Good Morning Friends! While technically a vacation day for me, I guess I am here opting to write a blog post because I have had some thoughts kicking around in my head. It has been a bit of a wild ride since the first of this month for a lot of folks on the internet. If you have not been impacted then gratz… you are not terminally online. For the rest of us, however, there has been a bit of strife even for those who abandoned that site last year. Essentially a sequence of events has led to Twitter largely being unusable for the average user that has refused to pay for the $8 per month badge of shame. Firstly on June 30th, Twitter shut off access for anyone viewing the site without logging in first… which also killed access to any links that have been shortened with T.Co. Next came the above tweet which announced that all Twitter users would be dealing with “rate limits”.
What this means in practice is that simply by leaving your Twitter client or web browser running, you would begin to lose access to new tweets when your account on any platform had cached 600 messages. New accounts are restricted to 300 I am assuming so folks don’t simply create alt accounts to bypass the quota. The rumor is that this is all being brought on by the fact that Elon Musk yet again failed to pay one of his bills… this time for hosting in the Google Cloud. There has supposedly been a mad dash within Twitter to migrate elsewhere, and the impossible task was not completed in time… leading to the entire service being severely throttled instead of fessing up to this… it is being played as more of Elon’s crusade against bots and data scraping.
This is not the first time we have decreed that Twitter was burning. However, this is maybe the first time that it has truly adversely impacted the average user. 600 Tweets is not a lot given how spammy some users are, and given that promoted tweets and the things that the algorithm crams in your feed also count towards that number… most everyone ends up being rate limited before long. There is actually a weird sub-community that has sprung up around trying to speed-run the rate limit. The end result of this is that folks who never considered leaving… are not desperately seeking a solution. Essentially everyone seems to be looking for the next Twitter.
The latest greatest home seems to be Blue Sky. For those who are completely unaware of what this nonsense is, essentially Jack Dorsey of Twitter fame… has gone off and attempted to create his own corporate version of Mastodon that looks and feels like Twitter did circa 2008. The problem with Blue Sky is threefold… firstly it is very much a “minimum viable product” at the moment and is missing a bunch of features that one expects from a Twitter-Clone like some measure of private messaging. Secondly, they are using the Gmail model for growth, where every so often users are given one or two invites for them to ration out to their friends. Thirdly you are jumping from the arms of one corporation that had no clue how to make enough money to sustain its service to the arms of another company with seemingly no viable business plan.
At some point, it seemed that Blue Sky was universally declared the new Twitter, and folks desperately tried to get invites to the platform. This caused so much churn that by the afternoon of the first, Blue Sky had to completely turn off invites… even for pre-existing codes that had been sent out. There was a period of time when neither Twitter nor Blue Sky was loading at all. They have since turned back on the trickle of outstanding invites, but no new ones are being sent out. Essentially there is no room in the inn for new users, and the site is not ready for public launch. The folks who are there seem to like it, and I personally think it is a reasonable place to visit… but doesn’t really feel like home. The platform as a whole is missing so many features that it really does not make sense for them to attempt to rush into production. So as a result of just not being able to accept the masses, Blue Sky will in theory fail to be the new Twitter.
Now Meta is attempting to toss their hat into the ring with Threads. I am uncertain if this is the ActivityPub option that has caused so much drama recently within the Fediverse, or if this is something entirely different that they had been working on. Whatever the case this will give folks who are already bought into Instagram an option to make Twitter-like text-based posts on that platform. While I use Instagram occasionally I don’t really love it. Instagram is a site about beautiful people posting beautiful things about their beautiful lives. I am not a beautiful person, and I am also not extremely visually motivated when it comes to expressing myself. I write walls of text broken up by screenshots, and when I am not doing that… I write dumbassed quips. Instagram has never really felt like home, and I doubt adding Twitter posts to it will make it more embracing either.
Then there are the living dead… the locations that attempted to be Twitter or at least give an alternate landing spot that failed to gain any real traction. These include Spoutible shown above, Post, CoHost, and countless others trying to be the next new place for folks to talk with each other. All of these have their own communities but they are also extremely narrow in their scope and have lacked the mass adoption required to be the next Twitter. Spoutible seems to be a carbon copy version of Twitter, and others like CoHost are leaning more on the past social networks and creating an almost Live Journal-style experience. Then there are things like Tumblr that are still alive and kicking and apparently working on federating over ActivityPub.
