Twitter's lost 13% of its daily users and its rebrand has failed
The new data — comprehensive and definitive — should put to rest the countervailing narratives over Musk’s management of the app. Under his stewardship, X’s daily user base has declined from an estimated 140 million users to 121 million, with a widening gap between people who check the app daily vs. monthly. X’s remaining daily users are engaged similarly as before. But the pool is shrinking. Apptopia pulls its data from more than 100,000 apps on iOS and Android, along with publicly available sources.
So apparently it lost only 13% of daily users? Thats a smaller number than I thought. Still bad news for Twitter though.
On the other hand, it shows the power of content creators and niche communities. I used less Twitter but cannot delete it because it is literally how I connect with my niche community on there.
Umm... Only 13%?
I thought it would have been more...
The increase in the number of bots made up for the rest. The "pay a small fee to get an I'm definitely human sticker" scheme was really popular in the misinformation community.
Good point...
Well, the question for me is how many active contributors have left. If those who leave are lurkers, it doesn't really matter. If those who leave are mostly creators, that's a serious problem for the platform.
Well, the question for me is how many active contributors have left. If those who leave are lurkers, it doesn't really matter. If those who leave are mostly creators, that's a serious problem for the platform.
mastodon finally clicked for me and i don't miss twitter at all. sometimes i accidentally load twitter out of force of habit, but immediately recognize how much it sucks now and close it again. Likewise, reddit's dead to me too now. i'm finally starting to feel like decentralized federated social media systems might actually work out.
What is reddit? That shit site with psycho owners who want to go public because they are convinced they are successful, despite not being able to make any money and alienating their moderators and userbase? Lols.
i started reading your reply in the voice of Dracula from the intro to Symphony of the Night XD
"WHAT is REDDIT 🍷💫💥 but a MISERABLE pile of SHITPOSTS!"
The 'net ill-needs a failure such as him.
His terms of service are as empty as his revenues!
all this to say, yeah fam 100% totally agree
Out of curiosity, can I ask what it was that made mastodon click?
I had two or three goes before realising that choosing the right instance can give you an engaging "local" feed. That seems dramatically less important on lemmy though.
i'm not so sure it was even my local feed that got me feeling like i belonged, really; more that I started reflexively defaulting to the federated feed and found it to be much more lively. Perhaps it was actually the changes brought on by time. Perhaps it was because twitter is rotting like a forgotten corpse in a warm, damp room and all the smart people who actually give a shit finally all started to say "fuck this" and enough of a critical mass has finally accumulated in federated services for them to affect its overall feel. I definitely see content from technically minded, creative, motivated people more on mastodon than i EVER did on twitter, but especially now. Twitter now is just ... sad, and it reminds me that I have a better place that I'd enjoy visiting more.
I will not call twitter "x" till the day I die
I like Xitter, pronounced like xi- in Mandarin Chinese.
For those who want to know, that makes Xitter sound like halfway between Sitter and Shitter.
As an English speaker you can try to make that sound by saying the Y in YEET and paying close attention to how exactly your tongue is positioned and where in your mouth the air is being constricted. Then try to position your tongue as if you want to say "yeet" or "yes" again, but make an S sound at exactly the same constriction point where you made the Y sound before. If you're successful, it should sound like a hybrid between S and SH to your English ears.
That's how I make it anyway, actual Mandarin speakers might find issue with my explanation.
Exactly what I go for. My Mandarin is pretty awful, however.
It's only ever "the website formerly know as Twitter" to me.
One of my current favorite alternative is, "X, the web app you access at twitter.com", though given the logo that they chose I'm tempted to start referring to them as X11.
Elon must have spent so much on x.com yet it still redirects to the primary URL twitter.com
Probably because if he changed that, then the whole site would break.
And he fired all the people with the experience to make it work again.
Agreed. It will be Twitter for me till it die.
I've taken to calling it "xitter"
Somehow, that reminds me of a snowflake dictator who gets annoyed by a cartoon bear and whom the WHO is very afraid of.
Rebranding Twitter, one of the most recognizable brand on earth, to "X" is not just shooting yourself in the foot, it's taking a shotgun, aiming at your feet and pulling the trigger.
