> Is a ton of people really leaving Twitter?

Probably too early to tell. Early reports have it at like a million which would be a drop in the bucket. I don’t think Twitter would die just because Elon took over, the question is will his changes overall slowly improve the site or slowly degrade it for “most people” whatever that means, the hard part for Elon is the least sticky twitter users may also be the least vocal. He could listen to everyone and still lose a large swath of users for reasons he doesn’t understand.

There are a lot of people fake leaving (read: rage posting about how they are going to leave but not actually following through) Twitter mainly because of Musk's buyout. Mastodon seems to be the new home for a lot of these people. While I'm sure some will leave and stay gone, Twitter has too much inertia going for it that is desirable to most users: centrality and reach, ease of use, by-proxy ad platform, to name a few. Some things like search and monetization need a lot of work, and from what I've gathered by Musk's tweets these two are at or near the top of the list to be fixed. In order for Twitter to fail at this point there's too much human behavior that would have to change. There are a ton of people out there touting Mastodon as a replacement, but I just don't think that's going to happen.

It honestly feels the same as when people were up in arms about Facebook’s privacy and Diaspora was the big open source FB killer.

The loudest people may be leaving Twitter for now, but I doubt it will be the death of the platform.

I have yet seen nothing that would make the average consumer to leave. Or people using it for marketing posts.

But depending how things change it might happen.

For the same reason that conservatives never succeeded in leaving Twitter for their own platform (Gab/Gettr/Parler/TruthSocial), progressives will also be unable to shake their addiction to the blue bird.

Sure, some will leave, but alternate platforms will never come close to even Twitter's tiny numbers.

> Is a ton of people really leaving Twitter?

I've heard that a ton of people have actually joined over the last week. Net new users apparently.