Anyone sane has left Xitter already and the crazies stay on their own platform, making the Web generally much more pleasant, as less and less sites link to Xitter.
Twitter is still influencing the rest of the web (look at its influence on reddit since Musk bought Twitter, and Spez started wanting to live in his skin). I don’t think we can just take the good without the bad and assume a net positive.
Nah, as someone who came from reddit, we were generally a pretty terrible bunch even before bots basically took over. I don’t feel that Lemmy is much better but the platform’s overall practices seem to be better. My mileage with the community varies greatly from day to day.
I think the common denominator for all these things are people. People are pretty terrible in large numbers behind anonymity.
What annoys me about Lemmy, at least with the communities and instances that I’m connected to, is that it is a really bad echo chamber for left / far-left techies. It’s not exactly representative of what is going on in the world. Don’t get me wrong , I prefer a left mindset. But I believe this is dangerous to a certain degree. I’m starting to think I should go back to forae. This whole social bullshit disguised as a news-aggregator is just exhausting.
I don’t know why you guys keep pretending X is Truth Social levels of dead. Is this just copium or are you really that far removed from reality? X is absolutely in a significant decline but it’s still the dominant microblogging platform by a mile. All politicians, all media organisations, all celebrities use X. And ultimately these are the accounts that will determine whether X remains relevant in mainstream society.
Even assuming 25% of Twitter users are bots (probably a significant over estimate), and even if half of Twitter’s users quit in the next year, it would still be 150x bigger than mastodon
(Mastodon has ~1m MAUs, compared to ~421m for Twitter)
From my understanding, Bluesky (despite its recent growth) isn’t particularly big either. Threads claims to have a lot of users and I assume it would have the easiest time attracting normies, but I am still sceptical of its long-term viability. I feel like the people leaving X would have quite a bit of crossover with people who despise Meta.
So that leaves us with a fourth competitor, which is nothing at all. Anecdotally I think this is what I am seeing the most - people who leave X are just abandoning the entire concept of microblogging, since the point of it is to speak to a large audience and none of the competitors can really deliver that right now. The appeal of Twitter was that everyone (who was interested in microblogging) was on it; smaller, niche communities are fine for discussion boards and group chats but microbloggers don’t really want to be screaming into a void where most people will never hear them. Microblogging was never even particularly popular anyway (when compared with other forms of social media) and I wouldn’t be particularly surprised if the downfall of X eventually kills the concept for most people in society.
iirc when you sign up for threads it links your Facebook/Insta account and there’s no way to delete your threads account without deleting the whole thing, so their numbers are likely inflated
All true.
With that said, Bluesky has had one hell of a growth month - not just from Brazil - and that’s nice.
I prefer Mastodon to what is ultimately still a for-profit corporation (“public benefit” notwithstanding), but both are better than Twatter.
I’d like to like Mastodon better. I’d like it - ot a simular open, decentralized platform - to be the one that everyone uses, if anything.
However, I do not like it as much. And Bluesky is getting the momentum, which is important.
They’re also at least theoretically relatively open and decentralized (but we do all know how that would go long-term)
But like you said, either is dramatically better than Twitter. Heck, just having many healthy options is good.
all media organisations use X
NPR quits Twitter after being falsely labeled as ‘state-affiliated media’
It’s not dead though, it’s still linked to everywhere, from big news to niche communities because it still has that critical mass and inertia.
And I have to be cynical of the Fediverse, but realistically, what replaces it, at least here in the US? Discord? No, thanks, I’d at least rather have information be public.
I’m speaking as someone who has never used Twitter, but I can’t ignore it, as much as I’d like to.
If you think X is getting linked at anything approaching the level Twitter was back in the day … where have you been? That platform is slowly bleeding out his billions of investment (well, some of his, but lots of other peoples’ money I don’t mind seeing burn, either)…
It’s still everywhere in my news/internet diet.
It’s bleeding, for sure, but it’s big. Its gone bad. But I think its premature to say its collapse is a good thing, because it just won’t go away.
It’s so big that it can take a lot of bleeding before it dies. It doesn’t help that there is no significant enough consensus yet on an alternative.
It seems like some people are flocking to bsky, probably because it has better visibility and seems more accessible than Mastodon (“What’s an instance? How do I pick?”). Others are heading to Threads just because it’s there already.
If enough people move to some other platform to generate a critical mass, they’ll pull others too. Until then, inertia will keep X rolling a good while to come.
The future isn’t one big town square. The future is lots of interconnected communities.
I, for one, have no interest in the corporate internet.
I disagree, not really an unpopular opinion.
The only reason that this is unpopular is that there are a lot of things that happened to the web that are far better than some overhyped group text vomiting website going downhill.
