Thread by @srossmktg

This is a good thread.

There are good reasons to go over Mastodon. Good reasons to establish presence now. But the collapse of Twitter will be chronic, not acute.

https://twitter.com/garius/status/1588827775628369920

I first joined Mastodon in September 2017 after folks were talking about quitting Twitter after the 2016 election. Several tens of thousands of folks were using it. It was so long ago, I forgot which instance I registered on when I re-registered in April 2022. Few folks using it.

Same thing happened back in December 2010 when folks launched a #DeleteFacebook campaign. I joined Diaspora--a social network like Facebook but federated like Mastodon. For as many #DeleteFacebook campaigns occurred over the years, Diaspora never had enough users using it.

Twitter has 400m MAU. 655k have joined Mastodon since Elroy took over. Even if that triples, it's still a rounding error off Twitter's user base (Elroy knows this).

Social networks do have a half life and Twitter may be past its half-life. But long half lives mean longer full decay times. Elroy may have accelerated this, but still not exponentially so. mashable.com/article/twitte…

So it is good folks are joining Mastodon. It's good folks are trying to build network value there and network effects. And perhaps now if Metcalf's law kicks in there, it'll be worth my personal, if not, professional investment.

But as an Xennial who has long been Extremely Online and consumed how these (and alt) networks work (anyone heard of WTsocial? Remember Ello?), my experiences lead me to believe the decline of Twitter will be chronic-- not acute. Join Mastodon. But not for the reasons you think.

Also, none of that is a defense of Elroy and how he's running this thing (eg the callousness of mass layoffs, the inability to moderate content). The two things are absolutely correlated. But my experiences with networks/network value is what inform my "how it works" perspective.

Anyways, aside from reading up the thread, I'm (professionally) at @[e-mail] if anyone is looking. And if I need to change instances, please let me know where. mas.to/@srossmktg