this post was submitted on 24 Jul 2023
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As Twitter ditches its iconic branding in favor of owner Elon Musk's favorite letter "X," its open source competitor Mastodon is once again seeing usage numbers soar.

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[–] [email protected] 380 points 1 year ago (21 children)

I can fathom no world where you'd want to trade away a multi billion dollar brand for a new brand you literally can't SEO. What, you think your brand is gonna be more impressive that the generic variable, and a part of the alphabet?

"Follow me on Twitter" becomes "follow me on X"? "You should tweet that" becomes "you should X that"? The little blue bird on every shop window, website, and business card becomes a stylized letter that, hopefully, doesn't look so threatening on the next iteration?

It's a textbook case of brand destruction. I almost regret never making a Twitter in the first place, just so I could quit today, or at any of the hundred days in the past year where it got inexplicably worse without reason.

[–] [email protected] 105 points 1 year ago (4 children)

“You should tweet that” becomes “you should X that”

"You should X-create" that

[–] [email protected] 114 points 1 year ago (2 children)

And a tweet becomes an "X-cretion"

[–] [email protected] 71 points 1 year ago
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[–] [email protected] 48 points 1 year ago (1 children)

It’s just a new form of messaging called X-communication.

oh wait.

[–] [email protected] 28 points 1 year ago (1 children)

It's inspired by all the X-Twitter employees

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[–] [email protected] 42 points 1 year ago (2 children)

I should X that sounds like I should delete/close that. How apt.

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[–] [email protected] 26 points 1 year ago (4 children)

The little blue bird on every shop window, website, and business card becomes a stylized letter that, hopefully, doesn’t look so threatening on the next iteration?

Haha, I know the most appropriate iteration, a red background with the X in a white circle.

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[–] [email protected] 232 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Yay, another week of higher than normal activity, until the fomo kicks back in and they leave yet again cause "everyone is on X/this is sooo complicated/I just wanna see the fallout/whatever excuse justifies their addiction"

[–] [email protected] 169 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Every time that happens the fedi retains a good chunk of users. There's significant and stable growth throughout.

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[–] [email protected] 82 points 1 year ago (1 children)

They even stole x.org's logo:

[–] [email protected] 75 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (7 children)

believe it or not its more likely they straight up ripped off U+1D54F MATHEMATICAL DOUBLE-STRUCK CAPITAL X:

𝕏

absolutely no creativity. at least threads drew the ring in @ clockwise instead of the usual anticlockwise

[–] [email protected] 44 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Saw this on Mastodon:

Important sets:

ℂ the complex numbers

ℕ the natural numbers

ℚ the rational numbers

ℝ the real numbers

𝕏 the set of fascists wannabes

ℤ the integers

[–] [email protected] 35 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

My favorite comment about this from Mastodon: "X is just a sans serif swastika".

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[–] [email protected] 76 points 1 year ago (2 children)

I'm just here to spread the good word about old.lemmy.world

[–] [email protected] 36 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Can't wait for Lemmy Enhancement Suite.

Because LES is more.

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[–] [email protected] 27 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (3 children)

Or Kbin! Kbin can do both microblogging and link aggregation/discussion. Tbh departing Twitter users coming to Mastodon, and reddit refugees are brought together on Kbin.

The "all-in-one" method acomplished by Kbin is a huge feat, especially when it's built by a single person from scratch (ie; not based on lemmy codebase wise) and still much more ActivityPub compatible.

Kbin is sadly very underrated imo.

[–] [email protected] 29 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I feel that's a feature of Lemmy to not do both. I don't care about microblogs. I want the sites that I use to do one thing and do it as well as possible, so I can mix & match what I use, and not see what I don't want.

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[–] [email protected] 24 points 1 year ago (4 children)

It needs a mobile app to take off, imo.

Additionally, since it is just one guy (that I'm aware of), I'm not sure how sustainable it is for him. I believe he's been surviving off some EU grant and donations, but once the grant runs out and donations slow, the server costs for delivering content to tens of thousands of users every day are going to start being pretty rough to handle. Has he explained what his plan is for long term sustainability?

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[–] [email protected] 76 points 1 year ago (3 children)

I opened Twitter page and it shows login page with small x on left and big x in the middle. But only one closes the popup.

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[–] [email protected] 73 points 1 year ago (4 children)
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[–] [email protected] 58 points 1 year ago (7 children)

What makes this even better is that apparently Mark Zuckerberg / Mets owns trademark for the X logo.

You know what that means! Millionaire monkey money fight!

[–] [email protected] 58 points 1 year ago (2 children)

I hate to correct you, but it's a billionaire baboon bills brawl.

[–] [email protected] 26 points 1 year ago (3 children)

An affluent ape asset altercation.

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[–] [email protected] 57 points 1 year ago (6 children)

I hear ya... The advantage that Lemmy and kbin have over Mastodon is that Redditors tend to be more technically inclined than Twitter users, so ditching Reddit for Lemmy was easy, while I only know a grand total of three people on Mastodon, and two of them are tech YouTubers.

[–] [email protected] 57 points 1 year ago (13 children)

Redditors tend to be more technically inclined than Twitter users

This used to be true, but Reddit has been mainstream for years now. Today's average Redditor is likely pretty similar to the average Twitter user.

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[–] [email protected] 47 points 1 year ago

A more appropriate rebranding would be 'L'.

[–] [email protected] 40 points 1 year ago (5 children)

This reminds me of the time that the movie XxX came out and it was difficult to find to pirate.

When you name yourself anything with a lot of X's then your search engine results are going to point to adult entertainment over the product

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[–] [email protected] 37 points 1 year ago (7 children)

So the rebrand comes with X promising to be an app to replace everything?

