As Twitter ditches its iconic branding in favor of owner Elon Musk’s favorite letter “X,” its open source competitor Mastodon is once again seeing usage numbers soar.
I can fathom no world where you’d want to trade away a multi billion dollar brand for a new brand you literally can’t SEO. What, you think your brand is gonna be more impressive that the generic variable, and a part of the alphabet?
“Follow me on Twitter” becomes “follow me on X”? “You should tweet that” becomes “you should X that”? The little blue bird on every shop window, website, and business card becomes a stylized letter that, hopefully, doesn’t look so threatening on the next iteration?
It’s a textbook case of brand destruction. I almost regret never making a Twitter in the first place, just so I could quit today, or at any of the hundred days in the past year where it got inexplicably worse without reason.
“You should tweet that” becomes “you should X that”
“You should X-create” that
And a tweet becomes an “X-cretion”
And retweet it become
X-Forwarded-Forit
It’s just a new form of messaging called X-communication.
oh wait.
It’s inspired by all the X-Twitter employees
I should X that sounds like I should delete/close that. How apt.
To me it sounds like axe.
“Yep, brilliant. Axe it.”
Follow me on ten.
Destroying the brand and ruining twitter was always the goal. There’s a good reason why Saudi Arabia fronted half of the bill…
Xing is short for kissing IE XOXO. So instead of tweeting we are now kissing!
Jamie Kennedy’s show is about to become relevant again. You’ve been X’d!
He’s just a fan of Laurie Anderson. Give him some slack!
Watch out… language is a virus!
Its a terrible rebrand that pretty much comes because of Elon’s impulses, or in other words, for shits and giggles. Regardless of this hilarious trashing of such a powerful brand, I’ll have fun calling tweets “xeets” for a good week.
Please call them Elon’s x-crements instead.
“Hey bros wanna see me light $40 billion on fire?”
The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia spent good money to never have an Arab Spring again.
It must be so horrible working “with” him. You’re trying to build something and every morning you must be frightened to see Elon hanging on a ladder because he thought it was so funny to draw dicks everywhere on the building, which would have you cancel everything you are working on.
I’ve worked in a founder led business and this is why I quit.
I’d spend forever working on a project to build a satellite site then suddenly we don’t want that anymore - bin the recipes we want a full main site redbrand.
Bye.
Feel you, I’ve been working with this kind of person but he was pushed away a few weeks after my arrival. He still had time to make an impression though, his genius move was to tell each team that the others hated them, which had no effect because we talked to each others…
“Hey, check out this X video”
He’s clearly laying the groundwork to sell it to Alphabet (Google’s parent company). /s
Yay, another week of higher than normal activity, until the fomo kicks back in and they leave yet again cause “everyone is on X/this is sooo complicated/I just wanna see the fallout/whatever excuse justifies their addiction”
I’m just here to spread the good word about old.lemmy.world
Can’t wait for Lemmy Enhancement Suite.
Because LES is more.
Or Kbin! Kbin can do both microblogging and link aggregation/discussion. Tbh departing Twitter users coming to Mastodon, and reddit refugees are brought together on Kbin.
The “all-in-one” method acomplished by Kbin is a huge feat, especially when it’s built by a single person from scratch (ie; not based on lemmy codebase wise) and still much more ActivityPub compatible.
Kbin is sadly very underrated imo.
It needs a mobile app to take off, imo.
Additionally, since it is just one guy (that I’m aware of), I’m not sure how sustainable it is for him. I believe he’s been surviving off some EU grant and donations, but once the grant runs out and donations slow, the server costs for delivering content to tens of thousands of users every day are going to start being pretty rough to handle. Has he explained what his plan is for long term sustainability?
@ArtemisApp is in beta right now. @hariette has been hard at work. I look forward to trying it soon. Hopefully. I’m not on discord, and that’s where most people are getting beta.
There’s a beta sign up form. I got an invite and I was never on the discord. I believe open beta is very soon anyway though.
I’m on the form. Been on there for a bit. Mostly I like pointing out that an app is being actively developed for kbin, and that I have never used it so I cannot tell you more.
I think lemmy people should know that @hariette has previously stated that Artemis will work there too. At least, I’m pretty sure they said that. Children have turned my brain to mush and my memory is about as reliable as a 3 year old.
