Such a business genius to just completely trash well known name branding that most companies would kill to have. Twitter was a household name, the bird instantly recognizable with the brand, and “tweet” and “retweet” as common words.
Such a brilliant display of Vision™ by Musk.
not only that, heaps of cultures associate birds with rumours and news (a little bird told me that …). I was genius marketing and top tier branding
And here we are, more than a year later, and any time anyone actually calls it by its new name, it’s always followed by (previously Twitter). Hilarious. Because the new name is fucking nonsense
and also it had the bonus that being commonly used in language still posed no risk of genericizing the trademark.
people say kleenex to mean tissue, xerox to mean photocopy (xerox famously put out ads telling people not to use their trademark name in generic context)…
… but never twitter to mean any social network or even microblogging. or tweet to mean a post on facebook or even mastodon. tweet is almost always used to mean a post on twitter specifically.
so it was not only universally recognized and thoroughly integrated in language, but also specific enough to be safe for the trademark. an absolute dream for any brand.
and what did the genius do? throw it away for a single letter that’s used to mean unknown or generic (great brand strategy btw), but only when it’s not used to mean porn.
seriously, since I’m a graphic designer and interested in these things i’ve seen some bad rebrandings before but this has to be the absolute worst.
he did it on purpose, it was literally an attack on progressives.
what? how?
It was the single platform where scientists and the politically active could interact, safe from regressives via twitters moderation policy. Essentially, a place where verified experts could share opinions to a receptive audience.
By taking over, the verifiablitiy went, the voices of the uninformed were weighted the same as the informed, and whatever (mostly left-leaning) communities existed there became fragmented as the twitter experience went down as the UX became more hostile and ad-ridden.
The progressives are recovering, and finding their communities again, but mostly via bluesky/mastodon
you give him way too much credit. he’s a fucking moron and he didn’t even buy twitter on purpose. he thought could back out of it just like he backs out of everything he says but was forced to go through with one of the worst purchases in history.
also the rebranding is not to ruin twitter but to pivot to the everything app he’s been trying to make for a long time. the name X is also something he always liked because he’s a child. he tried to name PayPal X too, and also named one of his children X. none of what he does is 5d chess. he’s just a loser idiot who has been failing up for too long.
Collectively we keep forgetting this and it’s so important. This isn’t 5D fascist chess, this is a guy who got so high on approval from the masses on Twitter he lost his fucking mind. Everything he does these days is for approval from people. The crowd he has decided are the cool kids, who laugh at his shit jokes, are fascists. I don’t even think he’s a fascist, I think he’s an irresponsible egotist with no stable sense of self-worth who deep down knows he’s a fraud.
Yeah, that’s trump all right
he’s not some idiot being propped up by rich backers for the purpose of political disunity: he is that rich backer that props up others.
Do not mistake public theater for incompetence.
he has demonstrated incompetence so many fucking times it’s incredible that you are even saying this. he is most definitely an idiot.
I mean, the ends are the same whether he was an independent actor or a puppet. Now Saudi Arabian is the second-largest owner of Twitter and it is destroyed as the mechanism it once was for progressive protest against governments.
Elon may be a moron but Saudi Arabia pitched in with direct goals. Imo the fact that any company can be partially owned by a dictatorship and receive constitutional protections is a tentacle of the Citizens United ruling.
I hate the muskrat as much as most people, but killing twitter was pretty cool.
Or use Mastodon. Either way…
Or bluesky.
Doesn’t support Activity Pub
Bridge is easy. And its got an algorithm while being FOSS.
Like you can follow mastodon accounts from bluesky and vice versa. (using bridgy)
Big plus for me is that mastodon is AGPL. Does bluesky have third party servers yet?
Why bother when we have Mastadon?
As I understand it, Mastodon doesn’t federate like Lemmy/K-Mbin does (and Sublinks & Piefed too!), where in order to follow someone you need to be on the same instance? Or something? Anyway Mastodon needs some work before it could be a viable replacement.
Edit: I did not phrase this well at all. Oh well, it led to an interesting discussion so I’ll leave it here for posterity, but it’s incorrect. I think the only correct part of the above is that if you try to leave a Mastodon instance, then like a Lemmy one, you can’t really take your account with you (only your settings, but people who followed you before will have to now follow you again in the new location, it does not automatically transfer). So it “federates” but it’s not “freely transferable” as people were over-selling it to be.
there are 2 sides to the AP-connected fediverse… microblogging (tweets/mastodon) and the threadiverse (federated forums/lemmy). mastodon is 100% microblog. lemmy is 100% threadiverse.
mbin is both.
i can easily follow/be followed by mastodon, universodeon, etc as well as fully participate with lemmy.
