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This Twitter drama is strikingly similar to Freenode. A rich guy bought it, people started moving to Libera.chat in small numbers and advertising their new channel on Freenode in the topic. There wasn't a huge exodus, though.

Then this new owner started taking over channels and kicking everyone out that had mention of a Libera.chat channel in its topic, forcing everyone to move all at once.

I haven't heard of anyone still on Freenode since then.

This shows the death of freenode quite clearly: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:IRC_top_10_networks_...

I don't think we will get Twitter's metrics (tweets, DAU etc) but let's see how the Mastodon graphs change: https://observablehq.com/@simonw/mastodon-users-and-statuses...

>This Twitter drama is strikingly similar to Freenode.

Freenode is orders of magnitude smaller with a technical and picky user base. Moving from freenode to a different server is a much smaller move as nothing changes for the users aside from a one time migration. Twitter is a mass market megaphone used by all sorts of people with different incentives, and the alternative - Mastodon - is vastly inferior for the average user who doesn't care about Elon's drama.

people will realize that only 50 of their thousands of followers can be found on mastodon, and then move back in a few weeks

This may vary by community. A big chunk of the Infosec community has migrated and seems quite happy about it. Other communities may do the same, particularly if they feel that Twitter isn't likely to be a safe place for them given Musk's increasingly Qbert attitudes.

This is my experience. Mastodon has absolutely replaced Twitter for many of my use cases, because many of the communities I follow have left Twitter.

+1, and it doesn't have the general toxicity that Twitter had. If someone is trolling, inflammatory, needlessly rude, or overly marketing themselves on the instance I'm on, it appears to me that they'll likely be quickly ostracized into oblivion, not encouraged with likes and retweets as they might have been on Twitter.

Can you post links of some mastodon accounts from the infosec community (and/or from twitter)

I'm interested in following them

Take a look at https://infosec.exchange and you'll find folks.

This very much depends on communities. A large portion of my professional community switched and a lot of them are talking about how they’re getting the same or more interaction despite lower follower counts because it’s not skewed by inactive accounts or the algorithm promoting only certain content. Mastodon is definitely not as good for breaking news (although we’ll see how many journalists switch) but for actual social interactions it feels like Twitter did in the 2000s.

Microsoft’s takeover of GitHub was more or less a model takeover, though (and, well, very surprising to those of us used to the old Microsoft). People had concerns, but they largely didn’t come to pass. This is very much, well, the opposite of that. If anything, Elon-Twitter is even _more_ of a mess than people had expected.

I think my mastodon account is at about 30% the following and follower count of my old Twitter account. But it’s largely the _interesting_ 30%; I stopped using twitter a few weeks ago and don’t feel I’m missing out.

> people will realize that only 50 of their thousands of followers can be found on mastodon, and then move back in a few weeks after giving up on the experiment

My Mastodon feed felt very empty a few months ago, but nowadays it's pretty good. A lot of folks switched or set up cross-posting, many of them not technical. Mastodon is doing much better than I expected back then.

It's not just network effects that saved GitHub. It's also that Microsoft didn't handle it like an insecure bully and visibly continued a commitment to its community. Had they not done that, certainly alternatives would've had a better go of picking up disillusioned GitHub users.

Twitter instituting a policy against cross promotion isn't going to save the public square. It's encouraging the rest of the ecosystem to retaliate or to escape.

It will certainly vary by Twitter community, but I'll say that the infosec community on Twitter has certainly either moved to Mastodon exclusively, or is posting primarily on Mastodon and cross posting to Twitter. Additionally I'm seeing more and more of writer Twitter move to Mastodon, including several large authors leaving Twitter entirely. I expect that politicians in many forms will be the last to move, but journalists are likely to have to leave Twitter entirely given Elon's current anti-journalist tendencies.

I'm old enough to have seen the "end" of Myspace before... and kinda like is happening with Twitter now, it started with a little bit at a time, then all at once almost everyone was gone.

The obvious difference is that Github didn’t immediately start spiraling the drain in the most pathetic manner possible.

Yup. People were angry that a company they don't like bought Github. But if you look at what Microsoft actually changed, there's not much to complain. They even made private repositories free, and significantly reduced prices for many users. It's hard to stay angry at a company when they are giving you what you want for free!

Twitter, on the other hand, wants to get users to sign up for a paid subscription and starts banning everyone who is sceptical. That's the best way to drive people away.

Free while there are alternatives.

After they asfixiated the competition they're free to jack up the prices.

Smart business practice really.

Right because it’s really hard for someone to set up a git server somewhere and change the origin.

That's why they introduce proprietary features like GitHub Actions.

I doubt github has significant interest in the small org accounts. If you look at the prize differential between the „normal paid“ and the „enterprise paid“ tier, you can see where the money is. Burning the goodwill of many technical decision makers would be an issue.

The worst is yet to come, I'm staying tuned if he really bans all those mastodon accounts. It's one thing to institute a policy and then remove it again once you realize that people are not following it. It's another thing to follow through with it.

Per his previous behavior, isn't it likely that he'll modify or cancel this policy if it proves too unpopular? Perhaps he'll put it to a vote in the coming weeks.

But it's not like a rocket or a car where you can say, ok, that didn't work, so let's put it back and continue. I was really into watching the rocket boosters attempting to land a few years back, and I remember someone at SpaceX (maybe Musk?) saying that each time a booster crashed, it was just more data and another step toward success, and I thought, that's a pretty cool way to think about it.