I opened Twitter page and it shows login page with small x on left and big x in the middle. But only one closes the popup.
I hear ya… The advantage that Lemmy and kbin have over Mastodon is that Redditors tend to be more technically inclined than Twitter users, so ditching Reddit for Lemmy was easy, while I only know a grand total of three people on Mastodon, and two of them are tech YouTubers.
Redditors tend to be more technically inclined than Twitter users
This used to be true, but Reddit has been mainstream for years now. Today’s average Redditor is likely pretty similar to the average Twitter user.
When a quarter of the replies on Reddit have become “this” or “💯” or “^^,” which it feels like it became when I left, I’d agree with you.
I remember when you’d get ripped apart and down voted to hell for daring to use an emoji on Reddit when commenting. People hated it. Then one day it was fine to do it, no one cared anymore. I guess that’s around when Reddit became mainstream, maybe.
Probably cause more and more users gravitated to mobile where it became commonplace to include emojis in posts. I remember too when using emojis was a mortal sin. At most you could use an emoticon but that was it.
Back when I started using Reddit it was frowned upon to post OC. I remember some subs had rules that you would be banned if you more than like 10% of your posts were OC.
And my axe!
I feel like when the Reddit API controversy happened I was more inclined to switch due to the blackout vs Twitter which didn’t have nearly as instant of an event that would happen to get me off. Now all of a sudden because of Reddit I’m on various Fediverse projects such as Funkwhale, Mastodon, Kbin, and Lemmy.
Plus there’s some staying power to posts on here
I’m replying to what you wrote 10 hours ago. My local feed would be a lot of shit before I ever saw this
And it’s 100% relevant to the area of content I wanted to read. Same if I went to a gaming or news related group
But in the other hand lemmy seems much more mature than lemmy.
Don’t get me wrong, the experience has been rapidly growing in recent weeks thanks to the proliferation of third party apps 👍 But Mastodon’s first party experience feels solid and their new official app just blends in any mainstream app.
I assume you mean Mastodon seems much more mature than Lemmy?
Yeah, I’d agree with you there. I’ve had zero issues trying to find people and content on Mastodon, while I have had federation issues with Lemmy. And I do use the official Mastodon app.
My only gripe with Mastodon is that it isn’t obvious that you should follow hashtags. I didn’t know this at first and struggled to get into it with post after post complaining about Elon, but once I figured out to follow hashtags, I like it now. I’m just annoyed that all the artists I follow on Twitter are flocking to Threads and Bluesky instead of Mastodon though.
Interesting. That is a good point
The vast majority of my friends on Twitter are artists, and the older ones ended up there when Angelo Sotira (spyed) got greedy on deviantArt. One of them ended up on mastodon.art, but the rest of them are trying out Threads, unfortunately.
What makes this even better is that apparently Mark Zuckerberg / Mets owns trademark for the X logo.
You know what that means! Millionaire monkey money fight!
Microsoft also as a trademark for X.
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i never got into twitter, and the longer this goes on, the more glad i am about that
I don’t like twitter nor Elon but why would someone leave a platform because they would change their name?
Elon has done more damage before so people who would consider leaving should be long gone.
You’re not wrong, but consider that people who justified sticking around for some reason or another might leave because the brand change (to a name that is so brain dead even a little offensive) finally hits home for them that it isn’t going to be the same.
A brand name change is about the single most overt thing you can do to send the message that a product isn’t going to be the same. And when that happens, people tend to look at the recent trends for that product to get an idea of what to expect. The recent trends for Twitter happen to be right-wing echo chamber.
So yeah, the people who were going to leave have largely already left. But this brand change is going to be effective at galvanizing those who remain.
Make sense.
It’s a “final straw” situation. No individual straw broke the back of the proverbial camel. One straw after another was placed atop it until finally the back broke. It’s not the final straw that broke said back, but the load of all the straws including the final that did it.
So they’re not necessarily quitting because of the name change. They’re quitting because of everything else plus the name change. That was the thing that pushed the go/no-go decision into “go”.
So the rebrand comes with X promising to be an app to replace everything?
X gonna give it to ya, X gonna deliver it to ya.
Well, it sure sounds like X is delivering users to Mastodon.
This is probably a stupid question, but for those of you that use Mastodon — how did you find people to follow?
