It’s not just lemmy that’s benefiting from Elon Musk.
I like the idea of referring to it only as “The social media site formerly known as Twitter” from here on out.
Ex-twitter
I use the historical name, twitter, because to the extent future historians will have to talk about it, that’s the name they’ll use. I cannot imagine it will do anything of relevance from this point forwards except as a glaring example of the failures of capitalism.
the name “X” is just a bunch of pollution to other topics that happens to have something of the same name. i hate it.
I’m sure there were a huge swath of people who used Twitter and didn’t care at all about Musk one way or the other.
Then he rebranded and threw his ego and control in everyone’s face. And all the people who like Twitter IN SPITE of Elon were now forced to acknowledge that their Twitter is gone.
Just like over at reddit now, the latest move has alienated the people who really cared about the platform itself. If they rebranded to “Spez’s World”, though, a lot of the people who didn’t give a shit before would suddenly be ready to bail.
Lmao “Spez’s world” will be so funny though
Is this migration already called xit? Because it should…
Xodus
tweXit
Good, Twitter is a disgrace to humanity
I find Mastodon very stuffy and boring, is there a way to shake up my feed? I feel like I’m missing something about how the app works.
I’d recommend following the hashtags you want to see. It’s sort of a build-your-own algorithm
Tools help, and because the Fediverse API is completely accessible, folks have already come up with awesome stuff.
- Populate your following list by finding friends, the Fedifinder still appears to work and helps find friends from Twitter on Masto: https://fedifinder.glitch.me/
- Now find friends of friends, the wider social graph. Followgraph works wonders: https://followgraph.vercel.app/
- Now you will likely miss posts, so try following updates of people if you really enjoy their content, plus of course pinning hashtags. PLUS. Up your game with an algorithm, either in the dedicated Mastodon app (trending posts) or with more customisation through the app Fediview: https://fediview.com/ Using Mastodon Digest (GitHub), you could also set up your own automation script.
- Folks have created lists and groups you can mass subscribe. The most successful one I know is from and for academics, perhaps there is a field for you in there. Journalists have similar stuff. See https://github.com/nathanlesage/academics-on-mastodon
- There are many awesome apps out there to access your content, improving the experience. I recommend Phanpy because of its unique and sleek design, see https://phanpy.social/. If you miss Quote Tweets and other stuff, try an app like Elk.
- Mastodon is only one option, if you want all of Twitter’s tools and more cool stuff, try Firefish. You can migrate followers and posts. This way, you can skip many external tools.
And that’s just the beginning.
Follow a lot of people to fill up your feed. Be generous with it, and if someone you followed continuously posts something you’re not interested in, you can just unfollow, or put up a filter so those posts from that person do not show up.
There’s also a feature to follow hashtags so they appear in your home feed, so just search hashtags of things you find interesting. That’s a good way to find new people to follow as well! Advanced web view also allows you to make feeds for specific hashtags or hashtag combinations for even more control.
And if you happen to find an instance catered to your specific interests, you can make an account there, and you can even migrate an existing account so your followers come with. Chances are the local feed will be filled up with content you enjoy on such an instance.
And if you want to help your followers discover similar people, be sure to boost content you enjoy.
On Mastodon, you are in control of your feeds. Even on the federated timeline, to an extent (as filters work there as well).
This is a welcome change tbh. All these other platforms push rage bait and crap just to drive engagement numbers.
It’s refreshing to go back a little to how the Internet used to be. You had to go and find what you liked, not have a million things pushed on you.
He has so thoroughly ruined Twitter that you can’t help but wonder if that was his goal from the outset.
Narcissists like him would never seek failure intentionally.
It’s just like Michael from The Office. You see he isn’t doing things on purpose to sabotage everyone, but he can’t control it, he needs the attention and the self worship.
Thanks for this analogy, it’s going to help me see the world in a funnier light.
You’ve obviously never played a board game with a narcissist. Flipping over the table and calling everyone, including the game they themselves purchased, cheaters is a totally expected move.