Social media is a different thing, though. You can't just say, well, this change we made drove away journalists and celebrities, so let's put it back how it was and continue. Hard to un-kick a hornet's nest.

Yeah. His style is well suited for some problems, bad for others. It's good to have touch UI that changes all the time if you are building demo cars. It's not good if you want to build cars that you want users to use.

> Perhaps he'll put it to a vote in the coming weeks.

And then when he doesn't like the results, delete it and try again.

> I feel the same with the "find me on mastodon" twitter bios: people will realize that only 50 of their thousands of followers can be found on mastodon, and then move back in a few weeks after giving up on the experiment. During all that time they have still kept most of their activities on twitter because there is simply more going on there, more replies to their tweets, more tweets to reply to, etc.

Pretty much. Among the big anti-Elon names, Kathy Griffin already gave up on Mastodon and is just posting once every 2-3 days now, probably because getting 200 likes on her posts is a major step down from the 100k+ she was regularly getting on Twitter.

> banning them might have actually the opposite effect here: then they get forced to focus on mastodon.

I agree, but if you're a professional relying on engagement metrics for your career--as many artists, musicians, journalists, and social media marketers do--it would take massive, massive guts to go all-in on Mastodon when it clearly has not taken over Twitter's engagement by any extent.

For historical precedent: Instagram instituted a very similar policy to stop people from adding OnlyFans links, but it didn't really decrease IG usage as far as I know. You still need Instagram to "funnel" people into your OF, same as journalists will need Twitter to funnel people into their articles. It's simply too valuable a resource to give up for them.

I moved to Gitlab and stayed there. Principles and all that.

It's breaking my heart to see Gitlab's recent behaviour (e.g., deleting old projects, removing sensible pricing options). I want to give them my money but no longer can because of how prohibitively expensive it is for me to buy the features I'd want.

It's clear they're struggling to compete with a post-acquisition GitHub that effectively has infinite budget from Microsoft.

Yes, and that's one more reason to stand by them. If they phase out the 'free' tier that I've been using for pianojacq.com I will be happy to pay.

Gitlab no doubt has some wonderful people, but out-of-touch behaviour and scorning your most loyal user base tends to point to bad leadership. It's very difficult to course-correct bad leadership without somehow removing them — just look at Mozilla.

They are definitely not perfect but Microsoft has been - and still is in many ways - outright evil and that's a different level for me. So Gitlab it is. Sytse is one of the very few billionaires that I know and/or know about that isn't an asshole so he's got that going for him.

No, they're suffering from needing to provide hockey-stick growth to their VC overlords. Gitlab will eventually go the fate of all promising startups and do things once thought unthinkable in their early years.

Kudos to you. I don't really use my Gitlab right now, but mostly because there is no project that I want to contribute to that uses Gitlab.

While a few people dislike Musk, Microsoft, or both so much that they want nothing to do with a product owned by one of those two, far more people were concerned that the new owners would change Github and Twitter for the worse. That didn't happen to Github, so most people stayed. It is happening to Twitter, and people seem to be leaving.

> people will realize that only 50 of their thousands of followers can be found on mastodon

But here's the thing - just enough of the people I follow are active on mastodon. It's about a quarter (78 out of 310) of who i was followong on twitter, but it's enough to give me an interesting timeline (also considering a bunch of them were muted obligation follows).

So I've fully moved over. The few people that were following me will notice one less person in their timeline, and eventually possibly make the jump as well.

Microsoft hasn't done much to change or mismanage GitHub, have they? Whereas it's been nonstop clown town with Musk in charge of Twitter, in just a couple months.

>When MS bought github many people moved to gitlab and started to advertise their gitlab IDs. I too put my gitlab in there. But ultimately, gitlab didn't catch on on a permanent basis: most devs still are on github, thanks to network effects. People removed their gitlab mentions.

That's some way of equivocating very different situations. Gitlab is a product/platform for developers, not the general public, and Mastodon has received the public's positive attention for much longer than people talked about the buyout.

You don't see HN users belittling Signal because it failed to come even close to replacing Whatsapp's 2B users. In fact the opposite is the case as fanboying the former goes so far that Matrix as the even better alternative is repeatedly argued against.

What you're talking about is exactly the ridiculousness of the situation. People around the world are forced to rely on foreign platforms to communicate and can't leave unless their community follows. This design is the issue, not a particular business.

I have no plans to move to mastodon. I will just invest my time and energy elsewhere.

I don't feel the functionality of Twitter is so critical that it needs to be somehow replicated.

We'd be happy to have you, just sayin'.

I find the level of engagement on Twitter to be very low. While I enjoyed using it for a long time (probably my favourite social network), I don't think it would take much for me to replace it. Having hundreds of followers doesn't amount to much once you account for spam, bots, inactives and passive users. If only a handful engage with you day to day, you only need a handful in a replacement network to feel like you're accomplishing much.

I feel like someone could crack this with an attempted replacement. Go out of the way to create incentive for people to interact with each other.

> people will realize that only 50 of their thousands of followers can be found on mastodon

That was true a few weeks ago, but not anymore (at least for tech/electronics).

I wonder if those other than 50 were ever relevant besides being a number on the profile and people just never asked themselves the question.

It's quite easy to get followers. You just post something with a popular hashtag and you get all kinds of followers. How do they help you though? Do people really think, those thousands of people actually read their tweets it they're not some kind of VIP?

I am at 96% of my follow count on Mastodon as on Twitter, and that is just for one of my accounts. If I include my main alt, I have more on Mastodon.

What is that in absolute numbers?

Should the point of social media be absolute numbers?