I’m thinking a little higher up and more to the centerline
Meanwhile, Reddit is like: “Hold my beer.”
Only 13%?? With everything he's going through, it seems very little to me. I think that the turning point would be top-level institutions and politicians changing Mastodon, I think that as long as that does not happen Twitter will still be relevant unfortunately
13% may not sound like a lot, but it includes almost all of the 10% who weren't complete idiots.
So I guess you're still using it?
Hey, this comment reads like you're just dunking on another user. If that is not what you meant to do, please try to communicate more clearly, and if that is what you meant to do, please refrain while commenting on Beehaw in order to be(e) nice. Thanks!
Considering they said almost all, that's not the gotcha you think it is.
That's just the 13% who have stopped using it daily I imagine, who were already probably super addicted to it.
Not sure if weekly/monthly users dropping out would be included in that tally. Also it says nothing about activity time from the daily users. It's possible the users that stuck around may not be using it as much i.e. 1-2 tweets or comments a day now vs 10-20 before.
It's the opposite. As per the article, daily users remained consistent while monthly users saw the 13% drop.
Choosing a single letter name was a marketing disaster. Elon is truly clueless when it comes to people and social. Even worse when X implies Ex anything.
Maybe lengthen it to xxx.com? Think anyone owns that one?
definitely not, seems completely original. Go for it elon!
People might confuse it for that Vin Diesel movie I guess, nothing else used 3 xs together like that though.
I don’t think Twitter and Reddit are going to die quickly. They have user bases that they can monetize and bots to flood content. They were shitty enough that enough of left and gave a nice boost to federated platforms. That boost will grow every time those legacy platforms alienate their users by treating them badly. Like windows and Linux.
It might never truly "die", but losing 10%+ of active users is massive. Twitter got decimated. Literally.
First time I have seen accurate use of decimate and literally together (not a language prescrivist, just find this funny.)
Even Digg is still running!
I'm convinced that muskrat did this to destroy a channel of communication. It sure helped me look for more free and open source alternatives. I never used Twitter other than seeing live on the spot events.
Saudi monarchy and other rich folks probably encouraged him further.
I think it's embarrassing how low that number is. If there are alien civilizations out there, I think humans would be at the bottom of the barrel intelligence wise.
It is probably like 50% of the users, the other 74% are bots that are still on the platform. lol
i actually thought i would go take a look at threads. when i tried to log in on my PC it told me i had to download the app on my phone before it would let me log in with the account they already apparently created for me.
so i left and havent been back
Threads was launched before it was finished to capitalise on one of Musk's more brain dead decisions - and the Threads website was initially almost unusable (it's still missing a lot of things - such as federation with Mastodon).
The requirement to use a phone app, if it still exists, wasn't nefarious, it was just the best they could do without delaying the product launch.
As for "the account they already apparently created"... AFAIK threads runs on Instagram's infrastructure. So if you have an Instagram account then, yeah, "signing up to threads" is basically just enabling threads on your existing account. If you don't have an Instagram account I'm pretty sure they create one when you sign up for Threads (but disable Instagram on your account unless you "sign up" over there).
I think Threads won't try to federate with Mastodon, since it's most likely to end up as a PR disaster. Half of the fediverse will de-federate with them from the outset, while the rest of them will have their fingers on the trigger. I don't think the fediverse has any tolerance for their BS after their (and Google's) rug pull on XMPP.
I am 100% off social media now. Was never a big fan of Twitter but I'm definitely not paying for it. Zuckbook has been deleted for a decade. When Reddit disabled 3rd party apps, that was the last time I used Reddit.
I miss some of the timely news on specific topics but otherwise nothing's lost.
So what's the consensus here? Does social media not include things where people use usernames, or do Reddit and maybe even Lemmy count?
Reddit and Lemmy are definitely social media. A subreddit or Lemmy community is effectively the same idea as a Facebook group, just with pseudonyms.
The quantifiably different thing about lemmy is nobody is trying to trap you in a skinner box.
I mean it kind of ends up being a Skinner box anyway just because of the loop of scrolling, seeing a post, looking at it and repeating. But I agree nobody is actively trying to trap you in one.