Then there is the Fediverse, or as most folks seem to refer to it… Mastodon. This is more the Anti-Twitter than a Twitter replacement because it was created by folks looking for an alternative to social media as it existed at the time… and was forged in the fires of folks who abandoned Twitter for various sundry reasons. There are many articles out there that will tell you that the Twitter Migration failed and that Mastodon will not be the next Twitter… and I agree with them for the most part. I think the key to understanding this is the fact that the folks running most Fediverse servers would not consider replacing Twitter as a laudable goal. It sorta just wants to exist as its own thing, which is there if folks want to partake but also… fine if folks don’t.
While I have been dabbling with Mastodon, particularly since 2018, I truly made it my home late last year and made what I hope was my final migration to Gamepad.club a server that I help administrate. I chided Blue Sky for not really having a viable business model, but the truth is… the Fediverse isn’t really out to make money either. Most servers like ours run on a patronage system where folks donate time and money to help keep the site running. This doesn’t really work at scale, but I feel like the Fediverse works when it is a bunch of smaller communities rather than attempting to be a single flagship mono-site like Mastodon.social or even honestly Mstdn.social. Because the network is so distributed… the smaller servers felt almost no impact from the crush of new user sign-ups. While we had quite a few new faces show up over the weekend… the server remained happily trucking along without missing a beat.
While there are absolutely a bunch of different options out there who do want to be the next Twitter… I don’t really think any of them will succeed at that goal. Twitter is a thing that evolved over time as the lowest common denominator, the network that everyone simultaneously agreed was tolerable enough to maintain a presence on. That began to change when Elon Musk took over, and it is a landslide that can’t really be stopped now. However once that dam truly breaks… folks are going to spread out to ALL of the options that I mentioned and many more that I didn’t… and not a single one of them will become the new ubersite. Folks have way too many options and once you realize you don’t really need Twitter or its clout, you start to focus instead on what actually brings meaning to your personal experience.
I found my new home, and while I realize most people ended up turning their noses up at the Fediverse/Mastodon experience… I found a community there. I would say maybe 30% of the total #TwitterMigration stuck around, but those who did found communities and started adding to the tapestry that is what makes that place special. While I will probably dabble in lots of different networks as they evolve into specific niche cases, my home base is always going to be Gamepad. Sure it meant that I lost a lot of friends through the transition, but I made so many brand new friends… and it isn’t like my path probably won’t cross the folks I missed along the way. It is not like I am terribly hard to find when someone decides to pay me a visit years down the line.
There won’t be a new Twitter, because you just can’t even have back a specific moment in time. For me, the final straw was Elon’s antics. For others, it will be the rate-limiting that started this week. For yet more it will be the fact that they will be losing TweetDeck in roughly 30 days if they don’t pay the $8 per month ransom to keep access. Much like there was never another World of Warcraft, because no other game really captured the moment that crafted that game… there will never be another Twitter. There will be larger communities and smaller communities… but there will be no one place where everyone has to be. I know personally… I am looking to move away from as many corporate services as I can and begin hosting my own infrastructure where possible. This blog has been around for almost fifteen years at this point, and has migrated between multiple providers… and because I own it… I know it will keep existing as my landmark on the internet for as long as I need it.
I’ve gone so far as to host my own Linktree because I did not like being beholden to that service. Sure it took a modicum of effort for me to configure Link Stack on my web host, but once done I now have a permanent way to keep my various links up to date and give someone a simple link to find pretty much everything I do. At some point… I probably want to go down the path of migrating away from Gmail. It isn’t like Google is known for keeping things around for long… so I figure at some point in the not-so-distant future the axe will come for it as well. Moving away from Twitter was more of an evolution than I realized it would be. I want to own my place on the internet, or at least trust the people who run the resources I am consuming. However… this will not be something that everyone is even interested in doing and as a result, someone will need to keep maintaining the “AOL” for those users.
