Twitter might be replaced, but not by Mastodon or other imitators

[Celerity]

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2023/01/17/twitter-mastodon-replacement-social-media/

https://archive.ph/967Ju



By now, every social media network’s primary problem is all the other social media networks. Each platform becomes more valuable with each additional user, because it means more people to connect with. But at this point, fledgling platforms have basically two choices to grow their networks: Persuade users to give up some other app, or persuade us to give up sleep.

This is why Elon Musk’s acquisition of Twitter turned out to be a stroke of luck for Mastodon, a platform that might be described as an open-source, decentralized version of Twitter. In November, people who were disgusted with Musk’s new moderation policies — or just worried that Twitter would stop working after a 75 percent reduction in employee head count — migrated to Mastodon, driving its user total from 300,000 in October to 2.5 million.

This was a spectacular growth rate until it stopped. By early this month, active users had fallen by more than half a million, the Guardian reported. Possibly, this was simply a temporary hiccup, but I doubt it, because the nature of the attention economy makes it hard to create a major social media network that is like an existing network, only a little bit different.

In general, if you are providing a service that is like something else on the market but tweaked in some way, you run the risk that you have changed something important, and your new version will be less popular, or less profitable, than the one you were trying to replace.

snip


related

Elon Musk drove more than a million people to Mastodon – but many aren’t sticking around

More than 130,000 people were joining the new independent social media network a day in November. So why hasn’t it taken off?

Sat 7 Jan 2023 19.00 GMT

The number of active users on the Mastodon social network has dropped more than 30% since the peak and is continuing a slow decline, according to the latest data posted on its website. There were about 1.8 million active users in the first week of January, down from over 2.5 million in early December.

Mastodon, an open-source network of largely independently hosted servers, has often been touted as an alternative to Twitter. And its growth appears connected to controversies at Twitter. But for many it doesn’t fulfil the role that Twitter did and experts say it may be too complicated to really replace it.

“Twitter, in its most basic form is simple,” Meg Coffey, a social media strategist, said. “You can open up an app or open up a website, type some words, and you’re done. I mean, it was [a] basic SMS platform.”

There were about 500,000 active Mastodon users before Elon Musk took control of Twitter at the end of October. By mid-November, that number climbed to almost 2 million active users.



snip

newest numbers:

https://api.joinmastodon.org/statistics

{"period":"2023-01-20T00:00:00.000+00:00","server_count":"9622","user_count":"5990469.0","active_user_count":"1466194.0"}]

[True Dough]

1. Mastadon

will go the way of the dinosaur? Who could have seen it coming???