Social media has always excluded forum like sites. It most definitely does not include anonymous sites. Social media has a strict definition about having connections to people, none of which Reddit nor lemmy has. Reddit technically added followers, but you cannot see nor interact with them, that’s not social media, that’s an email list. If lemmy is social media then so is every single comment section on every news site ever.
So are you saying that Facebook Groups aren't social media either? That's a forum like site. Tumblr isn't social media either?
This is Merriam-Webster's definition of social media:
This is Cambridge's:
Lemmy and Reddit both fall under these definitions.
Not sure what you mean by this... Reddit has had chats and PMs for a long time.
Neither Lemmy nor Reddit are anonymous. They're pseudonymous. Something like 4chan where you don't even need an account is anonymous.
Correct, facebook groups is not facebook. It's forum software hosted at the same url as facebook. Same as Facebook Marketplace. Marketplace is not facebook. It's craigslist. It just happens to be hosted at the same url as facebook. Just like StackOverflow Chat is not question and answer software even though it's literally hosted at the same url. Just like your phone is not social media even though you both create communities on it and communicate with people on it. If you don't understand how servers work behind the scenes then maybe that doesn't make a lot of sense to you, but a url is nothing more than a sign to put on the front of your building. You can then teleport the user to anywhere else in the universe and it can have absolutely nothing to do with the original location at all. This is the framework of the internet.
literally every single website on the entire planet meet those definitions.
You cannot interact with your followers. I didn't say anything about communicating with individuals that you see around the site. You have no way to know who your followers are you have no way to message your followers. You have no way to interact with your followers. Reddit is a forum software, exactly like every forum software before it.
accounts have nothing to do with anonymity, maybe you're using some layperson's version of anonymity, but anonymous means it does not require real information. reddit and lemmy are anonymous.
Complain to the dictionaries about it, then :) for now I'm sticking with the dictionary definitions.
Every post you make on Reddit or Lemmy is tied to your username. There's only one snowe@programming.dev and every post under that username is made by you. That's why it's pseudonomous, not anonymous - it forms an identity for you.
An anonymous system would have no way to tell that your posts are by the same person. See something like 4chan. You could post a comment or thread under the name "snowe", but it's anonymous because anyone can do that. There's no way to connect your posts together.
I should have said with the exception of Lemmy. Not sure I'm getting enough value to continue using it either honestly.
I view the term "social media" as a continuum and not a box. There are degrees of "social media" with the extreme being sites built around using people's "real-life" identities.
Well, social media has a definition. It is any media that allows you to be social. No matter if it is anonymous or not.
i am afraid that consensus among general population increasingly is "words mean exactly what you want them to mean at any given moment". welcome to post-factual age.
Nah, language has always been in flux. We're not going to become babbling morons any time soon. I mean, we even have writing now so we can save up a definition to adopt or reject later; that's fairly new in human history.
What is a bit different is that we have to talk about a lot of things that didn't exist a generation ago, but that's only a matter of quantity. Every branch of the Indo-European language family adopted it's own term for iron when it arrived, for example, so I'm sure we'll settle on some sort of consistent English terminology for different kinds of platforms. We're just not there yet, as the replies I got show.
yeah, no.
the person who wrote "look at me, i am so cool, i am not using social networks" on a social network didn't do that because they would be confused by new technology that didn't exist generation ago, they did that because it worked for narrative they tried to present. and unfortunately it is more and more common and it is not a problem related to technology, just look at any political discussion.
so while what you said is true, it is not very relevant to the discussed problem.
Social media has always excluded forum like sites. It most definitely does not include anonymous sites. Social media has a strict definition about having connections to people, none of which Reddit nor lemmy has. Reddit technically added followers, but you cannot see nor interact with them, that’s not social media, that’s an email list. If lemmy is social media then so are every single comment section on every news site ever.
social media has never excluded anything. it wouldn't even be possible, and that is because there is no supreme authority that could issue some strict definition that would be legally binding for everyone 😆
social media didn't come about until after the advent of facebook so yes, by definition it excludes anything before then. Forum software existed for decades at that point. At no point in time has forum software ever been included in anyone's social media definition, except it seems like you.
of course, sweetie. and just out of curiosity, what strict definition from some respectable authority other than you are you working with? 😂
social media, n. Websites and applications which enable users to create and share content or to participate in social networking.
social media, noun : forms of electronic communication (such as websites for social networking and microblogging) through which users create online communities to share information, ideas, personal messages, and other content (such as videos)
long story short, social media is more than facebook.
yes, they did. decades before facebook. you just said that. what you probably wanted to say is that the term didn't come out until... well here is the news for you. the term usually comes after the phenomenon it is describing, not the other way around. it doesn't work like "hey guys, i have cool term - social media - now we just have to invent some" 🤣
nice projection there. have fun.
