Twitter was special. But it's time to leave

Go ahead, find a place you like.

I stay on Twitter, because there are a ton of accounts I follow that post things that interest me and that I learn from, in particular Python and related frameworks. But also programming in general plus much more interesting things like machinelearning and AI.

I love the Godot project, and it's super fun to follow the #GodotEngine tag, you see so much amazing creations and tutorials people post. And Blender3D.

Those are just a few examples and only IT, I also follow up on things that happen in cities where friends live, what is going on in their lives and what is happening in their cities.

To me Twitter is a huge treasure trove of information.

And this is probably going to sound arrogant, but I really don't care for your high-horse posts about departing Twitter (or any platform), because from where I stand it's because of your own inability to filter the things you like and dislike.

I don't care who owns Twitter, I care about the people who create content that interest and inspire me. As long as they keep doing that, I will continue to be a happy follower.

> So, for my part, I’ll be moving on. My account will still exist, and I’ll perhaps use it to share posts from here, to help people migrate elsewhere, or to keep up with the increasingly few people I care about still on the platform. Instead, I’ll be posting in long-form here (subscribe!)

That's the meat of the article if you are looking for it.

I've always enjoyed pwn's content but will take a few $10 bets on them still using Twitter heavily 1 year from now.

Reminds me of election season with all the people moving to Canada frankly, it's predictable as the moon phases.

I agree with the author, at the end of the day Twitter is not going to make it and it’s time to consider alternatives.

They have in just 3 weeks:

- Become one of the least desirable tech companies to work for.

- Poisoned (probably beyond repair) their primary revenue source which I think was as high as 90% of their incoming cash.

- Developed a reputation as being a new home for the worst people on the internet.

- Lost many of their biggest content creators.

- Lost a huge part of their critical workforce with lots of incredible hard to replace people.

- Attracted a lot of attention from lawmakers around the world about their supposed non compliance with various laws.

This isn’t the kind of situation they are going to magically just “hardcore” their way out of. These were almost certainly fatal mistakes.

This ferver demonstrates to me that Musk was right. Some people want Twitter to be exclusive to their own politics. They don't care about who they follow, they care about who other people are following.

I sent my final message (assuming I'm strong) today and I'll use Twitter for nothing other than watching a slow-motion car wreck. I think this is a good thing for the world, and breaking up that global echo chamber on both sides is going to have a net positive effect.

I'm enjoying my time on https://hachyderm.io/ - it feels like those small spaces that we used to inhabit before the world got too big. (@mmastrac@hachyderm.io is my current home)

Once I feel more comfortable in Mastodon, I'll likely try to extract myself into a private server. I'm reminded of the old days of using someone's Fidonet server to participate in small-but-global communities, and how you'd eventually just run your own node to get a little more freedom.

Eh, twitter has never been more interesting.

I first joined Twitter to follow a couple of people who did not publish blogs regularly so Twitter was where they were.

Overtime I started finding other interesting people and I strated following them.

But also overtime people were getting suspended for publishing unapproved opinions, so a lot of the interesting people I was following were practicing self-censorship and reducing the amount/frequency of content they post.

The last week has been probably the most interesting week in terms of amount of content/interaction people are having and also just sighs of relief. People are no longer practicing self-censorship.

Some of the engagment is really "meta" in that people are on Twitter to talk about Twitter, which is a weird thing and can't last for too long, but it's still interesting.

It feels like the old school internet. You can login and always find something new and interesting.

I've never been more excited about Twitter.

To me this whole thing is pretty simple if you understand Elon’s history. He’s a master pumper/promoter much like P.T. Barnum. He’s currently attempting to inflate twitter’s perceived value after being forced to buy it by going on and on about how “alive” the site is now (despite no real changes) with much higher engagement.

I’m betting he takes the site public again in <6 months. What’s amazing though is the endless obsession with Elon by people who should know better and how they will blindly believe any and all things he says. Not even a hint of skepticism. So I imagine the IPO will garner a ton of interest and buyers who will overpay. Still Elon will probably take a massive loss on this deal unless the market recovers a great deal by then.

