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!
Cuz on the one hand - even if it IS an observably worse place to be than it was two years ago, it makes sense for small developers, artists, writers, streamers, et al to keep using Twitter right up to the point that it shuts down because there remains a large number of people who use Twitter. Like, whether you like it or not, for a lot of people in this position, "not using Twitter" represents leaving an unacceptable amount of money on the table. And people know how to use Twitter, too - anyone who has to interface with social media as part of their job knows that being successful requires regular engagement and a good understanding of a platform, its etiquette, its mores, its in-jokes, and it's hardly surprising that when confronted with a half-dozen potential Twitter successors, each with their own culture and format, people whose time and energy is already extremely limited will balk and give up preemptively. Nothing about being a small creator is easy, and the fear of backing the wrong horse only to be double-fucked in two years when, say, both Twitter AND Bluesky fold is palpable. Oh, and a lot of small creators who might have sizeable Twitter followings probably feel that said followings only got started due to random chance - happening to be at the right place at the right time during an era of social media that has come and gone, with no guarantee that they'll be able to make lightning strike twice on a new platform.
So, like, yeah, there are a lot of very valid reasons for someone who relies on Twitter to get visibility on their work to continue using Twitter until there's no Twitter left to use.
On the OTHER hand...
Everything @eniko is saying above is completely correct! This bit in particular echoes a lot of my frustrations with artists who gave Cohost a try during one of the big signup frenzies a while back:
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.
I referenced this a little while back on my Twitter:
It drives me up the wall how many artists signed up for Cohost, posted one or two pieces, and then either got spooked by the lack of metrics or at the lack of instantaneously rebuilding their entire following and went back to mainly doing art dumps on Twitter. Which, for all the reasons I just listed, is understandable. But this frog-in-a-boiling-pot mentality is really getting to me, man. If you wait until Twitter explodes to start seriously exploring alternatives you are going to be so much more fucked. And it doesn't have to be Cohost! At this point I just want everyone I like to get set up ANYWHERE else besides Twitter ahead of time so they don't drop completely off the face of the planet whenever Elon pulls the plug. You've got to pick somewhere and you've actually got to USE it so you know HOW to use it like you know how to use Twitter, because it's looking more and more like Twitter isn't going to be around forever (I said something similar to this in my post a month ago about setting up Patreon alternatives).
And on the note of follower counts being a deceptive measure of actual reach, here's the traffic info for the Adult Analysis Anthology:
I have about 1.4k followers on Twitter, and probably a little more than half that here on Cohost, yet as you can see, clickthroughs coming from Cohost have outpaced those coming from Twitter by more than 2-to-1. And that's WITH several of my tens-of-thousands-of-followers-having colleagues from the TinyHat adult game publishing label being gracious enough to retweet the announcement tweet I made. (The Twitter/Cohost clickthroughs on Opportunity are roughly equivalent and are both dwarfed by the clickthroughs coming from various parts of the Itch platform itself by more than 10-to-1 anyways. Off-platform socmed attention on indie games is mainly useful for building an initial sales presence and bringing attention to discounts.)
The very frustrating part about this is that right now it feels pretty hard to convince people to actually give new platforms a fair chance outside of big mass-panic events, no matter how good an idea it might obviously be. Sucks!
For what it's worth I no longer use Twitter. I'll add the caveat that if I have a release of a video or a game I'll still post it there, but I haven't used it other than that since the start of 2023. Now, that is a principled stance, but...
When I have used Twitter the results are so much inferior to what I get out of Mastodon. I admit I use cohost much more casually so I don't really have metrics on that but it wouldn't surprise me if even cohost was outperforming Twitter. I've seen accounts with a combined 6 figure following on Twitter try to promote an event and get 15 retweets between them. Meanwhile I promoted my itch and Steam sale over the holidays on Mastodon and it got 600 boosts with my puny 8k followers. It was the most lucrative winter sales season I've had in half a decade.
So like, is not using Twitter really leaving that much money on the table if it no longer works at all? Everyone has to answer that for themselves, but for me there's no question that Twitter isn't really worth using.
Of course the easy counter is "but Eniko not everyone has 8k followers on Mastodon" but like... where do you think those followers came from? When I saw the writing on the wall I hustled my ass off. I made Mastodon (and cohost) a real part of my life and also tried other alternatives (Bluesky, Hive, both of which I bounced off it because they just felt like they were not it to me) and that's how I got most of those followers. The vast majority of them are not people who migrated off Twitter briefly and then bounced, the majority are people who were either there already or who integrated into a new community to call their own.