You can subscribe to news or to Lemmy topics via RSS, you don't need an account unless you want to reply/comment/post. RSS allows you to subscribe on topic you actually like or want and ignore other stuff. Not having an account can help to be more productive and spend less time talking with others. I have not even a Google account so I can't neither like or comment on youtube videos or other places that needs an account and I'm totally okay. My only social accounts are this and a Mastodon user I don't use anymore as RSS is actually how I want to get the news or people opinions/posts.
subscription on lemmy allows you the exact same thing. i don't see how scrolling through your rss reader should be any different from scrolling through the lemmy app.
Because RSS works with an app that manages more RSS from others sites with different configurations you can set plus some filters you can do to that RSS list. So for me, the RSS app gives me more control on what I have read or not from not only Lemmy news (plus some filters I do, a pre-prosessing after fetching the RSS list using Javascript code). And you don't even need a Lemmy account for that.
Nope. Nothing failed. This was Elon's gambit the entire time. He wanted to tank Twitter. He was never interested in improving it or making it profitable. Why do you think Saudi Arabia gave him 22B to buy it?
Your position is that a wealthy man deliberately burned 22 billion dollars to destroy microblogging? That he's intelligent enough to plan and execute this perfectly, but too dumb to think of a better way to spend 22 billion on himself?
I think this theory falls apart on examination, to say nothing of Occam's Razor which argues heavily in favor of sheer incompetence.
This paints Elon like a calculated intellectual that carefully weighs his decisions and has a great team around him. When in reality, he’s a petulant, ego maniac that is far more swayed by his mercurial emotions than reason and intellect. His many prepubescent tantrums over the years is evidence of that.
Money doesn’t mean anything. It doesn’t make you a genius because you used your status to con someone out of it. If you don’t know how the tech works, Elon sounds like a fucking genius. A visionary. But if you are in the field, you’ll realize that his promises (living on Mars, brain chips, etc.) are just fiction.
I'm not sure from the tone of your post whether you are trying to agree or disagree with my conclusion because it reads slightly argumentative, but I assure you I agree with you 100% and think this supports my point perfectly so maybe I'm misreading the tone. I upvoted you either way for being right in your points whether you come to the same conclusion as me or not.
He burned 22 billion because he was forced to after being a doofus. He is not destroying microblogging, he is destroying the environment around microblogging on his platform. It is his new toy that was never worth what he paid for it, so there is little point (to him) in trying to recoup monetary value. It’s value is to him is being his personal playground.
This wouldn't be the first time it happened: Stop Talking to Each Other and Start Buying Things: Three Decades of Survival in the Desert of Social Media
Obviously, to ruin the world and complete his turn into a Bond villain, he needed to tank the 5th most popular social media site, which has been proven over and over to have less influence than anyone thinks.
The most obvious explanation to me is that following so much success running pump and dump scams on his followers in some stocks but mostly unregulated crypto, he decided he was untouchable. Then tried to run another such scheme on twitter stock, but this time threw in a legally binding contract into the manipulation because he's too dumb to realise how dumb he is.
He got so used to fucking around, he thought he'd never have to find out...
Ah yes, the good old 5d chess. Why would he do that
Because he is throwing a tantrum. The toy he bought won't do what he wants, and people won't play with him, so he is breaking the toy. It isn't a rational decision, it is a tantrum.
The theory is that he secretly has shorted Twitter somehow. Which I could see, but it'd take an immense amount of planning that no one has picked up on. So, I'll just continue watching the dumpster fire
He can’t short twitter, when he bought it he took it private.
Well the banks that invested 13 Billion in the take over will not like that if it were true and will sue him.
Elon Musk: slams dick in car door
Musk Fans: Masterful gambit, sir!
