I think that failed because it appealed to a comparatively much smaller audience and that audience was likely more engaged with mainstream social media much more through amplifying other “leaders” content than creating their own. In a case like that it’s much more difficult to rapidly acquire the captive audience ready to jump ship to the new platform unless you can get a bunch of the most visible leaders to very quickly do the same before the outrage dies down.

In the case of Twitter these changes are impacting a much more diverse population of passive consumers and active content creators, and doing so in a way that these policy changes, if permanent, will induce chronic friction in using the platform, so it may be a better opportunity that prior movements to ditch existing platforms.

I’m talking about probabilities though, not predicting that as an outcome. And I think the overall probability, while higher, may still not be too high. But I’m just an interested observer with no particular expertise in the social dynamics of network effects, so take this comment in that context as well.

The difference with Voat, to my mind, is that it mostly took the outflow of a sub-set of users who were aggrieved by Reddit at the time. This meant that it grew well, but was a more specific niche instead of having a broad base of users.

What's happening now with both Reddit and Twitter is effecting almost all of the users equally, which potentially opens up more of generic migration option. I'd never been that interested in Bluesky before, but in the last couple days, 5-10 people I was still sometimes checking in on on Twitter moved over, so now I can't see their posts at all on either platform since I don't have an account on either. It's a real bummer, and it feels like it's also preventing people from really committing to Bluesky, since there's no even read-only access to it, people who still want to have some reach can't use it exclusively.