I emailed Twitter's official press email address, press@twitter.com, for comment. Twitter automatically replies to all emails at that account with the message "<poop emoji>"
Jesus Christ. It's a literal shit-show.
Jesus Christ. It's a literal shit-show.
It will never hit wide spread adoption. You’ll have niches sure but your average John or Jane Doe don’t give 2 shits.
Oh look! This looks great! But I won't use it because I don't think others will use it (but I also won't tell others about it because it's so unfortunate that no one will use it)
Like what? If only some of the energy spent on saying a migration is impossible was spent on actually.... Migrating, the world would be a better place.
> the best of the social networks
That has nothing to do with MAU.
> You’ll have niches sure but your average John or Jane Doe don’t give 2 shits.
Twitter itself is niche, as only 23% of people in the US use it: https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2022/05/05/10-facts-ab... and even of those, most are occasional users with few tweets. Your average John or Jane Doe doesn't give 2 shits about Twitter.
Mastodon simply can't reach the heights that Twitter can currently, its userbase is unlikely to be helpful to that end, as are its anti-indexing/search policies, which also make it a haven for many deeply unsavory activities.
People always present this like it's a failing. But it doesn't actually matter if the specific communities you want there are present in sufficient number. Eugen might be all about competing with Twitter, but he only speaks for the non-profit, not for the entirety of Mastodon, and certainly not for the popular forks or compatible AP platforms.
If you can't find your people, you have two options: convince them to come, or accept it's not for you. Or if you've found the wrong people, that's on you to fix or move on from. It's not trying to splash, or be big. No more than Fidonet was. You're looking at it like it's a Compuserv or AOL with a profit motive or need to grow. A handful of thousand-user furry instances is plenty for people who come there for that.
You are of course welcome to come in and try to build a branch of the fediverse that has growth as its aim, but you have to understand that isn't universally shared and will likely see your realm muted or blocked by people who just want to browse #FursuitFriday without the trolling and spam that happens on Twitter.
Mastodon, the community as it is, not the project, is not looking for a to-the-moon growth chart in the lead up to a liquidity event. It doesn't care that corbulo on Hacker News can't find their people without doing the work to bring them. It's happy, stable, and self-sustaining as it is.
>> "as are its anti-indexing/search policies, which also make it a haven for many deeply unsavory activities."
I don't see those instances because they're muted and blocked in my spaces just like your Twitter replacement would be.
There's always value to niche forums, but that was my point from the beginning. The value is driven down by its audience, which is seemingly mostly obsessivists, contrarians, and creeps with genuine interesting content silo'd off somewhere.
The growth has been steady and the user experience fun. The two things twitter still excelled at are speed of news during something like a mass shooting in a school, and the quick wit. People are kinder on mastodon, as I think I am, but it makes for less chuckles. But more interactions. I post a lot, and have interacted with more famous people on Mastodon than in 10 years or whatever or twitter.
it's literally crypto spam and neo-nazis on that site now... how is this the "best"
I'll be (stuck) here as long as the interesting people stick around.
Edit: No, it was doge. I was misremembering.
I imagine those engineers, having dispensed with the telephone sanitizers, will die of an infected telephone
"Eschew flamebait. Avoid generic tangents. Omit internet tropes."
"Please don't fulminate. Please don't sneer, including at the rest of the community."
"Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something."
To be fair, some of Elon's other stuff has good PR even without a PR department - Tesla and SpaceX have a bunch of die-hards who do free PR for them. But I don't consider that "no PR", just "unpaid PR". Nobody's out there doing that for Twitter.