Im reminded of this short diddy https://youtu.be/9ywnLQywz74
A must have browser extension to avoid accidentally adding to their traffic volume: https://github.com/SimonBrazell/nitter-redirect
you can use libredirect to include other backends too: https://libredirect.github.io/
What percent did Reddit lose?
I'd be surprised if Reddit hasn't recovered and grown past its size at the point of the exodus. Only about 60,000 came here. 60k isn't even a big sub.
I read somewhere that they were 2% smaller in July. We are no threat to Reddit.
still, enough people have moved over here for Lemmy to finally replace Reddit for my use case (:
Reddit wasn't much bigger than this when I first used it. This feels a lot like Reddit in those days. It was a nicer place than today's Reddit.
once again, people turned out to be the root of the problem
The real answer was replacing human-human interaction with human-dolphin interaction.
Didn't a lot of people who create content leave, though? 10k OPs is more important than 10k lurkers for Reddit.
I think it's mostly wishful thinking unfortunately
Meh, whatever. Even if the fediverse were to never get any bigger, it's still a win. This place is big enough to be stable and generate it's own content and culture. All that matters is if you're enjoying it here and actively trying to make it a better place.
Maybe for you but I miss interacting with actual developers, personalities or other content creators that post and respond on reddit or twitter. Mastodon and lemmy/kbin only get second hand crossposts (if even that), without any of the actual interaction and back-and-forth that usually happens. I'm still hoping it takes off eventually but if the "big exodus" didn't do it I don't see it changing at all for the foreseeable future.
If the content creators left Reddit, they certainly didn't come here.
I don't mean content creators necessarily, but people who post content.
Or at least beans.
Lurkers still give ad hits, probably even more than OPs
Yes, but not without content.
Just as a note, losing 2% (and there’s a lot of different and more meaningful KPIs) is a really big deal if you’re supposed to be growing double digits. The ridiculous valuations built into tech companies is based on massive growth, not current numbers. If you’re expected to grow at 30% and instead you lose 2%, that’s a massive loss. Reddit, last I checked (before the rexit) had come down something like 66% in the estimated IPO valuation. That’s why they freaked out and basically banned third party apps in favor of controlling advertising and subscriptions. They said they want to emulate what Twitter is doing.
If they do go through with their going public, the short side is going to kill them. I think the appeal of Reddit is different than Facebook and that they’re going to do a slow run of Digg and MySpace.
this fits the narrative nicely but im certain a 2 percent trade for increased profits is not a loss for them
What I’m saying is that their pre-IPO valuation dropped by 2/3 before the additional user drop post-Spez closing everything down because he literally said he’s trying to do what Elon is doing to Twitter.
To be even more clear, what Elon is doing to Twitter has cratered them from the $44B that he paid for it (which was at the time probably overvaluing them by about 10-15%) to what was in April (as I recall) a $15B company as per the write down from their major bank investor. It is now widely considered a $4B company post the X transition and I think they’re still somehow bleeding valuation. Even that might be generous, since it has come out that Dorsey only kept his $1B stake in the company under the agreement that they’d buy his shares from him at the original $54.20 offer, so you can count that as yet more debt - this time for a quarter of the worth of the company. The Saudis also agreed not to sell and hold another $1.5B iirc, so if they have a similar deal Twitter is a $4B company with an additional outstanding and not on the books debt of $2.5-3B.
Spez did what he did because they crashed from a massively overvalued IPO estimate - what the bank that will be writing their IPO expects the company is worth - to about a third of what they thought. That’s why Reddit freaked out - Spez was watching his (hypothetical) money being set on fire. He really thought he was going to be the next Silicon Valley multimillionaire based on that site. His attempt at Eloning has not, based on anything I’ve read, increased the value of the site.
I think most of the cratering is because, as we all know, the money went away. That’s the same cause of the 500k layoffs in the tech field or whatever we’re up to. Literally everyone but Apple has cut tens of thousands of people because the covid boom and the free money went away. He’s still chasing the dragon and lashing out in a panic.
Spez thought he was going to be the next Elon. He’s going to be the next Tom MySpace if he’s lucky at all, and even that is more than he deserves.
On social media sites, the users are the ones who create the value. The company provides the structure to expose that through developing the software and the algorithms, and obviously paying to host everything. But unlike, say, a newspaper, everything that makes the site worth visiting at all is the community.
