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Comment by love2read | Hacker News Reader

Is mastodon really even taking the spot of twitter?

Not for everybody but it is for a lot of people. Pretty much everyone I followed in my hobbies have switched over and I don’t go back to twitter anymore, and have more content than I can keep up on in Mastadon. I’ve been perfectly happy with it.

This is how I feel as well. People always say that Mastodon will never replace Twitter because it’s either a) too hard to sign up for, b) no enough people on using it. However, since it’s federated, I feel the easier to find people and posts that are more akin to my interests on there. I just joined a midsized software dev focused instance and followed a few tags for my hobbies and my experience is great. It almost feels like Reddit in that way.

Out of curiosity, what instance? Sounds nice.

Fosstodon: https://fosstodon.org/about

They mainly focus around open source software. Admins are great, and the server is fast and reliable.

From what I've seen, only for niche programming or highly technical circles.

My "normie" friends don't even want to try something polished like Signal. Mastodon would have to be heavily simplified, polished, and maybe sponsor some exclusive influencers to actually take the spot of Twitter.

Why do you think it is supposed to? I've been using mastodon for almost a decade and it's been a great experience from the start but I would say pretty different than twitter. Personally I hope Twitter refugees won't ruin the magic of it. It being a bit more niche is great, just like with hacker news too.

It seems to have drained a lot of the more annoying people off Twitter, making it more fun.

Yes. Twitter is dead.

> Posted: 6:00 PM Jun 6, 2023

> 107.7M Views

You sure about that?

https://twitter.com/TuckerCarlson/status/1666203439146172419

I agree that Twitter is far from dead but you’re choosing a bad example.

> The main Twitter video view metric is triggered when a user watches a video for at least 2 seconds and sees at least 50% of the video player in-view.

So anyone that had the (auto playing) video in view for two seconds as they scrolled through their feed. Multiplied by the number of times it’s in their feed. It’s a pretty meaningless number.

How about:

> 845.9K Likes

> 237.6K Retweets

In a day and a half for a ten minute video of a guy in his basement talking. It isn't even a video platform.

Given how easy it is to have bot farms promote tweets I don't think this is a valid metric to use

But what is the argument here? 237k retweets is a lot, sure. This tweet from 2020 has 883k retweets and is just four photos:

https://twitter.com/BTS_twt/status/1296701109340237824

So does 237k retweets in 2023 mean the network is as vital as it was in 2020? I have no idea what basis this argument is being made on.

Does it mean Twitter is dead though? That's the basis of this thread.

That’s exactly my point. A tweet with 237k retweets was thrown out as a evidence that it’s not dead but I’m asking on what basis 237k is a lot or not a lot.

If you think that’s bad, wait until you hear how they measure broadcast and cable television viewership.

What does that have to do with Twitter’s popularity, though?

How

Putting aside the dubious methodology behind that metric, I’d like to point out that’s precisely the wrong metric to be paying attention to. You need to look at the traffic and retention numbers of the power users, and better yet the critical users in the social graph. Power user traffic has declined 25% since Elon.

The reason why this number is more important than overall user growth, is because social networks don’t decline, they chug along, until the collapse all at once, like a bridge with a key support knocked out. By studying the collapse look of Friendster, MySpace, Snap (which technically still exists), this predictor of collapse has been identified.

So yeah Twitter is dead. The rest of the network just doesn’t know it yet.

See:

https://www.cnbc.com/2023/05/17/twitters-top-users-are-posti... https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/29196654/

https://arxiv.org/abs/1302.6109

Twitter exists because of celebrities, politicians, journalists, musicians, etc. And those users have largely not migrated to Mastodon. Maybe you could argue they're promoting more on Tiktok now, but that's a bit of a different platform.

BLACKPINK and Taylor Swift both tweeted today. So did Barack Obama, and Stephen Curry. And CNN, ABC News, CBS News, and Fox News are all constantly updating their Twitter feeds.

Meanwhile the big Mastodon draw is... Kathy Griffin? And her last Mastodon toot was... March 31. Guess she got bored of only getting 100 likes per post.

The big Mastodon draw is getting away from Twitter and its bullshit.

People who are only interested in virality and clicks and drawing as large an audience as possible are welcome to stay away.

You seem to be confused. It doesn’t matter if Mastodon is going to replace Twitter. What matters is that Twitter is dead. Then I laid out why the collapse has already started. This shouldn’t be controversial. Twitter has been losing users for years now.

Celebrities aren’t trendsetters. They’re laggards. To use the hockey metaphor, they always skate to the puck, not where it is going. Case in point: Every band was on MySpace until well after the collapse began.

Do you really trust those numbers?

Twitter has all the inventive in the world to artificially inflate view counts and have done similar, sketchy things recently[0].

[0] https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2023/02/report-musk-had-...

Poor Tuck is doing a Twitch channel now?!

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