I tried it out a few months ago but I didn’t like the few accounts they recommended, and searching for users or keywords didn’t get me too far either…
There is an account called Fedi Follows on Mastodon that shares accounts according to their topics. Hope it helps.
Thank you, that looks like a great place to start!
You need to follow hashtags but primary groups. You will find groups boosting toots about your topics. It’s the first accounts to follow then you will find others.
It’s not that hard. People have to keep in mind, it’s not Twitter and so it works differently.
That’s kind of the problem I think. I was able to find like 2 people there I want to follow. Lemmy is going to be far more successful at displacing its alternative because all the communities you’d want to subscribe to are here.
It helps if you can find a half-dozen people involved in something you like to follow at the start. Other than that, try joining a mid-sized (~1,000-3,000 users) Mastodon server based around a hobby, interest, or social group you’re a part of. Most Mastodon clients allow you to keep a column open for the people you follow as well as the people on the “Local Timeline” who are a part of your server.
It’s a new social network. If you see someone pop up who’s made a pithy post or two, give 'em a follow. If they’re not working out a week later, un-follow them. Don’t feel afraid to follow a ton of people when you first get started to liven up your feed until you find a good circle of folks.
I joined up before you could subscribe to hashtags, so my approach was:
- Read my local instance feed and click on content that interested me.
- Checked the users that made the interesting content to see if they had more.
- If they did, followed.
Nowadays I would add this step:
- Subscribe to hashtags on topics I’m interested in and follow people who regularly contribute good material to them.
I wrote since stuff to help new Mastodon users: https://babylon4.com/mastodon
I joined via fosstodon.org much better recommendations
I used a site that let’s you follow the same accounts on Masto as you did on Twitter.
Gonna play devil’s advocate here.
If Elon is truly able to turn The App Formerly Known As Twitter into an ‘everything app’ that’s actually worth using, this could be a bone-headed move that pays off in dividends. It depends on what he plans to introduce to X within the next year or two. Transforming X into a messaging app won’t be enough.
Musk’s line of thought here isn’t completely asinine. Let’s not deny that superapps like LINE, WeChat, Alipay, Taobao and others exist, and absolutely dominate the digital landscape in their own regions.
Problem is, Twitter already has stiff competition. Threads is by far its largest competitor, and the moment Zuckerberg implements hashtags and trending topics, X is going to hemorrhage users.
This is honestly the direction Steve Huffman should’ve taken with Reddit instead of jacking up API prices and gouging every third-party app out of existence. Imagine if RPAN became a legitimate monetized mobile livestreaming platform instead of some dumb social experiment with seriously limited broadcasting times/broadcasters at once, or if Spez allowed content creators to sell access to premium content á la Tumblr Post+, Fansly, Patreon or OnlyFans. Enough e-girls have been astroturfing the shit out of Reddit to plug their paywalled collection of nudes, so may as well cut out the middle-man and drive OF out of business.
Facebook already tried to do the “everything app” and it failed in the US.
And Mark Zuckerberg is a million times more competent at business than Elon.
Yeah, you know what those have in common? They all started providing one service more successfully than anyone else on that market and slowly accreted functionality in the absence of a popular local dedicated service. Twitter is not that, was never going to be that, and it is not becoming that, certainly not with a skeleton crew. The same goes for Reddit, which was certainly bigger than people think but not big enough to pull that move. It may have grown into a OF alternative specifically, just from having a foot on that business already, but that’s about it.
We do have one of those “everything apps” here, though. It’s called Facebook. Terminally online people don’t realize, but there are millions of people right now buying and selling used stuff, dating, watching videos and exchanging business information over it, even without accounting for the rest of the Meta ecosystem.
If Elon is truly able to turn The App Formerly Known As Twitter into an ‘everything app’ that’s actually worth using…
That opening conditional (emphasis added) is carrying a whole lot of weight…
Musk’s line of thought here isn’t completely asinine. Let’s not deny that superapps like LINE, WeChat, Alipay, Taobao and others exist, and absolutely dominate the digital landscape in their own regions.
It isn’t a bad thought, but it should be quickly apparent that an American equivalent might not work. The West isn’t the same as those regions. There’s a complex interplay of culture, history, and the current market scene. A good business person would recognize the possibility that it might not work and just do exploratory work. Musk in his arrogance thinks he can make it happen regardless
How many people would trust Elon Musk with their banking details? I doubt enough to make the $44 billion worth it.
