Twitter's too large and the people who had bleu checks before the $7.99 fee are addicted to attention, validation, and/or lording their bleu check status over others.
That's why Mastodon won't replace it. Sure, a few small (relative to Twitter) alternative Mastodon instances will pop up, but no real challenger or contender for the throne.
> the people who had bleu checks before the $7.99 fee are addicted to attention, validation, and/or lording their bleu check status over others.
You're talking about, maybe, on the order of 50,000 people there. To a large extent... who cares? Extremely high follower count people are important to Twitter's _business model_ (or were, when it had one), but arguably not all that important to the _average user_.
I think maybe what you're getting at is the people who are celebrities solely _because_ they are big on Twitter/TikTok/Instagram/whatever. I would agree that the Mastodon model doesn't work particularly well for those. I don't see it as an issue for _normal_ celebrities, tho.
But that just seems like _such_ a niche. The majority of people, I'm reasonably sure, do not use Twitter primarily to follow internet celebrities.
For me, the appeal of Twitter is being able to interact with various communities (such as the legal twitter community). There are people who are fairly popular in that sphere, that I really like being able to see their thoughts on various issues and even ask the occasional question (Popehat, Akiva Cohen, Mike Dunford, Greg Doucette), etc.
Are these people celebrities? Kinda, in their niche, yea. In the broader sense of the word not really.
But all of those people have moved to Mastodon. So, I think that kind of reinforces the point. It's more communities within Twitter that move. That move is relatively sticky. And there are people within that community that are highly connected in that community ("celebrities" within the niche), and when they move it tends to solidify the move of the community.
The value of Twitter a lot of the time is less the big name Blue Checks, but the long tail of niche blue checks. I bet a massive amount of people on Twitter have no idea who Paul Graham is, or Popehat, or Marco Arment, or even dril, but they all have some number of people who were mostly on Twitter because of them primarily, so if they and their friends all move to something else, their fans will follow.
In some ways, it's not too different from TV hosts or journalists of note. People will watch John Oliver on whatever TV network he's on. For certain niches, no one cares where they write/speak as long as it's not so insanely paywalled or otherwise cumbersome that it's a problem to follow them to it.
However, communities and professions have already moved and will continue to move.
Things like Black Twitter ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Twitter and https://blacktwitter.io/about ) or Energy Twitter ( https://twitter.com/hashtag/energytwitter and https://mastodon.energy/explore ) are examples of communities that previously existed solely on twitter starting a migration.
This isn't about platforms but rather communities - and these things are "sticky". It's hard to get a community to move off a platform, but once it does move, it makes it hard to keep the remaining people as the pull to the new platform becomes stronger and stronger.
This is not a thing people regularly did? Old-school blue checks were never a status symbol, just a way Twitter used to denote "real" (meaning from-the-author-stated) and "fake" (real-humans-parodying-someone-else) accounts.
The idea that they denoted status was a criticism born from misunderstanding and invented by far-right activists who mostly were never involved in Twitter socially during the first 10 years of it's run, and never really understood Twitter user's culture. 99% of people with "blue checks" were not doing some holier-than-thou dance or whatever. (It's also why none of these people are rushing to pay $8 for this newly-invented blue-as-status symbol thing -- it was never about status, these people are already often rich and famous or at least noteworthy in their field, they don't need some weirdo micro-validation from Twitter.
Only a completely tone-deaf crazy person would pay money for Twitter in an attempt to gain validation or status.
The thing about putting the badge into Twitter Blue is that it makes it not a status symbol: both because it's just generally accessible (so even what little cachet you might agree it previously implied is now gone) and because for many you might see "enthusiastic about Elon Twitter" as an negative signal.
There's a whole separate axis to this where it was clearly easier to get verified as a mainstream journalist than for many other kinds of professions or claims to fame (understandable both just under the basic "verification" goals and for presumably being pretty easy to actually verify as such things go). Much "anti-blue-check" sentiment is just the same familiar fights over the media, simply filtered through Twitter's systems.
They're a status symbol, but I don't think almost anyone really cared about outside it of people who didn't have them and felt like they should. I'm not sure I ever saw a sort of "why would I trust you if you don't have a blue check" sentiment.
I need to make an exclusive invite-only Mastodon instance with verified accounts, so being @ that server will be a status symbol.
Is Bluecheck.com taken?
(except now someone else will do it. Also I'm too lazy to actually do this)
I'm sure when bigger celebrities migrate, someone will start a service optimised for few huge (in follower count) accounts.
Maybe it will never replace Twitter as the place to follow celebrities, politicians and corporations; so you can see what their social media teams have thought up in the last hour. But for keeping up with personal interests and chatting with other like-minded folks? Absolutely. And I'm not gonna miss the use-case that falls away. Also not going to miss the ads!
It cuts both ways — both the overvaluing of the check and the denigrating of those who have it.
2) tweet
3) no one responds
4) quit twitter
This problem is magnified with blue check marks.
The engagement problem is obvious. Twitter prioritizes influencers over end users and doesn’t have the appeal of Facebook.
Actual verification happens via proving that you control a website that links back to your Mastodon profile - see e.g. https://opensource.com/article/22/11/verified-mastodon-websi...
The "verified badge" on mastodon is just a satirical emoji.
Mastodon does have a mechanism for instances vouching for their users actually having control of a webpage (using rel=me links). Those are the links in green boxes here: https://hachyderm.io/@nova (It doesn't cost anything, and isn't exclusive to famous people).
I assume the person I'm replying to is aware of all of this... but for everyone else...
You realize that this is a parody account that posts pictures of foxes, not the American cable news channel... right?
You can see what custom emoji are available on an instance by visiting https://emojos.in/
Here are hachyderm.io's custom emoji, for example: https://emojos.in/hachyderm.io
You can add these shortcodes (eg. :verified:) to your Mastodon display name or your profile. If you don't see them immediately convert, try F5-ing the page and they should render.
To put it another way, Twitter is/was a notary/PR firm as well as a "microblogging" service. Popular people and brands could verify their identity with Twitter, and users could trust it.
I think, though the idea is unoriginal, that there is money in hosting Mastodon servers as well as hosting a particular mastodon service that does brand/personal identification. Perhaps even semi-automatically, such as via DNS.
Think of the quotation of "The Velvet Underground and Nico only sold 10,000 copies, but each person who purchased the record went on to form their own band"