It is not good news that Mastodon usage has dropped after the initial surge. But it's understandable. Patience and persistence are needed, along with greater (it's coming) ease of use here.
Meanwhile, it's disgusting that journalists -- whom Musk attacked directly and is still in some cases banning from his increasingly right-wing propaganda machine -- have meekly gone back to Twitter.
In a way, it's not surprising. Which says a lot about Big Journalism in our era.
https://www.wired.com/story/the-mastodon-bump-is-now-a-slump/
@dangillmor Like moths to a flame...
@jab01701mid @dangillmor
Truthfully it’s less about Twitter being a terrible place. People are perfectly willing to ignore the most heinous of things…to get something free.
Ignoring things like legal issues or even literal system stability the only question is…can it make money? The original Twitter ‘barely’ managed this via advertising. With additional new debt ads alone won’t cut it.
So the real question is…will people/companies pay for Twitter? As it is now?
Probably not.
@ministerofimpediments @jab01701mid @dangillmor I don't miss Twitter at all. It's a drug for people who just want to argue.
@pshread @ministerofimpediments @dangillmor I began using T*itter around the time of the events in Egypt associated with the "Arab Spring". It was a way to gather "crowd-sourced" news that was not being covered well by other news sources. And I could also follow journalists, and individuals, like I do here, even interact with them.
As soon as the owner of the platform declared open war on arbitrary enemies, using the platform as a toy, it was dead to me for that purpose.