I wouldn’t trust Musk to tell me the time of day without double-checking on at least three other clocks to make sure.
He didn’t want to buy the company. So, he’s turning it into a pet project. The end. The oxymoron here of this story: The winners of the 44 billion Musk payed for it probably don’t care that their creation is being run into the ground while the users of the platform are obviously in an uproar. In the end, the creators and founders, etc. did it for the money, not the cultural impact they would have on the world. Twitter’s former CEO has allowed himself to be interviewed from time to time to say what he thinks Musk is doing wrong, but he doesn’t seem to have any hurt feelings or express any kind of extreme regrets for the company being sold. From what I’ve seen in the news, he’s pretty dry. The drama comes from the user end. This tells me something about how, in the end, it’s just rich people doing business and doing as they please with what they please. It’s kind of sad. Like, let’s say I made something really cool with my own two hands and my creation got turned into something monstrous. I’d be upset. The people who made twitter are happy with their riches. In the end, the outrage and scandal is kind of pointless because it’s just a thing that makes more money for big business rich tech people and it always was just that.
He didn’t want to buy the company. So, he’s turning it into a pet project.
That’s a good point, and one that had not occurred to me. For all we know, he’s already mentally written off the $44 billion as a loss and is just having fun with it, with no expectation of success.
That would explain a lot.
The fact that he did not want to buy it for the price he had to buy it for is enough for me to conclude that he doesn’t give two shits about it. The ones he bought it from don’t give two shits, either. It’s just money. For Musk, money lost. For the former owners of Twitter, money gained. The rest is just blah blah blah to them. This is not so for the users of Twitter. It means much more to them socially than it does to the people who bought it and sold it. This, for me, is fascinating as a social phenomenon. Fascinatingly sad in a lot of ways.
Just to add in, X.com was something Elon wanted to do all the way back in PayPal days, basically a line/wechat with PayPal abilities.
It’s not his $44 billion, though.
The people who ACTUALLY paid for it are going to have a few words with him, probably, at some point.
Can anyone help explain how to find content worth following on Mastodon? I made an account today and despite going through the #explore category I’m finding it difficult to find content or people I want to follow. The few things I’ve found end up just being Lemmy communities which kind of defeats the purpose of having a mastadon account at all… maybe it’s because I never had a Twitter, but the Lemmy/reddit/forum layout makes much more sense to me
Unfortunately this is not the fault of mastodon, its community or tech behind it as much as … nobody from twitter actually moving to mastodon. There aren’t many big influencers, companies or content creators on mastodon so your feed is just random people talking about random stuff. The lack of algorithm doesn’t help either since someone’s random showerthoughts have the same chance of showing up for you as does something trending that you’d actually be interested in.
Yep, everyone I followed on Twitter went to Bluesky, some made accounts on Mastodon, but none of them stuck around
Follow / pin active hashtags. I have 4, #news #nintendo #xbox and #playstation. I’m a simple man
And then I get even more random irrelevant crap because everyone talking about their latest rp adventures in stardew valley tags steam, gaming, indiegaming and other general hashtags.
There’s some of that, but I prefer it for something like micro blogging. I want to see different things, points of view. By contrast, I’ll go to a news site for specific info. I love Mastodon because there’s a unvarnished stream of information that isn’t curated by algorithms. :D
It depends on what you are into. If you like anime (for example) you could try something broad like # (anime) [no spaces and such] & then see what other hashtags people are using from there. The same with music or something. That’s what I do at least. There might be better ways but a lot of times people are into similar stuff and that can lead down different paths as well.
Sportsbots.xyz host mirrors of the popular sports writers. I follow thurrott from twit apple insider and 9 to 5 max. Tech meme is good for tech news headlines. I fill krebs on security as well. It’s better than twitter because it’s chronological and not algorithm fed
I’m interested to know which accounts to follow for lemmy news. Seems like a natural place to go when having trouble connecting like I did with fmhy before and shit just works recently.
Fellas, it’s time to pay respects to Larry the Bird. He was only caught doing what he did best: tweeting.
At least Mastodon doesn’t risk getting bought by a multi billionaire.
It’s like Elon has read every book with an evil corporation in it and decided to make it his whole ascetic. X corp, sounds like the big bad that some plucky band of YA book protagonists have to team up to take down.
