nicky flowers

I've been thinking about the "why are people still on twitter" posts that go around, and also people periodically getting upset at Bluesky/Hive/Mastodon/etc., and it feels to me like at least part of it comes down to the unspoken desire to have one "Twitter replacement". And I don't think that's going to happen at all.

Twitter was honestly already breaking apart before Musk bought the site. They'd talked about it in investor calls - usage was declining over the course of the pandemic. There's a lot of reasons (Twitter sucks, everyone's aggressive, it feels bad to use), but it also feels like there's been a breaking apart of "publishing" and "consuming" where some people are moving away from "broadcast" networks entirely to sites where they mostly "consume" stuff.

Beyond that, to the extent that people are sticking around as "posters", it feels like we've hit a natural breaking point on the "everyone's on the same site" thing. Everything's breaking apart into various different smaller sites. I think some people are sticking around on twitter either hoping everyone else stays, or waiting for one site to emerge as the "new thing", but it's not gonna happen. People staying on twitter out of nostalgia for the "everyone's here" site aren't going to get that again; that era's over for now.

full-quack webbed developer @Webster6/2/2023, 6:21 PM

i think there are a lot of people, myself included, who do NOT want an "everyone's here" site. just a "my whole community is here" site. and they're waiting for a digital moses to deliver them there. which also is not going to happen.

You must log in to comment.

in reply to @dog's post:

andi @mcc6/2/2023, 5:57 PM

Thinking What if:

Bluesky - Site for people who want to be on Twitter the way it was before Musk bought it
Mastodon - Site for people who want to be on Twitter the way it was in 2013
Cohost - Site for people who want to be on Twitter the way it would have been if it existed in 1998…? Or, more likely: Site for people who want to be on Tumblr in some alternate timeline where everyone agreed not to do callout posts
Discord - Site for people who do not want to be on Twitter

andi @mcc6/2/2023, 5:57 PM

Matrix - Site for people who want to be on IRC

@Janet6/2/2023, 6:28 PM

have you had experience with urbit? at some point they sounded like they might integrate all the above into one thing while inventing another real estate scheme for the internet because maintaining ownership over domains isnt bad enough already

i wish it wasnt so heavily centralized* and complicated

i guess you can run it in isolation but last time i was trying to get my head around it i was barely getting into the lowlevel language stuff, the highlevel part might as well have been martian /_/ the complexity felt a bit like obfuscation to me and lisp looked much more approachable in comparison, also the authoritarian feel of it all wasnt very inviting

Misty @dog6/2/2023, 6:29 PM

Oh god, Urbit. How much is it all still under the cloud of its founder? A whole lot I bet.

@Janet6/2/2023, 6:31 PM

its been at years since i last touched it, but the memories still haunt me

andi @mcc6/2/2023, 6:55 PM

My only experience with Urbit was having my legal name put on a recommended industry blacklist of "SJWs" that software companies should avoid hiring¹ because I cosigned a petition asking a programming conference I was ancillary staff on to dis-invite Urbit's founder/project lead from giving a talk on Urbit².

Following these events I made a personal decision not to bother investigating the technical side of Urbit

¹ Created by the "Sad Puppies" guy, so it didn't seem like the kind of thing a potential employer would actually take seriously, except that ESR did write a blog post posting the list and urging software companies not to hire on the list, so that would have actually been a bit alarming if ESR were still relevant.
² A petition I felt was important due to non-technical blog posts in which he advocated or presented the appearance of advocating race slavery.

RSS download -> https://ghoulnoise.com/feed/@ghoulnoise6/2/2023, 7:50 PM

holy shit

@Janet6/3/2023, 6:17 PM

holy fuck...

i guess this was expected, i havent seen the race slavery thing but im glad i jettisoned that shit off my disk before stumbling over any of that... you may quote me on saying it was technically impressive but overly complicated and hard to follow to a point of me suspecting the intent being obfuscation.

colin @vogon6/2/2023, 6:19 PM

I would say mechanically, mastodon and bluesky are both twitter if they came from an alternate universe where jack dorsey'd had enough foresight to see the online reaction of 2014- coming

mastodon is from that universe if he realized no for-profit company could be trusted to maintain public discourse and dissolved it into a bunch of volunteer-run nonprofits

bluesky is from that universe if he realized no for-profit company could be trusted to maintain public discourse and decided to redesign the software such that the discourse itself was entirely unmaintained but you could choose which private security contractor you could use to keep the riff-raff off your doorstep

andi @mcc6/2/2023, 6:44 PM

I haven't actually used Bluesky, I can only judge by the people I know of who've gone in hard on it, how they've described it, and therefore how they seem to conceptualize the site themselves

colin @vogon6/2/2023, 7:00 PM

yeah, totally valid -- the big thing vibes-wise is that they went hard on sending early invites to big Classic Twitter influencers, and the userbase is still smaller than cohost

lori @lori6/3/2023, 12:00 AM

I got access and frankly it's just Twitter but more boring

andi @mcc6/3/2023, 12:19 AM

"Twitter but more boring"

That is fine with me, I am a Mastodon user

lori @lori6/3/2023, 12:36 AM

Mastodon has cool people posting though, Bluesky feels more like Spoutible which is one of the worst ones so far where people just post about Biden and the royal family all day.

Brett @bck3566/2/2023, 6:41 PM

I never had a twitter because aggression from strangers is terrifying to me and I didn't even want to try it. I think even if that wasn't a problem for me I still wouldn't really like it because I want to people, not brands or celebrities and as far as I saw that was the only shit that actually mattered on twitter

cohost tempted me out of my hermit crab box because there's only people here but my paralyzing fear of aggression didn't go away

My point bringing this up I guess is that I don't understand (as in literally don't understand, not don't empathize) the "everyone's here" aspect of twitter because I was not there to experience it and the other thing I don't understand (and this time I DO mean "don't empathize") is why people want that

Like maybe this is just hermit me only ever talking to a handful of people I randomly met in video games and hit it off with but the sheer exposure of social media, just in general, triggers massive social agorophobia in me, and yet I am a person and I have a need to actually interact with people every once in a while too

So where cohost settled ended up being pretty nice for me I guess and that's why I actually stay but the size of the community (at least, perceptionally) is pretty much inversely proportional to how willing I am to actually stay

SO my big point is

I think having multiple smaller sites is a good thing

@AndreL6/2/2023, 9:38 PM

Yeah, Twitter never was the place with everybody, though most journalists were on it. Musk only has about 187 million daily users worldwide, less than a tenth of Zuck's 2 billion daily.

@secrets6/3/2023, 12:47 AM

There'll be lots of sites everybody's on, Twitter at its height never had anything on Facebook or Reddit or even Telegram. But there'll probably never be a website again where you can show Ted Cruz or Bari Weiss tubgirl and be reasonably assured they'll see it and get really mad, and I think that's kind of sad.

Pinned Tags