Both things can be true by the way- Twitter was a massive dumpster fire due to having no leadership for a long time AND Elon could be trying to pump and dump it. I think in general Twitter’s value is overestimated by its users by a huge factor. If it vanished it might leave a void in people’s day but it would not have any meaningful impact on society.

FWIW I don’t think it will vanish because while it’s a relatively small portion of society who use it regularly those users are incredibly sticky and aren’t going anywhere. After all this is over and it’s taken public again I suspect it will be largely the same site.

I am reading lot of people are moving to mastodon. I never thought federation was the future but the more I think about it the more it is starting to make sense.

The good part is federated alternatives do not look like massive echo chambers like Twitter is. Even if certain server does turn into an echo chamber the rest of network can just leave that server alone. Federation is closer to our actual societies. People don't clash on daily basis in our societies at least not as much as they do on Twitter. In real life, we avoid certain topics or getting involved with certain groups or going to regions/squares in cities where we know there is possibility of conflict. All these aspects are already well replicated into fediverse.

Lots of people are saying “you’ll come back” and “nobody is migrating for real”, and I have had the same opinion back when the Twitter deal was first announced and a few people moved over to Mastodon.

But this time, it was very different: When the deal went through, a large part of my bubble really did move to Mastodon. This happened over a few days, and after the second or third day, my Twitter timeline was noticeably empty, and Mastodon is very alive instead.

Of course I can’t predict if this sticks over the medium or long term, but for me, the situation is very clear: the people I care about are now on Mastodon.

(I spent 10 years on Twitter, with over 4000 followers.)

Your Twitter experience is going to be what you make of it. It's based on the people you chose to follow. Nothing more. Nothing less. The author in this case seems to be politically motivated in his decision to leave Twitter. That's his right. But he definitely seems to be mixing politics with the beauty of Twitter and I'm not sure I agree with that.

> With Musk sucking the oxygen out of Twitter, the conversations are quickly moving elsewhere

Actually, the organic traffic on twitter.com shows an upward trajectory over the last weeks [0]. So unless there is something wrong with the stats on semrush, this writer seems to be confusing facts with wishful thinking.

[0] https://www.semrush.com/analytics/overview/?q=twitter.com&se...

I find the general negativity towards Mastodon in HN quite intriguing, considering that:

- ActivityPub is basically a two-way RSS (which is the most beloved tech in this community)

- It's open source and you can setup your own server in one afternoon

- No sorting algorithms, no tracking, no ads

- Relatively easy to customize/hack

And to add to this, during this past month I have seen the majority of the infosec, astronomy, psychics, maths, biology, ecology communities migrating to Mastodon and for whatever reason my timeline is currently way more interesting and engaging than what Twitter offered to me.

I'm not a big social network user and I guess that's why I don't understand the sentiment in this comment section, but I do enjoy using Mastodon at the moment and I hope it stays as cool as it is now :)

I feel the same about the strengths of old twitter, and how it has mostly been replaced with meaningless yammer, bots and whatever "engagement" means.

I recently dusted off my old mastadon account, and it reminded me of the early days of twitter. I am sure people will find a way to screw up this one too, but for now I am happy to have something that resembles the good old days of twitter.

Sceptics are talking about low usage and how it will never be as big as twitter. But for me that's just positive. In fact, mastadon does certain things a bit differently specifically to reduce meaningless "engagement". Hopefully this will also discourage "influencers" from joining :)

Given such a division of opinions on Twitter and other platforms, I can't help but think that we need the 2 of everything: 2 Twitters, 2 Facebooks, 2 Googles, 2 Apples, 2 Netflixes, etc... Some people will be on Twitter 1 and be happy. Others will be on Twitter 2 and be just as content. The additional wrinkle is that the majority of "engagement" is coming from Group 1 and Group 2 mudslinging each other. If we separate them on two different platforms, the temperature of the conversations will go down. We already do exactly the same thing at the international football (soccer) competitions: you always sit the fans from opposing sides separately.

The socially mediated announcing their departure. Where have i seen this before.

> healthy medium for serious communication.

Maybe i m crazy but i ve never met "serious communication" even though i am very proactive to seek it. It s 100% emotional outbursts, very opinionated opinions and hot takes. It's fun but not serious. This article is like that, too

Could somebody explain to me how people turned in their heads "Internet SMS" into "discussion board"?

