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.

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.

  • Roundcat@kbin.social
    612·
    2 years ago

    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”

    • Sam@lemmy.ca
      19·
      2 years ago

      Every time that happens the fedi retains a good chunk of users. There’s significant and stable growth throughout.

      • Conowelle@lemmy.caEnglish
        8·
        2 years ago

        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

  • User_4272894@lemmy.world
    55·
    2 years ago

    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.

    • teolan@lemmy.world
      15·
      2 years ago

      “You should tweet that” becomes “you should X that”

      “You should X-create” that

    • dangblingus@lemmy.world
      51·
      2 years ago

      Destroying the brand and ruining twitter was always the goal. There’s a good reason why Saudi Arabia fronted half of the bill…

    • Mars2k21@kbin.social
      3·
      2 years ago

      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.

      • Bogasse@lemmy.world
        1·
        2 years ago

        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.

        • Urbanfox@lemmy.world
          1·
          2 years ago

          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.

          • Bogasse@lemmy.world
            1·
            2 years ago

            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…

    • rm_dash_r_star@lemm.ee
      1·
      2 years ago

      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.

  • danielton@lemmy.worldEnglish
    35·
    2 years ago

    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.

    • TheRedSpade@lemmy.worldEnglish
      331·
      2 years ago

      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.

      • Flying Squid@lemmy.worldEnglish
        131·
        2 years ago

        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.

        • Busy@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
          8·
          2 years ago

          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.

      • Tag365@lemmy.worldEnglish
        4·
        2 years ago

        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.

    • Saneless@lemmy.worldEnglish
      19·
      2 years ago

      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

    • Bogasse@lemmy.worldEnglish
      1·
      2 years ago

      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.

      • danielton@lemmy.worldEnglish
        3·
        2 years ago

        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.

      • danielton@lemmy.worldEnglish
        2·
        2 years ago

        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.

    • jantin@lemmy.world
      61·
      2 years ago

      I tried Mastodon and failed. Lemmy is different IMO in that you can freely access, write on and read all lemmy communities from any Lemmy instance (and apparently from Mastodon). On Masto you’re quite siloed-in, can’t follow “local” from a thematic instance with an account on another (and in Lemmy you can follow thematic communities from all around the threadiverse), people won’t see your content unless they either actively follow you or read the local/global feed. Curating feed is a necessary effort and not too easy one since you only get to follow individual users.

  • ComeHereOrIHookYou@lemmy.world
    11·
    2 years ago

    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!

  • kaotic@lemmy.world
    10·
    2 years ago

    Elon has no idea how to run a social media company. At this point he’s just trying random shit hoping it will work. Get the platform operating successfully again and then worry about branding…

    • jantin@lemmy.world
      3·
      2 years ago

      gossip that Elon has no idea about running anything was circulating for a long time but since Tesla/SpaceX were not social media it was easier to manage the PR to make Musk seem like “tech and business genius, also twitter troll” regardless of what was going on behind the scenes. On Twitter every single decision hits millions of people and businesses within an hour and managing that is impossible for any PR department so we get to see the man as who he really is.

    • TheArstaInventor@kbin.social
      1·
      2 years ago

      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.

      • Azzu@lemm.ee
        3·
        2 years ago

        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.

      • bassomitron@lemmy.world
        0·
        2 years ago

        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?

          • can@sh.itjust.works
            0·
            2 years ago

            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.

            • 1chemistdown@kbin.social
              1·
              2 years ago

              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.

  • CharlieAus@lemmy.worldEnglish
    5·
    2 years ago

    Addiction it is. They think they are advocating for health and social justice. But they’re not. They’re just addicted to Twitter/X. I mean… it’s owned by someone who pays fascists to post on there, but they are still there? WTAF?

  • dreadedsemi@lemmy.world
    5·
    2 years ago

    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.

    • SpaceCowboy@lemmy.ca
      1·
      2 years ago

      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.

      • cleric10@lemmy.ml
        2·
        2 years ago

        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.

  • 99nights@lemmy.world
    4·
    2 years ago

    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.

  • CharlieAus@lemmy.worldEnglish
    41·
    2 years ago

    Mastadon is where the smart people hang out… X is the fascist site and Facebook/Threads is the frivolous and stupid site.

    • Ktheone@lemmy.worldEnglish
      2·
      2 years ago

      Nah, Facebook and x are both fascistic sides because of the amount of qanons and magats I’ve seen on facebook