They’re not doing that to lose. They’re doing that because they already lost.
I GUESS YOU’RE RIGHT, LIKE YOU ALWAYS HAVE TO BE!
- Knocks phone over -
Fucking cheaters
To what end, though? The man blew 44b on a site that apparently was only worth 5-10b, and that was before he ran it into the ground. He also destroyed his reputation and the mystique as “genius entrepreneur” which the world can now clearly see he never was.
I can’t think of a single net positive. I think it’s an age old tale with people with too much money: he fell victim to an over inflated ego and too many yes men aiming to please. He started to believe he really was brilliant.
Sad thing is the man has so much money he still can’t fail, personally. He’ll have destroyed Twitter and even more people will lose their jobs. And autocrats around the world will be pleased. Musk will just shrug, tell himself it wasn’t his fault, “it was the libs” or something, and move on.
Eta: the only winners here, as per usual, are the shareholders.
44b sounds like a lot of money (it is!), but his net worth right now is 219b after this fiasco. At this point it’s just a score between rich assholes who got the bigger number.
You could take 200b away from his evaluation and he could still retire on a yacht and not work a single day in the next 100 years. Same for his children and his children’s children.
So yeah, “bad” financial investment, but it might be worth for him to kill one of the biggest platforms where he was called out for his bullshit.
Thing is, now ALL the platforms are calling out his BS. I don’t think he would have sold his golden boy reputation for any price, given the choice
To be fair, Elon doesn’t all have that money in cash. Also, like half of the Twitter buyout was made possible with a loan where he used his a Tesla stocks for like half of the operations as collateral.
Although I agree that he’s far from being broke, this can become a pretty bad financial decision to Elon.
Totally valid point.
That 44b had to be paid in real cash, not just the current theoretical value of the sum of his shares. He sold quite a lot of Tesla shares afaik to banks to give them a “small loan”.
Lol, “real cash”, look it up what he actually did. He took a loan in the name of Twitter, so he didn’t even use his own money. Pretty much financing half of the deal with the theoretical value of the company he just bought. And he took in extra money from Saudi investors, it’s not all his money.
There was never a 44b “real cash” transaction.
Foil hat time. Twitter was at one point a huge communications platform. People got news and opinions on daily happening almost immediately. He has successfully purchased that platform and destroyed the faith people had in it, in time for some of the most controversial events in recent history.
Cool, but the article is from July 24th
IMO X is shorter, easier to say and cooler. I like it!
Fuck spez. Why isn’t he doing more psycho shit like Elon so he can move more people to Lemmy.
Give him some more time. It’s not that simple keeping up with Elon’s adventures
By the way, your username shows as bot to me. I think you need to disable it in your profile.
Just deleted my Twitter account. Of course, the app gave nothing but errors so I had to do it on desktop, but it’s done!
So now you have an ex-Twitter account. Or an X account for short.
Maybe Elon was truly 200 IQ with his naming
Lemmy would be soaring too if it weren’t for terrible database code allowing for easy ddos.
Hopefully they can fix that issue and the communist communities stop having hissy fits.
they’re prob ddosing themselves for failing the purity tests.
It’s not the rebrand that’s killing Twitter. Elon is. He’s proving to himself that he cannot, in fact, run Twitter better than the prior owners.
I wonder if previous twitter execs are feeling a bit bad to have sold him twitter to see it destroyed like that.
I mean it certainly proves Elon is an idiot as he used fraud to manipulate the price and got played instead.
But was it worth it to let him destroy Twitter just because he tried to defraud it?
They got $44 billion, double what sane people thought the company was worth. It would be irresponsible not to take Elon for a ride.
I root for Mastodon like everyone else but as long as there is some very good improvement in discoverability and intelligent feeds, it will never be the same in function as Twitter (not X, Twitter). Especially when it currently has a fraction of the creators Twitter had.
Discoverabily is like crack. It’s what hooks you, and it’s what drags you into hell.