Seems very silly to me. There is no big difference before and after Musk except that people are talking a lot about Musk - it'll die down in a bit.

I love Twitter and use it a lot. I hope it doesn't die though I acknowledge that's possible. It certainly hasn't died yet though - despite much waiting and gnashing of teeth.

This was probably written with only the English-speaking part of Twitter in the writer's field of view. English in Twitter doesn't comprise even a third of all tweets ( https://www.vicinitas.io/blog/twitter-social-media-strategy-... ); in fact, for pure tweets that aren't RTs nor replies, the above data even shows there are more Japanese tweets than there are in English, albeit by a slim margin.

So, I agree it's about the people, but I don't see the people leaving, at least in the languages I use.

> With interest payments to the tune of $1bn or more a year, the future of the site itself depends on obtaining colossal new sources of revenue.

Before the acquisition, Twitter's revenue was over 4 times that.

I think it has been time to leave the massive American (and now the Chinese one too) "tech" companies for a while. So in a sense, it's great that Elon has shown the world the existence of Mastodon and the ActivityPub beneath it. I know, I know, a lot of you already knew about it and were already on it too, but I sure didn't.

I'm European, Danish to be exact, and I've had this weird feeling about our politicians and public institutions being on things like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and so on, for about a decade now. Not because it's wrong for them to use the social media platforms, but because they rely so much on American advertisement companies in doing so. In that sense, something like Mastodon just makes a lot more sense. Our government could operate a Mastodon server where they house all our elected officials, and nobody would be at a risk of being banned for breaking some American TOS. They would even be able to moderate their comment threads a lot better, by not allowing stuff like American anti-vaxxers to comment on things about Danish vaccine programs without first having to rely on Twitter or Facebook to police it for them. It seems the EU has already gone in that direction, or at least did so back in the spring of 2022 when Elon first announced his plans to buy Twitter, but our local politicians haven't yet followed.

Similarly, our journalist profession has something called a "pressekort" which is basically a certificate that shows the world that you're a Danish journalist. They could come together and build a Mastodon server where a "pressekort" is required to be a member. (There are already some of those springing up, so I guess it's already happening), and it's already limiting the amount of misinformation that happens on their posts by a massive amount.

I know this won't be the "free to say anything without consequences" haven a lot of people here on HN want. We're already seeing right-wing network servers and users completely blocked, but it's sort of how free speech works in a democracy. Before the American advertisement companies gave the village looney a platform, nobody around here listened to them. We still largely don't listen to them in my country, but we sure waste more time on them than we did in the world before Facebook.

So yes, the time has come to leave centralised Social Media companies. The real question is, whether we will actually do it. I'm not going to say that joining Mastodon was hard, because it wasn't. But I spent about a week researching a good server to join, and that's sure "harder" than just pushing my telefonnumber into TikTok.

I never understand Twitter timeline...sometimes posts hours ago appears on top ...sometimes I saw boring posts from strangers. And they are not ads

Quite the opposite for me. Just started using it more actively for arts and other actually interesting stuff.

For every person that self exiles to a fringe ghetto, a new person on Twitter will capture their audience.

It should be possible for the people who enjoy trump’s tweets to see them and those that don’t to avoid them. If that’s not possible there is something very wrong with a platform that seems to be based around following and gives you the option of blocking. if it’s possible for people to avoid trump easily then trump should have a voice on the platform.

Why second guess what the moderation panels come up with ? As yet we have no idea.

Every buying or support decision you make is (in the end) political. Elon Musk uses his money to support his political agenda. If you are on Twitter you support Elon Musk and his political agenda. So if you do not support his views, get out. I did. It is as simple as that!

massive disinfo dont read comments ^^

Feel free to leave and don't let the door stop you on the way out.

Most of the so-called Twitter 'exodus' are people unhappy with the decision that Twitter will host different opinions from what Twitter used to in the past ~decade. And that's fine, but signalling your disapproval based on unfounded perceptions and speculations is disingenuous BECAUSE those same people used to champion everything about diversity and inclusivity. That's pretty hypocritical if nothing else.