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”
X-crement
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
We’re witnessing an X-tinction event in real time.
Ain’t X-ing a term for cutting something out of your life ?
Yes, and I was thinking how confusing it could be. A: “Hey, did you see that trend on X?” B: “What? No, I don’t talk to my ex anymore.”
I should X that sounds like I should delete/close that. How apt.
Twitter is my ex
To me it sounds like axe.
“Yep, brilliant. Axe it.”
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?
Haha, I know the most appropriate iteration, a red background with the X in a white circle.
Perhaps with each corner of the X at a 90 degree angle clockwise? You know, to add style points.
It makes the X go faster, everyone knows that.
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.
“Hey bros wanna see me light $40 billion on fire?”
Follow me on ten.
you should X that
You should x-crete that
Xing is short for kissing IE XOXO. So instead of tweeting we are now kissing!
“Hey, check out this X video”
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!
Here is an alternative Piped link(s): https://piped.video/watch?v=UfOK0evCqZY
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source, check me out at GitHub.
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”
Every time that happens the fedi retains a good chunk of users. There’s significant and stable growth throughout.
Ya that’s what happened with me, I deleted my account once Musk took over and started a Mastodon account and now I’m on Lemmy too and haven’t looked back at either platforms
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.
I feel that’s a feature of Lemmy to not do both. I don’t care about microblogs. I want the sites that I use to do one thing and do it as well as possible, so I can mix & match what I use, and not see what I don’t want.
The thing is, it’s not forced into your feed or anything. If you want to see microblogs, you have to go to the microblogs tab
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.
It was one guy until recently. But now if you look at the Kbin commits, it looks like 3 or 4 people. It’s growing.
Great for the fediverse there’s many different codebases.
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 just checked too. And if you close popup it takes you do another login page (also with an X) but that one can’t be closed. So apparently there is no way to browse Twitter without an account now, which you could before.
People always used to claim that getting banned from twitter meant you were cut off from important information. It’s highly debatable that there was any important information on twitter. That aside it wasn’t really true you were cut off entirely, you could still browse tweets, just couldn’t post when banned. Now it seems being banned does mean you’re cut off from reading it.
Yeah, that’s a change from while back.
Twitter was really good for news media and it kinda still is. Where I come from legacy media have been bought off by plutocrats who are in bed with the government and only reputable source of news are independent media which don’t have enough funding or financial backing to appear on satellite TV channels. There’s also no incentive for the incumbent to let such media flourish since legacy media is doing their dirty work. So for people like me this is a huge setback.
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!
I hate to correct you, but it’s a billionaire baboon bills brawl.
Damn, that’s even better!
An affluent ape asset altercation.
Grossly gilded gorilla grapple?
Overhyped orangutan oligarch octagon ordeal.
Lucrative lemur litigation.
Wait so the cage match is still a possibility?
There is a possibility!
Microsoft also as a trademark for X.
deleted by creator
A more appropriate rebranding would be ‘L’.
They even stole x.org’s logo:
believe it or not its more likely they straight up ripped off U+1D54F MATHEMATICAL DOUBLE-STRUCK CAPTIAL X:
𝕏
absolutely no creativity. at least threads drew the ring in @ clockwise instead of the usual anticlockwise
Saw this on Mastodon:
Important sets:
ℂ the complex numbers
ℕ the natural numbers
ℚ the rational numbers
ℝ the real numbers
𝕏 the set of fascists wannabes
ℤ the integers
I would argue that ℤ would also be the set of Russian fascist wannabes.
My favorite comment about this from Mastodon: “X is just a sans serif swastika”.
Imagine a billionaire approving that “logo” despite how uncreative it is. Like get a better graphic designer I guess?
only difference between billionaires and normal people is that billionaires have a lot of money. best not to assume they have above-average logo appreciation skills. although they could hire some good advisors i suppose
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!
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.
What I did in the very beginning:
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don’t worry about the instance that you are on. My server is quite generic and is meant to be a simple entrypoint to the fediverse, not a “community in itself”.
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Go to the mastodon directory to find the list of servers based on interests. fosstodon is one for FOSS enthusiasts, beekeeping is for those interesting in gardening, mountains.social is for those that like hiking, etc. The important thing here is to find servers that are not huge, but that have an active userbase.
