-twitter-tweet-equivalent-1849786221

They were called toots and they fucking got rid of it? How uncreative can you be!?

People still use it all the time, often ironically.

I'll say that, fart jokes aside, I like just saying "posts" for everything because at this point, and in an interconnected set of networks where we're all using multiple services I've frankly outgrown the need to brand each bit of text I spew onto the Internet. It's the same reason I say "I'll text you" instead of "I'll whatsapp you" or whatever.

Addiction it is. They think they are advocating for health and social justice. But they're not. They're just addicted to Twitter/X. I mean... it's owned by someone who pays fascists to post on there, but they are still there? WTAF?

When is rebranding ever good for users/consumers?

Most rebrands keep an element of the original or adopt how the customer refers to it. Think Dunkin dropping “Donuts” and Kentucky Friend Chicken becoming KFC.

All good.

But for Dunkin Donuts to suddenly rename itself “Place” - not so good.

When they change from a racist name and or mascot.

That rebranding seems to me as just hiding past misdeeds. I'm not charitable enough to take apologies from companies at face-value, there would need to be some effort to explain and show change too.

That’s exactly it. I saw a lot of people on Twitter today saying they’re only staying the fallout. It’s dumb, and yes, I’m part of the problem, though I’m staying only to update some connections on where I’m going.

Those same people have “only been staying for the fallout” since musk bought it, still tweeting away dozens of times a day. They’re the same people that said they’d leave Reddit on July 1 yet are still there.

Completely agree. I think people are so engrained that they just don’t want to try something else.

I wonder how much x.com cost to purchase, or if it was just a domain twitter/Musk had lying around.

He actually did, from Paypal days. Well he bought it back in 2017.

Curious if he sold it to twitter, I can't imagine parting with a single character domain for free.

Mastadon is where the smart people hang out... X is the fascist site and Facebook/Threads is the frivolous and stupid site.

Nah, Facebook and x are both fascistic sides because of the amount of qanons and magats I've seen on facebook

Hence why I haven't had a Facebook or Instagram account in years.

Once the celebrities or official pages or figure people leave that site for its dismaying complications, that will be the doom of it as followers of those don't have other significant reasons to stay.

I guess the whole Threads battle making Elon realize he needs to be the data master, and X born earlier than I expected

Um yeah, I'm not seeing that. You can see monthly active users on https://the-federation.info/platform/21 and it's been fluctuating up and down, no big jump. So I call bullshit on that article based on the metric there. Though no doubt as Twitter (X) implodes Mastodon will see the fallout with higher activity.

I don't want to rain on your parade but I'll do it anyway: The numbers of active posts and members in Lemmy communities, even in the most active ones, are mindbogglingly low in comparison with Reddit, even in comparison to somethingawful what I still consider the dirty cousin of Reddit.

All the numbers are just two sizes lower than Reddit and then there is the atrocious web interface. I have stopped counting how often my posts got eaten, the reply button didn't react and general stuff didn't work at all.

we willget there eventually.
you can't compare a product that is decades old wuth something that's fairly new.

Twitter hasn’t even rebranded yet and an article like this comes out? Jumping the gun a bit don’t they think?

99% of the people that were leaving twitter when musk took over are still there. They’re too invested to leave. People like Steven King just keep making fools of themselves by still being there 12 months later complaining about how bad Twitter is.

It did though? Twitter.com no longer shows the bird (replaced by an X). It's loading screen is a stylised X. And x.com points to the same server.

The app is still called twitter with the bird logo, at least on iOS.

Also what it’s called is irrelevant. It’s still twitter, it’ll still behave the same, it’s still got the 500 million users. Why would anyone leave a platform simply because it changed names and url?

Usually a rebrand signifies a change in the direction or focus of the brand. I don't keep up with it much, so on a surface level this rebrand seems like more of a "I like it better this way" on Elon's part than a true rebrand with a point and reason.

What it's called isn't irrelevant. Twitter blue, tweeting, Twitter and tweets are all linked to Twitter and not to X. And X is what it's called now. So post on X and follow me on X.

Just because the App on iOS and or android haven't been updated to reflect that change doesn't mean it hasn't been rebranded yet.

How it will affect the users? Well that's to be seen. The first waves of Userscripts surely will follow soon to replace X with the bird in browsers.