Thank you for the explanation!:-)
But can someone follow you from a different Mastodon instance than the one you are currently on? Or was that something that changed in the last year? Maybe I misunderstood or it wasn’t explained to me well, but I definitely get that people don’t want to switch instances bc they will lose all their old followers, but is that the main impediment to people using Mastodon - they just don’t want to switch to using it? If so, it’s enough, bc as we have seen, these large entities like Twitter are a lot more fragile than people used to believe.
mastodon is a federating micrblog platform… so anyone on any other instance of any kind that also speaks AP/microblog can interoperate. instance is just an address.
the main thing keeping people from leaving twitter are their own egos. as you point out, ‘ive got x followers! ill have none in the fediverse!’
Hehe, I’ve switched between at least three different Fediverse accounts since leaving Reddit, but okay sure if that’s how they want to interact with the world…
Tbf it does point to the more fundamental differences between the platforms, with like anonymous shitposting on the Fediverse (which is like 90% Star Trek and Linux memes:-P) vs. tech or other topical blogging on Mastodon where their actual irl names mean something (e.g. I would be inclined to read something from Robert Reich, but Alex Jones not so much).
And the funny part is that, according to that article I linked in another comment in this thread, their followers are already leaving, now that Twitter has morphed into X (just like advertisers, hey-oh!). They aren’t even necessary going elsewhere, so much as simply leaving, and waiting for something to solidify.
So, much like all the people on Reddit that self-report now as being shocked - shocked I tell you, shooketh! ⚡ - that the platform is feeding them crap that they don’t want to see (but which the algorithm demands that they view - all hail The Algorithm, forever may it reign 😭), the time to be bold and jump somewhere else was when Musk took over and people could have made a coordinated exit strategy. Or maybe if enough people got (ahem 💵 “involved” 💰 i.e. 🤑 enough to affect the market) they could even have ousted him as CEO entirely and saved Twitter to be bought by someone else. Anyway, the second best time is now, before their followers never log back in to that advertisement-infested cesspool of human garbage again, in order to see their messages about where they have decided to jump ship too.
Like fascist governments all around the globe, WE the people gave these demons the power that they hold over us.
I love Lemmy. But the thing I miss most about Reddit is being able to connect with ppl who have deep obscure knowledge about specific things. That will come as Lemmy grows.
Definitely it will but I don’t expect it to happen soon. Social media has turned fairly toxic, and now that people have been saturated with those bad experiences, many people have simply moved on. Some to offline, some to far more obscure rather than centralized spaces, some even are dead of COVID, or lost or are stressed about keeping their jobs in Big Tech, etc. A new generation will rise up to replace them and those likely will use a federated source, or they may turn away from “social media” altogether and use more like wiki writing or even micro-blogging.
What people choose to not understand is that while they are free to do whatever they wish, so too are other people - e.g. a community mod removing their post, an instance admin banning them altogether, or even simply someone else leaving the room when all the kids shout and make too much noise.
Lemmy requires heavy and constant curation, and a thick skin during that never-ending process, to be usable. Not everyone is willing to do that, especially people who are perfectly happy to entertain themselves in other pursuits. Thus the most capable people are the least likely to put up with our crap.
Hopefully I’m wrong, or at least just wrong enough that that aspect of the Fediverse still grows despite that counter trend.
Lastly, there is hope for improvements on the technology side - e.g. if you could see someone who is consistently downvoting you even for solid quality stuff, that’s someone you can block to reduce that negative “noise” feedback, except right now the voting is essentially anonymous since there is no way off a non-instance admin to view it (outside of K/Mbin, I mean like even on those platforms iirc I’ve tested and you can only view those originating from another K/Mbin instance, at the time, again iirc). When things become more equitable in that regard, it should entice more people to remain.
It is actually easy to participate in Lemmy from Mastodon. Federated community are represented as user. When someone write on the community, they appears as the author on Mastodon while the community boost the post. This way a Mastodon user can follow acommunity. By mentioning the name of community in a post that is not an answer to another post, their write post on the Lemmy community. The next post in the Mastodon thread will be treated by Lemmy as comment.
The problem is more in sharing comments. After one or two level of comment it is becoming very buggy. For the rest, it works very well.@pseudo
And here I am, participating in a Lemmy thread from my Mastodon account.cool!
even your correction is wrong lol. you can move accounts on mastodon taking all your followers and follows with you, just not your toots.
