The fact that 76% of developers responding to the GDC survey still use twitter in the face of clear evidence that the site is crumbling to pieces and may go bankrupt at any moment is a real moment to me of like... man, inertia is a powerful thing
a mere 10% of respondents having tried any of the new alternatives is esp fascinating to me - I feel like there's a popular perception that bluesky is "the new twitter" among its users but clearly brands and marketers don't feel the same way
I can't help but wonder if, when twitter eventually fully collapses, we're going to see a moment where a huge number of devs are just... caught out and have to rebuild from scratch. Like if you were going to get out, the time to start getting out is "as soon as humanly possible". It feels actively dangerous to me to not be at least trying to build up elsewhere as a hedge.
I guess we'll see.
Still using Twitter because inertia, sure, that one I can understand.
It's hard to change, especially if you've been using it for ages.
(And it's still the place with the widest... feature set? I guess? In one place? If and when they work on a given day.)
But... Who the fuck is promoting their games on Linkedin, the I'm A Big Business Businesser Person Grownup Roleplaying Site
Waiting until twitter falls over completely or becomes a ghost town is so, so dangerous. I have 8.3k followers on mastodon mostly cause I had some first mover advantage during the migration.
I'm gonna talk about the fediverse here cause uh, well, cohost doesn't tell me how many people follow me and is just too new to see the kind of adoption fedi has. Bluesky also just doesn't have the numbers/activity imo. Feels a lot like the place people have as a backup in case twitter becomes completely non viable.
Anyway, lots of fellow devs used it for a little while, but like, not really? They mostly set up a cross poster, didn't bother to follow people who were actually using fedi, didn't try to form connections there, said nobody was interacting with them, and ditched to go back to twitter.
And yeah I had 13k followers on twitter but 8k on mastodon is effectively more like 30k on twitter. And like, those devs missed out on that. I did try and warn people that 3, 6, 12 months out from the big migration getting traction was gonna be much harder.
Thing is it's still much easier now to invest in being somewhere that isn't going to shit. When twitter does finally bite it though, it's gonna be so hard. The best time to get out of twitter was end of 2022, the second best time is now. The worst time will be when it becomes literally unusable.
It's baffling to me that so many devs, even marketing people, have literally no plan B even though social media marketing is so hugely important to indie gamedevs. Like, you know twitter is dying. It's not a secret. Why are you ignoring the lifeboats? Do you intend to go down with the ship? Cause I don't think that's an amazing strategy!