Edit: just checked the twitter App on the android play store may still be named by such but is now owned by X Corp. The most generic name ever.

Why is what it’s named relevant? Twitter blue will be renamed. Functionally nothing will change.

Check out the app or webpage, they've already put in the temp X logo

The app is still called twitter with the twitter logo, at least on iOS.

Well they started taking down the Twitter sign at HQ, so it's happening

I'm not denying that it's happening, I'm simply saying that the rebrand hasn't even happened on the main way people interact with twitter, yet we have article after article saying that people are leaving in droves because of the rebrand.........that they haven't seen yet.

These people are addicted to such a degree that they're functionally on the same level as literal junkies, just without the physical damage. Social media was such a fucking mistake, and I don't think we're ever going to recover from it within our lifetime.

Ted Kaczynski was right.

These people are addicted to such a degree that they're functionally on the same level as literal junkies, just without the physical damage. Social media was such a fucking mistake,

  • Onii-Chan@kbin.social

I mean, yeah. The only 'social media' I have is kbin, and I check it once or twice a day. If it went anywhere, I wouldn't really give a shit, as I left all the major platforms years ago and adding one more to that list wouldn't bother me. Don't group me in with Twitter (x?) users because I called them out on their addiction, when I've already done what they seemingly can't.

Apparently this is all part of some grand master plan. Maybe Elon will pull it off???

I can't fathom that anybody could be this stupid. Does he have a reason to purposely destroy Twitter?

The decisions he's making aren't just bad, they're the worst possible ones that he could make. As in, he gathered a group of experts and these are the best ways to destroy Twitter that they could think up.

Some people are suggesting he ran up so much debt buying Twitter that he's now running it into the ground in order to declare bankruptcy and not have to repay the debt. I don't know how plausible this is.

I wonder if that would be taken to court if true.

I imagine it would be hard to prove, because he would never admit it was intentional, and he'd never have to tell anyone else that in order to execute the plan. It can look like a series of blunders either way.

Exactly!

More are more I've been thinking - he watches anime, he thinks current social media is incredibly dangerous, and (while he was always a dick in private) he only really showed the current Musk after meeting Trump.

We know musk watches anime - it's like the zero requiem. First, he becomes a folk hero, a billionaire putting his weight behind important tech for humanity. Then he meets Trump - maybe he realized how dark our prognosis as a species is.

He starts driving away his left-leaning futurist and techy core with bigotry and being a dick. He backs out of a plan to buy Twitter, violates his parole, and makes a big show about trying to get out of it... But what did he actually do besides complain it's full of bots, then give up?

He walks in with a kitchen sink, drives away anyone who can afford to leave or might resist a stupid order, and settles in.

For months, about every two weeks he's been doing something to wean users off Twitter, while making a big show of some increasingly obviously dumb ideas. Like seriously, his business is ads - it makes so little sense that he limit users to such low limits - even subscribers could eat through that easily

He lies through his teeth and says it's working, he's almost breaking even, that users and advertisers come crawling back... Exactly what u/spez and every other social media guy desperately want to believe - the only thing standing between them and profit is telling their users to suck it

Now he finally admits they're in terrible shape, making his last fanboys look like idiots, and making himself look not only erratic and out of touch, but like a bad businessman.

To totally parallel the requiem, he needs to topple all the billionaires before staging his death - leaving the world in shape to rebuild, and very wary of the dangers of wealth inequality.

Or at least make us actually unite and change the laws and economic system.

Or maybe he's just having a midlife crisis, hates Twitter, and is just burning money for the hell of it. And the attention.

name a single grand master plan that elon has ever pulled off

Still waiting for Teslas driving from west to east coast completely autonomously. And Elon flying to mars.

Uh, the first one. It's all downhill after that. It's the only one he's ever pulled off. Look at the goals for the master plan part 2 and you'll see that they haven't managed to do a single one, but Elon still went ahead a published a part 3. Why actually meet goals when you can just pretend you've met them by posting new ones, I guess.

Weren't all his companies successful in the end?

The companies he took over after they were were founded?

Okay? Taking over a company, growing it, and then selling for huge profit is still good business sense.

He's a douchebag and takes too much credit for the engineering that has made them successfull, but SpaceX has delivered some next-level rockets and Tesla has been very successful creating a new market niche and selling a ton of cars

His master plan sure does seem massively reactionary for a master plan