Some people will never leave Twitter because it's familiar, they're an established journalist addicted to feeling important, or because they're right-wing chuds who want to see Musk and Truth Social Redux succeed.
Some will migrate to Bluesky for Twitter without Musk. Some will stick with Mastodon on principle or because it's good enough. And then there's some also rans. But I don't think Mastodon or Twitter are going anywhere anytime soon.
Twitter's entire problem is Elon Musk, the debt he saddled the company with, and the intentionally awful decisions he makes. But it still has the most users and is by far the easiest to directly monetize.
That may relegate Bluesky and Mastodon to niche platforms for people who want to avoid ads and other shit. And that could be a lot of people! But it may never dislodge Twitter from its current place of importance.
Only Musk can fly that rocket into the ground.
In the meantime, Bluesky is going to get attention because people are attracted to a shiny new thing and frankly, most social media users don't want to think that hard about what platform they're on.
The people who will leave Twitter typically want the alternative to be extremely Twitter-like, easy to use, with big names they're familiar with, and preferably slick to look at.
They don't care about decentralization or who owns or controls what.
That's neither good nor bad, but it reflects the fact that the average Mastodon user doesn't care about replacing Twitter and is often opposed to making it more Twitter-like, culturally and technologically, even it means driving potential users away.
Bluesky, meanwhile, is very specifically aimed at people who want a Twitter replacement, even if it's not there yet.
Regardless, this could all end with Twitter winning by default, with all of the negative political consequences that entails.
Bluesky seems to have targeted its invitation and recruitment process at popular Twitter super users, although this process was apparently easily gamed, and if it can get a critical mass to sign on and stick around, it might even succeed, leaving Twitter full of nothing but blue check Musk dittoheads.
It's definitely the best funded and organized "Twitter killer" we've seen recently.
That doesn't necessarily mean anything to Mastodon, of course, other than some people who came here to get away from Twitter may eventually migrate away. And good riddance, some would no doubt say.
Mastodon and the Fediverse may regret that attitude if -- and it's a big if, as there's no reason to trust Jack Dorsey -- Bluesky succeeds at becoming the bigger and more popular decentralized platform.
@gwynnion This has always been my frustration with #Mastodon — that its developers and community don't aspire to unseat Capitalist control of social media. They "think small," despite the huge potential #ActivityPub offered.
Had Gargron allowed for "quote toots" and popularity-sorted feeds, Mastodon would have nipped #Bluesky in the bud *months* ago.
Now that window has probably passed, and some VC-funded alternative protocol will overshadow it.
@smitten @donnodubus @gwynnion
What we need are a choice of user-defined algorithmic feeds rather than a single global algo designed to maximize monetization.
@donnodubus @gwynnion don't agree; most of the complaints from fedi-critical twitter users that i've read, including people i knew personally, is that picking instances and apps is too complicated and the culture around content warnings and the like is too suffocating. quote toots and better feed sorting doesn't address those, and there are still workarounds for quoting anyway.
fedi's complexity, fedi culture, and network effects from corporate platforms are better explanations imo
@donnodubus @gwynnion This seems a bit harsh. Quote Toots are on the roadmap and development continues on Mastodon as quick as resources allow.
https://joinmastodon.org/roadmap
It’s an open source project and #Bluesky is hardly complete.
Seems like the major “killer feature” for #Bluesky is that it just seamlessly dumps everyone into a single instance and hand-waves all the federation complexity for sometime later.
@gwynnion
"Bluesky seems to have targeted its invitation and recruitment process at popular Twitter super users"
I feel like this was Post's approach as well. And it too was well-funded by the usual suspects.
Bluesky has the edge of launching immediately on the heels of the bluecheck debacle, which has alienated users and tarnished the brand far more than the capricious banning and unbanning of journalists back in December.
@gwynnion Don't underestimate the number of people who specifically chose the fediverse because they got fed up with Twitter, even before the Musk takeover. It was filled with ads and « recommended » content. Musk helped a lot of people make a decision they were thinking about for quite some time, and now they have moved, will never think about going back to a Twitter lookalike platform.
Also, I can not imagine how a second Twitter can be anything "decentralized". Dorsey wants to keep control.
What's the goal of following celebs?
Are they spreading handfuls of "celebritude" over all their followers, so they can emanate a celeb smell when they are commuting on a crowded train?
@GustavinoBevilacqua @gwynnion You don't have to understand WHY people want to follow celebs. You just have to understand THAT people want to follow celebs.
A good way to recruit people is to give them things they want. That is a thing they want.
If people WANT to jump into a volcano (which I consider a great idea anyway) there must be people EDUCATING them that it could be dangerous, not just satisfying whatever whimsical they want.
I don't give a fuck to recruit sheepies: I want to recruit FIGHTERS to educate people.
@GustavinoBevilacqua @gwynnion Educate people by pummeling them in a fight? I'm sure that strategy's really successful.
Anyway, anybody who's using the word "sheeple" non-ironically has had their brain blended into a fine goo so I now entirely regret responding to you. Good day.
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