The moderation is the product. That’s it, 100%. When they get confused about that - that is, when they lose sight of the fact that 100% of their real value is being created for free, and their job is to just get it to people - their community starts to fall apart. A fall in KPIs, pre-IPO, is deadly. I would be shocked if they go through with it at this point, because they’re going to get killed. spez needs to show ballooning numbers to justify anyone institutional investors staying involved.
They should sell themselves to anyone willing to write a check at this point.
Not all leavers join Lemmy, I'm pretty sure some just stopped and found other things to do with their life.
Still plenty of people who can’t live without reddit unfortunately. We’re just in the initial crowd here. I really think FOSS at this point is the only way to a fair and open future on the Internet Lemmy, Mastodon, etc. are great bastions for that.
On the other hand, the exodus catapulted Lemmy from being an obscure project to a well rounded one. Lemmy doesn't seem to have as many problems these days as it had initially. Meanwhile, we are spoilt for choices on clients after many of the defunct reddit clients were repurposed for Lemmy.
I think my only concern with Lemmy is that federation is not guaranteed two-way. Some changes have broken federation in the past for certain instances where they can see everything but their comments or posts are not federated out. I would hope, at least in the future, this part of Lemmy would be difficult to break with an update.
Honestly don’t know. Whenever I check back in on the few communities that I care about that didn’t find a new home on the fediverse (at least that I’ve seen) the rest of Reddit seems less engaged than before.
I mean, I visit but don't engage. I'll browse but don't really do anything on reddit since they made it so cumbersome and difficult to do anything there. Couple that with draconian mods/admins and you're better off going elsewhere.
yet
Please don't let this be another Reddit, i didn't switch because i only wanted to get rid of the platform itself.
It's certain that of the 120 million that remain, a huge number are bots or spam accounts of some kind. They will be there last "users" to quit the platform. And Elon will be happy to collect ad money to show those bots your ads until the very end.
And that's why it's only 13%
And he's not alone.
I'm on tech Twitter and trying to switch to Mastodon. Unfortunately, the latest news and top content are still on Twitter and I don't want to be missing out on either of those.
A real transition will happen in bursts. I'd love to see stats by interest categories, because I suspect what happens is enough prominent people in some community move at to bring the rest with them, but until that happens there's no budge.
13% is low, but I guess this shows how resistant to change people are. It's better to establish a new market (or the first to become popular in a young market) than to try and come along with something disruptive in a mature market.
Well, 13% of daily users is pretty much if 50% are trolls and bots. 🤣
In related news, Twitter is up to 80% nazi billionaire despot disinformation bots now. Congratulations!
They didn't lose money, which is what they care for. They also don't lose much power on people because these who are leaving are most likely smart people that twitter and other companies don't want in the first place. Their business plan is to rely on stupid people, just like apple do selling their overpriced products, they know that no matter what as long as they stay relevant there will be idiots following the trend. Purging smart people benefits them because they can create a bigger circlejerk and keep at bay potential troublemakers. Their fail is in the total lack of foresight but big tech and capitalism never ever gave a shit about what's not directly under their nose.
You almost had me there - until you claimed Apples business plan was to sell to stupid people.
In his defense , the laptop is the only thing that you can give credit for, rest of the stuff is just overrated BS with locked in feature that will only work with other apple products so yea its selling to stupid people who love apple *ecosystem"
yeah stupid people like most tech workers who just need their tech to work as expected rather than be “customisable”
there’s value in the “just works” when not working costs you hundreds of $ per hour that it doesn’t work
$2000 for a phone is nothing when it’s a professional device
Mobile phones are toys designed not to be professional devices at all. Photographers use real cameras, journalists, business men, programmers, don't type their shit on a 1 inch touch keyboard.
If you want your tech to just work you don't buy apple products that gets locked in by updates and have all sort of incompatibilities, some of their shit doesn't even have usb ports
They are real cameras. Have you seen the photos and videos people create with phones? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H8qFTgcRV6w
Yes, there are some situations where an iPhone won't get you a great photo... but that's true of any real camera too. You don't take a several hundred thousand dollar Sony HDC-4800 to a wedding for example. Professionals use the right tool for the situation and these days that is often a phone.