I think the volume of what is available on Twitter will likely land in three different places. There will be about a third of people who do eventually migrate over to the fediverse in one form or another, even if it is corporate variants like the ActivityPub federation that Tumblr is looking at. Then there will be folks who stay loyal to Blue Sky and keep betting on Jack to make things right again out of some sense of misplaced trust that he can build a new Twitter. There will be another third that land on whatever the Meta offering ends up looking like because they are already comfortable with Instagram or Facebook and just want a turnkey solution that asks absolutely nothing of them and could not give a fuck about what that might mean for their data in the long run. The monoculture of Twitter, if there ever was such a thing… will cease to exist. Elon has done irreparable harm, and all that is left is for folks to wake up and realize that particular party is over.
There will be no new Twitter because that era is over.
[UPDATE – 14:00 CDT]
When I wrote this post earlier in the day… I was apparently super dense. I knew that Meta had been working on what is effectively their own Mastodon Client (technically just interops with ActivityPub), but I had no clue it was launching this fast. Threads is essentially a corporate storefront on the Fediverse. It will be interesting to see how this all shakes out.
More good thoughts here, Belghast. I think you’re right. There won’t really be another Twitter. And most people who flee it will land in one of the three sites you mentioned; I’d say that’s accurate.
I’m on Twitter, but I’m not a heavy user. I might try Bluesky. Somehow, though I’ve come close several times, I’ve never made a Tumblr account! Also, never TikTok. Just no. I did use and like Google+ circa 2012. But yeah, ya know, Google killed it unceremoniously.
In any case, this is a fun time to try new things online and see where things go. The fediverse may be the true web 3.0 or whatever.
I just wanted to say it feels very validating to see someone else talk about Instagram the way I feel about it. So many of my peers are on it and they don’t understand why I don’t want to be on there and why someone would prefer words over looking at pictures.
Personally, when people started migrating for the first time, after Elno took over, I was trying out Mastodon/Fediverse and while it was nice to see a platform that is so violently Anti-Twitter and community-based, I just wasn’t able to stick to using it. I had a hard time finding people or figuring out a bubble to latch onto and ended up just not using it all that much.
It’s similar to me with the game launcher debacle. If it weren’t for the fact that most of my games are on Steam, I’d probably use GOG’s or Epic Games’ launcher or even uPlay or whatever… but at the moment, I only really have the spoons for Steam.
I dislike Musk and the website has been getting slower and slower while also getting more and more radicalized. I’ve been seeing so much hatespeech and toxicity on Twitter even with my best efforts of curating my timeline and muting/blocking terms. Heck, I blocked Elno and it kept unblocking him.
Despite that, I still used it because so many of my friends were still using it and it was the only way to still be kinda up to date with what’s going on in their online lives.
Now, people are migrating again and there are many people leaving the website because TweetDeck stopped working and because of the whole rate-limit thing. My issue is that people are moving to all sorts of places and it’s just kinda difficult to decide on where to go next to not lose out on too many of them. Fomo intensifies, haha
I haven’t hit any rate limit and that’s probably just because I only browse Twitter here and there for a while and there’s no way that I’d ever get to 300 tweets, let alone 600. With that being the case, I’m just feeling less and less comfortable on Twitter. The “free speech absolutism” that Elno provided is what’s limiting free speech on that platform.
When I stick to my lists and the “Following” tab, I have an okay time… but the app and the browser page keep pushing me onto the “For You” tab where I suddenly encounter queerphobes and racists – all of which have blue ticks and all of which are getting boosted by people from their bubble. Elno isn’t helping the case either since he always somehow makes it to the “For You” tab despite being blocked and muted – posting unfunny “memes” that remind me of that Anti-“SJW”/”Woke” BS from 2014.
And since there’s no real alternative, I may just stick to Discord and I’ll possibly revive my tumblr page, idk. I agree with you that there will be no “new Twitter”, mostly because it just kinda needs that general consensus of people to move there and I don’t see that happening with so many clones appearing in the mix. Just like how TeamSpeak didn’t really have an alternative apart from Curse… and then Discord showed up and now there’s not really an alternative to Discord because people don’t wanna install a new program and get used to it, like with Guilded.
The ens–ttification of Tweedeck got me to leave, finally and immediately. Tweedeck was the only way it was viewable on my browser; for years, Twitter’s main site has started hiding and un-hiding posts as I scroll down, making it impossible to read as the entire timeline jumps up and down randomly. Now Tweetdeck does that too… and no longer lets me view my alt incognito account, either.
I’d stopped posting on Twitter a while back. Now I’m not even looking at it.
