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Evan MintoMastodon/The Fediverse now has over 1 million monthly active users, approximately the same as Twitter's estimated active user count in 2008, when I joined. People forget that Twitter also started as a weird, confusing new thing.
Jim@VamptVo I think I was 2008 too. Remember when the default was you saw all the replies to everyone you followed? It was crazy for a moment. @steevbishop
@VamptVo @steevbishop Then they stopped it, because I think it was not helping their uptime problems.
Steev Bishop@sullybiker @VamptVo Heh, oh yes I remember. And was so used to it that I was OUTRAGED when it was removed. Needless to say the way Twitter is now, I'm glad I don't see that.
@steevbishop @VamptVo I remember your dissatisfaction
It_me_greg@VamptVo I feel like I was waffling about joining Mastodon long enough and had read enough about it that it wasn't too confusing for me. Still some quirks and limitations I'm not used to but it seems pretty great so far.
Melanie Baker@VamptVo Twitter mostly started as a way for digital marketers and tech bros to feel cool at SXSW in 2006. By 2008 was when it really started to expand to other people and become interesting. And confusing. 🙂
Raineer 
🦆@VamptVo for everyone griping about lag in the fediverse, remind me again about the stability of twitter in 2008? hah
wubbo ✨💫
Chaspap@VamptVo I want to believe!
Liam Lemon@VamptVo is there a place to find the real time fediverse active users numbers?
Shelenn Ayres@dmb677 @VamptVo there are multiple sources tracing but one that is older and self-reporting for all instance types the-federation.info/
Sar
Mike@VamptVo
And back then, “tweet” sounded as ridiculous as “toot” does now. We’ll get used to it.
And back then, “tweet” sounded as ridiculous as “toot” does now. We’ll get used to it.
Iron Curtain (Chiptunes)
White Gandalf@VamptVo I remember those days! Kinda fun reliving it now, with nostalgia but also a lot more web acumen. It’s like a massive do-over.
Aaron McLeran@VamptVo
Definitely. Twitter was super weird in the beginning. One of my friends was super into it in the early days and I remember asking him what utility it had... "ok, so like... you 'tweet' and then what?" "It's like microblogging man!"
He ended up *working* for Twitter and I still didn't get it... until maybe about 5 years ago.
Robyn Hanson@minuskelvin @VamptVo Microblogging! I totally forgot about that analogy. I joined Twitter in 2008 and spent the next few years teaching workshops to tourism organizations on how to use Twitter. Definitely a challenging platform for a newbie, especially if they’re not curious. I remember telling people it’s like learning email. That was once weird and strange too!
@minuskelvin @VamptVo No, I didn’t work for Twitter. I was an early adopter though. I worked for a real estate marketing software company, training up agents how to use the software, and I was tasked with figuring out how real estate agents should use the platform (i.e. don’t spam your listings, just be your authentic self). That segued into being hired by an agency whose clients were tourism orgs. Super nice, I realize.
@minuskelvin @VamptVo Niche, ha! (Reading this whole backstory is fairly ridiculous I realize!)
lucas 🎺@VamptVo Does this count the users over at
Truth 🤢 dot 🤢social 🤢
Chris Alemany 🇺🇦🇨🇦🇪🇸 🌱@VamptVo that’s when I joined too! Sept 30, 2008. It honestly made no since to me for 5 years. I sense though that if EM continues on his current trajectory without relinquishing the bird site Mastodon and all the people in it, is going to mature much much faster.
Mark Dang-Anh@VamptVo it will hopefully take another direction though
Nujoud@VamptVo which is the year I joined Twitter too, so apparently this is where I reside in the tech adoption curve
Roman Meliška@VamptVo “Even Mastodons are born small.” 👍🏻
E. Hatt-Swank@VamptVo Good points. Heck, i joined twitter a few years ago, long after it was a well-established platform, and it still took me a while to figure things out. Learning new technology is fun! But there are always growing pains & learning curves.
Anke@VamptVo I remember people ridiculing the idea of calling posts "tweets", and that Twitter's image was "a site for people without friends in real life posting what they had for breakfast"
Permagriculture
Jozef@VamptVo while I agree that all software begins new and incurs a learning process, I think Mastadon’s first time user experience is far less intuitive and quick than any popular social media platform that exists today. That includes Twitter in the early years of its inception.
I think the more upfront the community is about that, the faster the user experience is likely to improve.
@GungJoe I've also posted about that before and I agree! I actually think that it would be better for adoption to have centralized services talking to each other over a decentralized network (a la email) rather than Mastodon's current state where it's open-source software run by anyone.
Liam @ GamingOnLinux 🐧🎮@VamptVo I remember the days of constant Twitter errors screens too, it went down *a lot* and people seem to have forgotten or just weren't around then
motang 🇮🇳🇺🇲@VamptVo That about the time I also joined twitter. Back then it was just to try out and I was more of identi.ca user. I still missing that to this day.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Identi.ca
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Identi.ca
@VamptVo exactly. I didn’t understand Twitter when it started: “why would I limit my own text to just 140 characters?!?!?”
Cate@VamptVo If everyone gave $1, we could support this platform.....greatly! 😎
Sean Igo@VamptVo I was a natural language processing researcher at the time and got SO sick of the papers for the next few years cheerily describing what a "tweet" was.
Carlsouthern@VamptVo I, too, started as a weird, confusing new thing
Adam Dalliance@VamptVo Looks like Twitter went from 1 million to 10 million in the year from then during which I joined.
Crikey. Things can move fast. Can they move that fast without an advertising division?
Cosmic // Bren@VamptVo nah this feels more like the start of facebook
Snorefest
arcdaniel@VamptVo I really like the #fediverse but I find it hard to check if an account is really official... It makes the switch from twitter a lot harder.
Movin' to dice.camp
jeSuisatire neindochohh ᘛ⁐̤ᕐᐷtrue, but if we get a real rush to the twitter exit doors, mastodon will have 10 million in a month. How much took twitter to get to 10 milion?
StrohMaestroh@VamptVo I was thinking the exact same thing! Mastodon had a learning curve the same way Twitter did... I remember figuring out hashtags and retweets, etc
@VamptVo I joined in Feb 2007, and it was fun and weird to see who was there, shouting and seeing if anyone heard. Getting/sending tweets via SMS. Seeing Fail Whales.