Has the network effect of Twitter been seriously disrupted at this point? I know a lot of folks who disagree with Musk claimed to be leaving for mastodon. I'm curious if there are trustworthy engagement numbers available.
In my niche of Apple platform software developers, it's definitely been disrupted. The migration from Twitter to Mastodon has been accelerating, especially in the past few days. A lot of abandoned Twitter accounts.
A significant number of these people had been on Twitter for over a decade.
Overall, it's not the total user base that matters, it's the prolific tweeters who matter, because most Twitter users are quiet consumers of tweets. There's nothing to consume if the tweeters leave... except Musk's own tweets, if you're into that.
Some of the people abandoning Twitter include developers of 3rd party Twitter clients and browser extensions, so that's going to matter a bit to the general user base. Also, alienating software developers isn't going to be great for any future hiring that Twitter may need, if it ever crawls back from the financial brink.
This so-called 'disruption' has been greatly exaggerated and has hardly made a dent on Twitter.
This kind of comment degrades the conversation on HN. Please follow the guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
My feeling as a long-time user is "no". That being said, we know Musk has no problem "spinning the truth", so as you imply it seems unlikely that we'll ever get trustworthy metrics again unless Musk were to allow independent auditors.
However, conversations have become boringly "meta" (lots of hot takes this morning about Musk unbanning everyone he banned), I'm getting tons of spam (where I got almost none in the years before the Musk-quisition), and the quality of the advertising I'm seeing has plummeted.
The primary thing Musk has going for him right now is that there's nowhere to go.
I'm an academic in computational political communication. I wasn't fond of Twitter before the move, but was there largely because my professional network was. Most or all of them are now on Mastodon, so the network effect driving me there has gone (and I've cheerfully left). My wife is an author, and book Twitter is mostly still there. Ditto the journalists.
I mean, my part of the job world was never on LinkedIn - while for others it was indispensable. This feels like the same.
No idea if similar metrics exist for Mastodon.
I mean, of course?
Although, if this is the main driver for the increased numbers, then it is hardly sustainable. There is only so much fuel a garbage fire can consume before it dies out.
Monthly Active Users 2.1M+9%
Servers Up 8.8K+46%
Data collected by crawling all accessible Mastodon servers on Dec 15, 2022.
https://joinmastodon.org/about
Despite restoring some of the banned Twitter accounts, Twitter is still throwing a "Warning: this link may be unsafe" alert for Mastodon links, which seems to be a sign that they're afraid of people leaving and trying to stop them. Twitter was/is also preventing people from adding their Mastodon handle to their Twitter profile.