G. Willow WilsonI've been trending in this direction anyway, but next month Twitter will become an announcement-only platform for me. Personal prediction: there will be no mass migration to the fediverse or spoutible or anywhere else. Instead, a return to internet 1.5 norms is underway: smaller, more niche communities, many of them walled gardens. The global public square/water cooler is on its way out as an ideal.
Why do I think this? Partly bc Internet 1.5 platforms are having a renaissance, Reddit and Discord in particular. Most people don't want the entire planet to follow the conversations they have with their friends. That is a useful discoverability feature for content creators/media people (myself included) BUT there are ways to manage. Ppl will still go to Twitter, FB, Insta etc for news; posting announcements there will still have value.
What is happening now on Twitter is not migration; it's dispersal. People are leaving for a whole host of different platforms. As long as twitter remains an essential clearinghouse for breaking news and up to the minute info, it will shuffle onwards, but it's finished as an incubator of mass culture.
Coles Street Pothole@GWillow I think you’re right. I’ve likened my Mastodon instance to a community bulletin board that can, if I want it to, be partially merged with other boards. But there is no central public square. And my Twitter use is mostly read-only, for news.
JJ Peterson@GWillow Its not an essential clearinghouse for breaking news, it’s more like breaking announcements by journalist/influencers pretending to do news, but who are actually just enabling blatant fascism and white supremacy by staying on Twitter. They think they are too important to not be on Twitter.
Joby (chaotic good)@GWillow Yeah, I've found that Twitter is still unrivaled on that front. I don't post to it any more, but I do still check it for breaking news or to see if other people are having the same problem as me with a platform or service.
Patrick, Grand Arbiter
tptigger@GWillow This reminds me of what happened when Livejournal started becoming hostile to fannish activity: a slow scattering with no consensus of where to go next.
Craig Grannell@GWillow I think you’re right, but I do wonder whether Twitter will even survive as the place for breaking news. Musk seems to be doing everything to erode trust in the platform. And if we’ll be at the point where only paying subscribers get visibility and all polls are paying folks only, I can’t see too many networks with any integrity or editorial standards taking Twitter that seriously.
@craiggrannell We'll see! Media outlets prioritize eyeballs above all things, including integrity, so I imagine they will continue hanging around until the eyeballs disappear.
📎🖐️ Alan Taylor 🎬 📚
screw_dog@GWillow I tend to agree. One idea I've been mulling over is that internet 2.0 was partly a fad - that many who've left FB/Twitter/etc haven't gone to other platforms, they've stopped using social media qua social media all together.
@GWillow Oh, and I've been wondering if we're seeing a really important societal shift away from having a "mainstream culture" created via mass media to only having fragmented, overlapping, niche cultures in a way that hasn't existed for possibly generations