It will die a slow death as the content creators and news organizations leave it.
It won’t happen overnight. But removing Block and requiring IDs will help speed that along.
When it stops being relevant in the cultural consciousness.
One of the reasons people use Twitter is for up-to-date news and notifications on events. As official organisations move away from it and the user experience degrades, it will just fade away like MySpace.
You can already see this happening. My guess is that it will just go on slow decline. I would bet Twitter will not be nearly as relevant in a year.
When your local politicians and journalists start to use Mastodon or similar apps.
Twitter is popular because of the massive user base. It’s a self-fulfilling prophecy of sorts, where people use Twitter for the massive user base, which encourages more people to use Twitter. So escaping that spiral will require a mass exodus to something new. Because artists, musicians, celebrities, etc rely on that large user base to gain and maintain a following. So as long as Twitter has the users, that’s where the content will be.
Threads was a good indicator that people are willing to move if the new platform is available. Unfortunately for Threads, the launch was a fucking train wreck, so people quickly got tired of it and returned to Twitter. They didn’t even have basic functionality figured out. But as a proof of concept, it showed that people aren’t tied to Twitter specifically; They’re tied to the user base. If a new service manages to cultivate that user base, people will be willing to migrate.
Mastodon’s big issue so far has largely been visibility. People simply don’t know it exists, and the people who do know about it use it as a backup for their Twitter; They’re not using it to replace Twitter, but rather they’re double-posting everything to both Twitter and Mastodon. So the Twitter users have no reason to move to Mastodon, because the Mastodon users are still using Twitter. It’s a catch-22, where the Mastodon users need to use Twitter to maintain visibility, but then the Twitter users will never switch to Mastodon because everyone is still using Twitter.
You’re forgetting one very important thing.
In the virtual world, people can be in more than one place at a time.
Nobody “moved” to Threads, really, people just gave it a try to see what it was about.
There is no world or future that exists where something gets released that causes people to go through the effort of deleting their twitter account.
People are lazy and lean towards convenience, me included.
I don’t know that visibility is Mastodon’s biggest problem. I’ve talked to a lot of people who tried it but just didn’t find it easy to use and just bailed. I think people expecting it to be diet Twitter and getting frustrated when it isn’t as populated or user friendly is a bigger issue at this point.