I'm two of those, I type constantly on my phone. Yes - I also have a nice mechanical keyboard and I always use it at my desk, but I'm not always at my desk.
Ask a photographer to take pictures at your wedding and they will show up with a real camera not with an iphone.
Most nerds I know (including sysadms) started out on Android because of all the reasons you'd expect. Most of them now use iOS / iPadOS because, at home, they want things to Just Work - and have the available income to throw at the problem. Desktop-wise many of them have used Macs on and off, but it seems like lately they trend Windows and Linux again. Probably because macOS has become more hassle than it's worth with the continued locking down, increased paranoia, lower flexibility and ridiculous storage prices. It used to be that you could work around the storage prices, but these days it's practically impossible to run programs from somewhere other than Applications if you want your system to stay up to date. Macs just aren't the great *nix alternative that they used to be, and while Windows is still pretty awful for my use, Linux as a desktop/gaming system is getting better every day. At least so far. I miss when macOS became more useful for every release. The big releases these days break more than they fix for me.
I work in software development, not sure why but most of the sysadmins and DevOps guys I know use Apple (phone and laptop). Most developers use Android (and usually Linux). Most testers use Android and Windows. This is purely from personal experience from the last few teams I worked in.
In my experience very varied. I feel students lean more towards Android, but if you develop on Mac you’re also more likely to have an iPhone, but the one place where it’s somehow been consistently Android in my team is the app developers.
While I don’t mind it at all, somehow the Android build of our app still has the most issues. Consistently over almost six years now. Which I find a bit ironic.
A friend of mine that was also a former colleague has always been an Android guy. A year ago he switched employer and the new company is iPhone only - but he can’t get the latest versions, and it’s basically just the base version too. So he’s still running with his Galaxy S21, but no e-mail or calendar sync.
I think he’d switch if he could put some of his own cash in and upgrade to the top model.
People can have the preference they want in life, but there’s no need to obnoxious about it.
It's because DevOps need to be able to do anything, and there are some tasks where a Mac has better software. Also, iPhones have amazing integration with Macs. From copy/paste as if they were the same device to being able to open a dev tools inspector on your computer to debug a page loaded up on your phone to just not even needing to use a phone at all (you can run iPhone apps and websites, on every hardware size and operating system version, on a Mac).
It's because at home the efficiency doesn't matter and you can do more with x64 still. The constraints of having their memory on the CPU instead of slightly slower socketed memory are more relevant, too, because there are more uses for higher amounts on a desktop.
Since at the very least the release of Dell XPS 13 we can have "just-works" machines that run Linux.
Also, specially for developers, the amount of software tools that have better performance and UX on linux is incredible. Homebrew is a clunky mess compared to any other package manager. I've worked with devs who refused to run docker on their machines because they said they battery got destroyed. Unless you work with iOS development there is no real, practical advantage in using MacOS for work.
Uh. No. I love Linux, use it every day, but you need to know what you're doing.
How much power a docker container uses depends on the container. Obviously if the container pegs all eight CPU cores at 100% utilisation then yeah - battery life is going to suck. But with commonplace server side software running in the container I'm able to keep docker running all the time on my Mac and get about 18 hours on battery... and that's with a battery quite a bit smaller (therefore lighter) than the battery in the XPS-13.
I have done iOS development in the past, but these days all of the software I write is for Linux. I think a Mac is the best way to develop Linux software - the Mac window manager is so much better than Gnome or KDE and it has really nice integration with other hardware (for example I'm typing this on a keyboard connected to my desktop Mac, but have the browser window open on a screen connected to my laptop Mac... you can do that on Linux, but it's just two clicks to enable it on a Mac and requires installing/configuring/troubleshooting third party software on Linux)
I have Linux installed on my Mac - and it works perfectly... if it was better I would be using it.
You mentioned apple, what's your thoughts on macbook air or pro ? The reason I am asking is because I am looking for a new laptop.
There are better value options if you're looking to play games on it. There are cheaper options if budget is a huge concern and you're OK with low quality plastic builds.