-
Now, the real trick: for all these servers you found that could be interesting, you go browse at the federated timeline. This will give not only the activity from people in the server, but you will also see what they are following, boosting, etc. To me this was a way to find not just interesting people, but who the interesting people are following as well.
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Be very generous when browsing these timelines, and follow as many as you can possibly can. During the first week, try to add 50 a day.
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Follow hashtags. This will also make your timeline more lively and will bring different people who might be interesting to you.
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Write an intro post, and pin it to your profile. Usually pinned profiles are always visible between servers, so it will make it easy for people to interact with you.
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(Somewhat controversial, but I do it) If you have people that you like to follow on Twitter, follow them on Mastodon as well via a BirdSite mirror. You won’t be able to do it from the larger instances, but if you join a more chill instance (like mine ;)) it should be fine.
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Evangelize: if you have friends on Twitter, ask them to join as well. Most Mastodon servers have a way to let you send invites to others.
When you start getting the feeling that you are getting overwhelmed, it’s the time to cull down the list. Feel free to unfollow any person or hashtag that you think is too noisy or not really interesting.
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I wrote since stuff to help new Mastodon users: https://babylon4.com/mastodon
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.
how did you find people to follow?
Find tags that you like; follow the tags.
Eventually you’ll find people posting in those tags that you end up liking; follow them.
And repeat. =)
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.
boosting toots
I don’t think they call it TOOTS anymore.
I’m a grandpa of mastodon.
Toots despite the proximity with tweet is good for the community aspect.
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 mainly used it for news till the rate limiting but i just followed news sources and have since found users to follow.
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.
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.
He wants something like WeChat that does everything.
Less than 1% of twitter users signed up to pay for twitter blue. And less than 1% of twitter users are going to do their banking through a social media site run by a megalomaniac. This is doomed to failure, just like it was 20 years ago.
As painful as it might be for him, this dude really needs to let go of his obsession with the letter X.
Source it was 1%?
He does know that Wechat is the everything app because of the authoritarian government, right…right?
I think he knows well how it works.
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”.
Maybe because this new decision is so unbelievably idiotic either it is the last straw or maybe some people realize
twitterx is lost cause? Idk.I don’t like twitter nor Elon but why would someone leave a platform because they would change their name?
Twitter has been around for so long, many are attached to it on an emotional level. It’s older than my eldest niece; she’s known about it since she could memorize the damn word.
So as dumb as it is that THIS is what pushes people to leave, I’m glad more are leaving regardless.
This reminds me of the time that the movie XxX came out and it was difficult to find to pirate.
When you name yourself anything with a lot of X’s then your search engine results are going to point to adult entertainment over the product
Just googled X, musk isn’t on the first page of results, absolute melon of a man.
google is broken anyway after 2 decades of people fucking with the algo by offering SEO services. The search results are basically random now unless you really focus your search term.
Google should have added SEO detection that would allow a site to be near the top for enough time for an SEO consultant to get paid, then drop the site to page 4. SEO would have looked like a scam before long.
When life gives you melon…
And then you add the lead actor to the search terms and it gets even worse
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Yep, everyone I followed on Twitter went to Bluesky, some made accounts on Mastodon, but none of them stuck around
One idea is to browse the hashtag #introduction and follow people whose introductions sound promising to you. The hashtag #FediTips might also be useful. If you want to follow scholars and scientists, there is this list grouped by discipline: https://github.com/nathanlesage/academics-on-mastodon And in general, you can follow hashtags on Mastodon, e.g. “#bloomscrolling” for pictures of plants.
@Squidquid Option #1: Search for a hashtag. If it exists, and it’s halfway active, follow it. No, I’m not kidding you, you can do that on Mastodon.
Option #2: the people section on fediverse.info.
Option #3: No matter which instance you’re on, go to mastodon.social with your Web browser and search it for interesting hashtags. This may reveal to you more people who are interested in those topics/write about those topics.
Also, if you want to learn more about the Fediverse beyond Lemmy (and beyond Mastodon, for that matter), go follow [email protected]. It’s a public forum on Friendica. You’ll learn soon enough what Friendica is.
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.
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.
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.
and instead of tweeting, people are now x-creting
Joke of the century
