The new data — comprehensive and definitive — should put to rest the countervailing narratives over Musk’s management of the app. Under his stewardship, X’s daily user base has declined from an estimated 140 million users to 121 million, with a widening gap between people who check the app daily vs. monthly. X’s remaining daily users are engaged similarly as before. But the pool is shrinking. Apptopia pulls its data from more than 100,000 apps on iOS and Android, along with publicly available sources.

So apparently it lost only 13% of daily users? Thats a smaller number than I thought. Still bad news for Twitter though.

On the other hand, it shows the power of content creators and niche communities. I used less Twitter but cannot delete it because it is literally how I connect with my niche community on there.

120 points

Umm… Only 13%?

I thought it would have been more…

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120 points

The increase in the number of bots made up for the rest. The “pay a small fee to get an I’m definitely human sticker” scheme was really popular in the misinformation community.

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11 points

Good point…

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26 points

Well, the question for me is how many active contributors have left. If those who leave are lurkers, it doesn’t really matter. If those who leave are mostly creators, that’s a serious problem for the platform.

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11 points

Actually it makes sense. Look around and check how many people actually take action even if it’s inconvenient. Almost no one. For example Amazon and Uber are bad for society in ways that most people understand and are aware of (monopoly, gig economy, killing small businesses, exploiting workers) but what % of society actively avoid them? 5%? Less? So a lot of people will complain that Twitter under Elon is big source of hate speech and misinformation but vast majority will not do anything about it. Probably 5% left for this reason and the rest got annoyed with technical glitches and other changes. Most sheeple will keep visiting.

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15 points

You had me until the “sheeple” thing.

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2 points

How do you call people that do whatever everyone is doing without thinking about the consequences?

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1 point

Amazon is a tough one. Definitely a ton of problems but online shopping in general is very useful for a lot of people. Demanding proper treatment of workers and supporting smaller businesses instead of feeding the monopoly is important and a good start. Giving up Amazon/online shopping would mean having much less access to products for a lot of people. Online shopping displaced catalog shopping, which has been around since Sears catalog days, and is unlikely to go away.

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1 point

There’s plenty of other online shops. I avoid amazon and can get 99% of products from other stores. I would survive without getting the other 1%. People use amazon to save 15 minutes it would take them to find stuff in other places. They know the real cost of those 15 minutes saved but they don’t care.

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2 points

Well, the question for me is how many active contributors have left. If those who leave are lurkers, it doesn’t really matter. If those who leave are mostly creators, that’s a serious problem for the platform.

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83 points

mastodon finally clicked for me and i don’t miss twitter at all. sometimes i accidentally load twitter out of force of habit, but immediately recognize how much it sucks now and close it again. Likewise, reddit’s dead to me too now. i’m finally starting to feel like decentralized federated social media systems might actually work out.

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19 points
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What is reddit? That shit site with psycho owners who want to go public because they are convinced they are successful, despite not being able to make any money and alienating their moderators and userbase? Lols.

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23 points

i started reading your reply in the voice of Dracula from the intro to Symphony of the Night XD

“WHAT is REDDIT 🍷💫💥 but a MISERABLE pile of SHITPOSTS!”

The 'net ill-needs a failure such as him.

His terms of service are as empty as his revenues!

all this to say, yeah fam 100% totally agree

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2 points

Out of curiosity, can I ask what it was that made mastodon click?

I had two or three goes before realising that choosing the right instance can give you an engaging “local” feed. That seems dramatically less important on lemmy though.

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3 points

i’m not so sure it was even my local feed that got me feeling like i belonged, really; more that I started reflexively defaulting to the federated feed and found it to be much more lively. Perhaps it was actually the changes brought on by time. Perhaps it was because twitter is rotting like a forgotten corpse in a warm, damp room and all the smart people who actually give a shit finally all started to say “fuck this” and enough of a critical mass has finally accumulated in federated services for them to affect its overall feel. I definitely see content from technically minded, creative, motivated people more on mastodon than i EVER did on twitter, but especially now. Twitter now is just … sad, and it reminds me that I have a better place that I’d enjoy visiting more.

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1 point
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2 points
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I joined at first because someone I like moved to it. But then I forgot about it for several years. As of two weeks ago though all of a sudden it just started to actually be engaging, and I began making friends on it. Now the people who are still on Twitter just aren’t important to my web experience. I still have friends who use Twitter but I just don’t need Twitter to interact with them anymore.

Also George Takei is on Mastodon and you know him even if it’s just in the parasocial sense.

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55 points
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I will not call twitter “x” till the day I die

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33 points
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I like Xitter, pronounced like xi- in Mandarin Chinese.

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19 points

For those who want to know, that makes Xitter sound like halfway between Sitter and Shitter.

As an English speaker you can try to make that sound by saying the Y in YEET and paying close attention to how exactly your tongue is positioned and where in your mouth the air is being constricted. Then try to position your tongue as if you want to say “yeet” or “yes” again, but make an S sound at exactly the same constriction point where you made the Y sound before. If you’re successful, it should sound like a hybrid between S and SH to your English ears.

That’s how I make it anyway, actual Mandarin speakers might find issue with my explanation.

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3 points
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Exactly what I go for. My Mandarin is pretty awful, however.

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18 points

One of my current favorite alternative is, “X, the web app you access at twitter.com”, though given the logo that they chose I’m tempted to start referring to them as X11.

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7 points

Elon must have spent so much on x.com yet it still redirects to the primary URL twitter.com

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10 points
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Probably because if he changed that, then the whole site would break.

And he fired all the people with the experience to make it work again.

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18 points

It’s only ever “the website formerly know as Twitter” to me.

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4 points

Agreed. It will be Twitter for me till it die.

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2 points

I’ve taken to calling it “xitter”

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2 points

Somehow, that reminds me of a snowflake dictator who gets annoyed by a cartoon bear and whom the WHO is very afraid of.

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51 points

Rebranding Twitter, one of the most recognizable brand on earth, to “X” is not just shooting yourself in the foot, it’s taking a shotgun, aiming at your feet and pulling the trigger.

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3 points

I’m thinking a little higher up and more to the centerline

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3 points

Meanwhile, Reddit is like: “Hold my beer.”

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43 points

Only 13%?? With everything he’s going through, it seems very little to me. I think that the turning point would be top-level institutions and politicians changing Mastodon, I think that as long as that does not happen Twitter will still be relevant unfortunately

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26 points

13% may not sound like a lot, but it includes almost all of the 10% who weren’t complete idiots.

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8 points

So I guess you’re still using it?

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34 points

Hey, this comment reads like you’re just dunking on another user. If that is not what you meant to do, please try to communicate more clearly, and if that is what you meant to do, please refrain while commenting on Beehaw in order to be(e) nice. Thanks!

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13 points

Considering they said almost all, that’s not the gotcha you think it is.

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1 point
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6 points

That’s just the 13% who have stopped using it daily I imagine, who were already probably super addicted to it.

Not sure if weekly/monthly users dropping out would be included in that tally. Also it says nothing about activity time from the daily users. It’s possible the users that stuck around may not be using it as much i.e. 1-2 tweets or comments a day now vs 10-20 before.

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10 points

That’s just the 13% who have stopped using it daily I imagine, who were already probably super addicted to it.

It’s the opposite. As per the article, daily users remained consistent while monthly users saw the 13% drop.

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3 points
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Technology

!technology@beehaw.org

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A nice place to discuss rumors, happenings, innovations, and challenges in the technology sphere. We also welcome discussions on the intersections of technology and society. If it’s technological news or discussion of technology, it probably belongs here.

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