For all metal construction their value is really good, and there still isn't anything out there that balances the power and battery life they offer. For most professional use cases (which usually mean working with video/photos, in terms of what's demanding on a laptop), they're at minimum competitive on raw power. The biggest difference is that can use that power all day on battery, while the stuff that can be argued to be competitive will chew through the battery at high loads (and, compared to Apple, at idle, too).
You actually have no idea what you're taking about. Don't you?
It's pretty spot on.
There is nothing on the market at any price that provides both of the performance on battery and battery life the MacBook Air has, let alone higher tiers. Apple Silicon is sincerely insanely impressive.
Apple has also always been perfectly fine performance per dollar in the class they've actually been in. Their build quality isn't perfect, but it blows everything meaningfully cheaper out of the water. You can't compare an aluminum shell with trashy plastic and be surprised the plastic is cheaper. The actually well built stuff like thinkpads were never meaningfully different pricing than Apple. That's what it costs.
Please ignore cloud; they have been posting inaccurate flamebait throughout this thread.
I would never not buy a laptop from Apple. Not only are they the last PC maker that hasn't fallen to the Microsoft Monopoly Machine, but their laptops are well-built†, futuristic, and have incredible value and battery life for what you get. Especially since they migrated off of Intel.
† I know someone will inevitably come up with a counter-example, but the last time they had a widespread quality problem was a little more than ten years ago.
Why would you want one? They are overpriced, unreliable and closed in all possible ways. You can't change os as you want or swap a component in these. Look at pinebooks or similar devices or used laptops which are well supported by the community like old thinkpads. If you need a more powerful device buy a desktop
Need processing power and battery backup which sadly theres no other laptop out there that can beat apple macbook for the price.
get a laptop with a removable battery and you can swap as many as you want also i doubt you will be much time away from a power switch. As for processing power if you need to do anything serious you are supposed to do it on a desktop
Fascinating
Funnily enough twitter just suddenly got much worse like a couple days ago for me, only pushing blue-check accounts so I might just finally stop using it
You hypothetically showed them.
They call it rebrand but changing a name to something really bad is a rebrand now? Isn't it supposed to come with different behavior or different style as well?
It's the same man child running it as before, nothing has changed.
He should start charging the users to make up for the loss ;) (praying and hoping this damn site dies soon)
I still use Twitter but I think honestly that I could live without it and I reckon most other people could too. It's just force of habit more than anything else. Mastodon, or Threads, or Blue Sky would all be quite happy to pick up the slack. I actually use Mastodon too but I wish the news media would produce feeds for it rather than rely on mirrors.
The place has become a cesspool tbh and with no moderation it only gets worse with each passing day. Blue ticks actually pay to elevate their moronic hate views above others so more moderate and normal voices get drowned out. Musk is mulling charging everyone money to "combat bots" (bullshit), and mulling pulling out of the EU because of their pesky requirements about moderation. I wish he'd do all this stuff and bring the whole thing crashing down.
Just you wait until elections really kick off, then you'll really see how shit it is.
To be honest, I’ve had a Twitter account for years but didn’t really use it. I would only go on Twitter once every few months. Since everyone’s talking about it now because of Musk I think about it more and use it a little more. Maybe once a week. I wonder if the lost users are being replaced by people like me.
For me it's more the other way around, had a Twitter account for years. Didn't really use it much, a bit more in the last 2 years. Deleted my account after Elon took over.
I only have a Twitter so links are easier to follow.
Can't you just follow them via one of the mirror instances like bird.makeup?
Interesting.
Every time I follow a twitter/X link it asks me to log in to read it. Which I cannot do as I never bothered to get one. Is there a way to read those links without an account?
bird.makeup is fediverse server software. it creates mirror accounts from twitter users, which means that you can follow twitter accounts from Mastodon (or CalcKey, Pleroma, etc).
You can also just use something like nitter.net to follow and browsing Twitter without an account.
I don't have any intention to follow anything, I just want to follow the occasional twitter link.
That is the same reason I still have Facebook. Although the content i post there comes from their other app IG, there isnt any political garbage on my IG feed to wade through so I still use that.
(i come here for my political garbage fix)
Interestingly the Facebook algorithm works so well for me it never shows me irl people, or politicians. Only animals, art and news articles (mainly long form editorials from NYT).
Aww. Bad news for Elon Twitler