X gonna give it to ya, X gonna deliver it to ya.

[–] [email protected] 28 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Well, it sure sounds like X is delivering users to Mastodon.

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[–] [email protected] 35 points 1 year ago (4 children)

I don’t like twitter nor Elon but why would someone leave a platform because they would change their name?

Elon has done more damage before so people who would consider leaving should be long gone.

[–] [email protected] 43 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (3 children)

You're not wrong, but consider that people who justified sticking around for some reason or another might leave because the brand change (to a name that is so brain dead even a little offensive) finally hits home for them that it isn't going to be the same.

A brand name change is about the single most overt thing you can do to send the message that a product isn't going to be the same. And when that happens, people tend to look at the recent trends for that product to get an idea of what to expect. The recent trends for Twitter happen to be right-wing echo chamber.

So yeah, the people who were going to leave have largely already left. But this brand change is going to be effective at galvanizing those who remain.

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[–] [email protected] 38 points 1 year ago

It's a "final straw" situation. No individual straw broke the back of the proverbial camel. One straw after another was placed atop it until finally the back broke. It's not the final straw that broke said back, but the load of all the straws including the final that did it.

So they're not necessarily quitting because of the name change. They're quitting because of everything else plus the name change. That was the thing that pushed the go/no-go decision into "go".

[–] [email protected] 27 points 1 year ago

Maybe because this new decision is so unbelievably idiotic either it is the last straw or maybe some people realize ~~twitter~~ x is lost cause? Idk.

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[–] [email protected] 35 points 1 year ago (18 children)

This is probably a stupid question, but for those of you that use Mastodon — how did you find people to follow?

I tried it out a few months ago but I didn’t like the few accounts they recommended, and searching for users or keywords didn’t get me too far either…

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[–] [email protected] 28 points 1 year ago (4 children)

He didn't want to buy the company. So, he's turning it into a pet project. The end. The oxymoron here of this story: The winners of the 44 billion Musk payed for it probably don't care that their creation is being run into the ground while the users of the platform are obviously in an uproar. In the end, the creators and founders, etc. did it for the money, not the cultural impact they would have on the world. Twitter's former CEO has allowed himself to be interviewed from time to time to say what he thinks Musk is doing wrong, but he doesn't seem to have any hurt feelings or express any kind of extreme regrets for the company being sold. From what I've seen in the news, he's pretty dry. The drama comes from the user end. This tells me something about how, in the end, it's just rich people doing business and doing as they please with what they please. It's kind of sad. Like, let's say I made something really cool with my own two hands and my creation got turned into something monstrous. I'd be upset. The people who made twitter are happy with their riches. In the end, the outrage and scandal is kind of pointless because it's just a thing that makes more money for big business rich tech people and it always was just that.

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[–] [email protected] 28 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Serious question, isn't this going to force them to release their trademark on the word "tweet"?

[–] [email protected] 24 points 1 year ago

Quick, someone create a Mastodon Frontend Twatter that uses different logos than X yet seems oddly familiar...

[–] [email protected] 25 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I wonder if they'll renew the twitter.com domain name

[–] [email protected] 29 points 1 year ago (1 children)

It would be hilarious if a random got that domain and threw a mastodon instance on it. They'll probably keep it though lol

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[–] [email protected] 24 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (9 children)

Gonna play devil's advocate here.

If Elon is truly able to turn The App Formerly Known As Twitter into an 'everything app' that's actually worth using, this could be a bone-headed move that pays off in dividends. It depends on what he plans to introduce to X within the next year or two. Transforming X into a messaging app won't be enough.

Musk's line of thought here isn't completely asinine. Let's not deny that superapps like LINE, WeChat, Alipay, Taobao and others exist, and absolutely dominate the digital landscape in their own regions.

Problem is, Twitter already has stiff competition. Threads is by far its largest competitor, and the moment Zuckerberg implements hashtags and trending topics, X is going to hemorrhage users.

This is honestly the direction Steve Huffman should've taken with Reddit instead of jacking up API prices and gouging every third-party app out of existence. Imagine if RPAN became a legitimate monetized mobile livestreaming platform instead of some dumb social experiment with seriously limited broadcasting times/broadcasters at once, or if Spez allowed content creators to sell access to premium content á la Tumblr Post+, Fansly, Patreon or OnlyFans. Enough e-girls have been astroturfing the shit out of Reddit to plug their paywalled collection of nudes, so may as well cut out the middle-man and drive OF out of business.

[–] [email protected] 38 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Facebook already tried to do the "everything app" and it failed in the US.

And Mark Zuckerberg is a million times more competent at business than Elon.

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[–] [email protected] 23 points 1 year ago

It's like Elon has read every book with an evil corporation in it and decided to make it his whole ascetic. X corp, sounds like the big bad that some plucky band of YA book protagonists have to team up to take down.

[–] [email protected] 22 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (11 children)

Can anyone help explain how to find content worth following on Mastodon? I made an account today and despite going through the #explore category I'm finding it difficult to find content or people I want to follow. The few things I've found end up just being Lemmy communities which kind of defeats the purpose of having a mastadon account at all.. maybe it's because I never had a Twitter, but the Lemmy/reddit/forum layout makes much more sense to me

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[–] [email protected] 22 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Fellas, it's time to pay respects to Larry the Bird. He was only caught doing what he did best: tweeting.

At least Mastodon doesn't risk getting bought by a multi billionaire.

[–] [email protected] 29 points 1 year ago (1 children)

and instead of tweeting, people are now x-creting

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[–] [email protected] 21 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Is he saying we should all X communicate?

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