For me, Mastodon has been… fine. I followed hundreds of accounts on Twitter, and on Mastodon I follow <70, perhaps a third of which post regularly.
I don’t see any appealing alternatives at the moment. A lot of the content I got from Twitter won’t be replaced on Mastodon – the old friends, niche news outlets, musicians, historians and museums, game studios and social media accounts for specific games. Many of the artists and writers I followed on Twitter went to Tumblr instead, and have been active there.
I’m not interested trawling the firehose of Mastodon’s local / federated content for accounts of interest – I never looked at the equivalent on Twitter either. Without an easy way to search for specific people or topics, I don’t forsee my feed growing (search by the opt-in user hashtagging has been – in my experience – waste of effort). While there are several server communities I’d theoretically belong in (game developers, writers), the content that I actually post doesn’t fit the topic. I’m not talking about work, I’m mostly talking about my cats and the shows I watch.
Mastodon is… fine. I realize I don’t “use it right” – I’m interested in reading, not being read. I didn’t use Twitter “right” either, and it was possible to surface the content I wanted to read there, once.
It’s fine. I dropped Facebook cold turkey years ago. I’ll get used to this new reality too. But with work going remote, my life is much, much quieter than it was before. When I do feel like talking, there’s no one to listen.
I work with someone who uses Twitter a lot and I asked her what she thought of all of this. Her reply was so radically different from everything I’ve seen within the blogosphere that it makes me wonder whether Twitter-users with no tech background have even really noticed anything’s happening at all. Firstly, she was delighted by the $8 buy-in for the blue tick, which she took up immediately. She said it had always pissed her off that famous people got to be verified just because of who they were and the move to paid verification meant a level playing field for everyone. Secondly, she said that other than that she hadn’t noticed any difference and hadn’t even thought about moving elsewhere..
That was before the limits and throttling but honestly, as a non-user, when I saw the bar was set at 600 tweets a day my reaction was “Who the hell would need that many?” I’ll have to ask her next time I see her, but I would guess it would have no impact at all on her normal activity and I would consider her one of the heavier Twitter users that I know. I think there’s a very real chance that Twitter itself will implode due to the wild and chaotic way Musk is running it but I suspect that if and when it does that implosion will come as a total surprise to the average, un-tech-savvy user. I doubt many non-tech folks would care to learn how to use Mastodon or most of the alternatives (Although maybe Meta will be able to leverage their Facebook experience and reputation there.) They’re just too fiddly and fussy. Twitter had the benefit of being really, really simple to use. Anything that wants to replace it needs to be at least as easy to pick up.
As for Google withdrawing Gmail, I’d guess that’s about as likely as them dropping the search engine. The repercussions would be unbelievable. If they did, though, it wouldn’t take long for other email providers to move in. Email is pretty much a solved problem, unlike whatever it is Twitter is doing.
The 600 limit is not tweets you make, but every tweet and reply that shows up in your timeline, be they from an advertiser or something that Twitter thinks is important for some reason. So if you use it long enough, you will hit it regardless. You are probably right though there are likely many users that will keep on trucking on oblivious to anything going on. I know my timeline looks nothing now like it did when I was actively using it. So many people are gone and it seems to be the same handful of folks.
While I made the move to Gamepad.club on my main Twitter account and never looked back, I have a side RP account on Twitter that I’ve been trying to hold on to. It has quite a number of followers and some folks there that weren’t in places like Tumblr – where this RP account originated.
I peeked at Threads as a possible alternative for this RP account, but I have no love for Instagram or Meta. On top of that, I’m not seeing a browser/web option for it. Seeing I do 99% of my social media on a computer web browser, that’s a deal breaker.
I didn’t like, but could deal with the rate limits and the forced login for content. But the moment they take Tweetdeck away is the moment I pack it up for good. The vanilla Twitter site is unusable for me – I have things very organized, filtered and it all relies on Tweetdeck to work that way. So, I guess my RP account is going back to its Tumblr roots – I am interested in how Tumblr might federate one day anyhow.
Aside from that, Mastodon has been a wonderful new home for me. I’ve met more people and had a million times more interaction with folks there than I ever did on Twitter. I’m perfectly content where I am on my main account, and have been happy to welcome all the new folks in. 🙂