The Social Media Stampede: Twitter, Mastodon, and What's Next
By: Mithrandiel
Well, it's been an eventful week in the world of social media - more specifically at Twitter, where Elon Musk's takeover of the company has triggered a collective backlash that is upending and restructuring the landscape of social media as we know it.
For those who have remain largely disconnected from the hubbub of social media, well I applaud you. But to catch you up:
March 2022: Elon Musk reaches out to Jack Dorsey (Founder of Twitter) to discuss future of Social Media, and by the end of the month announces he has a nearly 5% stake in the company.
April 2022: Musk's stake increases to 10%, before making an offer at $54.20/share on April 14th. By April 25th Twitter agrees to the terms, granted Musk puts up half of the funds himself.
May-September 2022: Some contentious back and forth occurs between Musk, then-Twitter CEO Parag Agrawal, and various legal actors as there is concern over the valuation of the company and prevalence of bots on the platform.
October 2022: Musk positions that the deal should be closed. While some elements remain in the air, on 10/26 Elon Musk entered Twitter HQ to formally begin his tenure as owner and CEO of the company.
Yesterday, November 4th, nearly half of the Twitter workforce was laid off by receiving an email to their personal account and being unceremoniously locked out of their work devices and kicked off the company Slack server.
Posts all over LinkedIn documented the culling, and in short order a class action lawsuit was confirmed to have been brought against Elon Musk due to the lack of formal notice regarding the mass layoff.
Of course, the layoff was an expected exodus - what wasn't quite as expected was the massive migration that has begun in the last week.
Granted, the estimated 900,000 users that left the platform so far is just about twice the average, and in the broader scheme of just 275 million users globally, it may seem inconsequential. However, Musk has not done much to win over many of the high profile accounts - in fact, he has spent the last few days antagonizing quite a few of them, including Stephen King and Alexandria Ocasio Cortez. Of course, this was going on while he is in the process of being lambasted left, right and center for seemingly spending $44 billion dollars on a company that was losing $4 million a day, and with no seemingly coherent strategy to assuage concerns that major advertising partners had around lack of content moderation.
So, if you're of the mindset that Twitter is going to Hell in a handbasket, but you're still looking to get your social media dosing in, where do you go?
One platform that's been getting a lot of attention recently is Mastodon. Featuring numerous servers, known as "instances", Mastodon allows for a more organic and curated approach to social media. Rather than a broader algorithm that is feeding off of everything from your search history to location services, Mastodon feels a bit like exploring an oversized, albeit mostly empty estate. You stumble across large rooms with a handful of people sitting in a cozy setting, maybe there's some music coming from down the hall that lures you that direction.
There are no lists of suggested users to follow. No mini quiz at the beginning of your logging in pointing you in one direction or another. Unbound, your social media experience is about as manual as you can get.
Not only that, the velocity of Mastodon can vary wildly. Depending on the size of the instance, your feed isn't updating every 30 seconds to a minute. You might see posts every 5 minutes, 15 minutes...up to an hour. Of course, various instances are ramping up with the migration, the biggest being mastodon.social, which is nearing a million users.
Of course, if you don't enjoy the instance you're on, you can always transfer, along with all of your followers at any time.
In my recent conversations about this with my wife, it did occur to me briefly: why does anyone need to "go" anywhere? Could it be sufficient enough to turn off Twitter's tap, as it were, and move on with our lives? So much of the interactions are mindless scrolling, occasional "likes" of media that we never give a second thought. In the words of Bo Burnham, our addiction to social media represents the successful colonization of the most valuable commodity there is left - time.
At the risk of waxing too philosophical here, I'll wrap it up: there's a lot of moving parts right now in the social media space, and Mastodon is just one of many options out there right now. But one thing is for sure - the social media landscape will never be the same.
