Some Bluesky, Twitter and Mastodon predictions for 6 months time
andy-bell.co.uk
andy-bell.co.uk
Hopefully we'll have some good third-party apps to go alongside it (again, something that Elon fucked with).
From what I can tell, most of the loudest Elon-Twitter detractors are people with some ideological bone to pick. They dislike Elon, they dislike centralized platforms, or name your cause.
To me, none of this portends an imminent mass exodus to slightly more complicated, vastly less popular Twitter clones.
And yeah, people who use the platform less will see less changes. That seems almost obvious. But that doesn't mean that there aren't any changes. And some of those changes are very obvious, like the fact that the maximum post length on this micro-blogging service is no longer 240 characters, but 10,000 characters.
If anything, your hand-waving of nu-Twitter criticism seems more ideological than anything. "They're not valid criticisms, they just hate Elon."
if you look at nearly any widely-viewed tweet now, the first few thousand replies are from irrelevant, uninteresting blue-ticks. This is clearly worse than how it was before for most users.
Pure turd vs tainted turd.
It's all turds my dude.
Also, the AT protocol is much better designed than Mastodon. The ability to leave with both my identity and data and go to a new provider is pretty amazing.
It can either survive largely unscathed if rather less relevant, or it can become a Musk-ier Parler, but I don’t think there’s an obvious middle ground.
Personally I think it’s probably doomed to Musk-y irrelevance, but I’d believe “it basically carries on” before I’d buy “it is a mini-Facebook”.
I’m also not convinced that whatever replaces twitter will be particularly twitter-y. There’s a world where Mastodon and/or bluesky are to Twitter as Dreamwidth is to Livejournal; a thing for people who really liked the old thing but don’t like the new owners and/or their incompetent stewardship of the platform, but not the _default_ destination for people fleeing.
Myself, I’m enjoying Mastodon, but it largely replaced the bits of old-twitter I liked. Those aren’t the bits that everyone liked. And, realistically, it’s mostly a facsimile of an _old_ twitter that was dying even before Musk brought his unique flavour of Dunning-Kruger to the party.
I'm enjoying Damus client.