Hello from Mastodon
Cool! Consider the receipts delivered, and with my thanks for the gentle correction:-D.
Nice name and profil picture.
Thanks! 😁
Incorrect. It’s just a different kind of platform. There’s no really simple way to make a twitter-like site and a forum site mesh fluidly, but Mastodon users can see Lemmy posts and comments and like and reply to them, and I believe even post. Lemmy users can interact when Mastodon users come into Lemmy but are limited in discovering other Mastodon content.
Yes, they can post. They only need to make sure the community IS federated to there instance and then mention it in the toot that is the first of its thread.
but people who followed you before will have to now follow you again in the new location, it does not automatically transfer
It’s possible to leave a redirect information on the old profile. Normally all your followers are informed about this and automatically follow the new account.
Anyway: this means that you depend on your old profile and server to work at that moment. If the server completely vanishes or if you’re banned by the admin for whatever reason you can’t set that redirect information.
By the way it’s worthwhile to consider that in the case of Bluesky at least right now the whole portability of profiles is depending on some kind of centralized Meta server in the background that manages the identities. Bluesky claims that this won’t be necessary in the future, but right now it does afaik still work like this.
If you migrate, people will automatically follow you on the new account, I’ve done it cca month ago.
I’ve been able to follow people from different instances no problem.
I thought Blue Sky wasn’t based on ActivityPub at all. Isn’t a different implementation better than no implementation?
Bluesky uses “AT protocol”, not ActivityPub. Ironically the former is trying to federate as well, but still it’s a different protocol altogether (so it would federate within its own network, as in people could start up their own Bluesky instance). Despite that, some people tried building a bridge between ActivityPub and AT, but there was enormous pushback, driven in part by ideological differences between more serious Mastodon users and the more casual X/Twitter style user (picture a Reddit mod, now halve their IQ, and I’m just joking bc I’ve never had a Twitter account so I don’t truly know what that filth is like to have to wallow in:-). Anyway, MBin is able to connect Mastodon to Lemmy bc they both use the ActivityPub protocol, but AT is a different protocol.
A lot of things allow you to export your settings, but nothing that I’ve heard of allows you to import your posts and such - and therefore truly migrate - your account from one place to another. Therefore the whole federated concept has been oversold - as in, “if you don’t like a place you can leave it and go somewhere else”, the same as anything else in the entire history of space and time (divorce, immigration, quitting your job, etc.). But if you do, then you lose everything - all of your follower base, which for like an author is impactful to their actual career. Hence why so many are so reluctant to leave X, despite the Musk having taken over (and the smell permeating the place now, to where most of their followers are gone as well).
It’s the same reason why “everyone still uses Windows” (I don’t): herd mentality, and also, like using Querty (that one I do), holding onto the past bc of not wanting to pay the price to have to switch.
Bluesky does their own thing: https://atproto.com/
Does elon still own the twitter trademark?
Couldnt we just make a new site and call it twitter and make it the same as twitter used to be?
It would really piss on his ego.
If he’s actually serious he should also sell the domain so someone could host a mastodon instance on it
It would still have to be some sort of social media site but I think so, yeah. The point of trademarks is to make sure you don’t confuse consumers. In theory you could make a restaurant called Twitter and be fine.
trademarks have to be protected and used. Its likely you could reasonably win a trademark battle with him since he’s rebranded
It was always shit. Musk made it shittier. But as always, stop giving it oxygen.
What’s butterfly icon? Did Xitter get a new one?
That’s Bluesky. It’s supposed to be a federated social media, but right now there’s only one kind of software for it and you can’t yet self-host it (although you can self-host your data). The open-source protocol, known as AT, was created by Twitter back in the day, and Jack Dorsey and a bunch of staff were able to rescue it when Musk took over.
AT does not federate with ActivityPub, but users of either protocol can appear on the other using Bridgy; and some Friendica instances have basic support for AT. The equivalent of “fediverse” is “ATmosphere” (with the first two letters capitalised).
Since it became public (as opposed to invite-only), Dorsey left the platform and went back to Nostr (yet another microblogging platform, this time built around blockchain :-P).
It’s actually quite a nice place, in my opinion, with a vibe similar to a combination of Twitter and Tumblr.
Sorry for going into this much detail. I just really like explaining things.
EDIT: Turns out, the word being thrown around in place of “tweet” was also slang for cum. I have removed it, as this was probably originally a joke.
So do you guys not know what skeet means or…
I’m dying, we really out here trying to convince people to leave Twitter for a site that uses the word “reskeet”
I’ve just looked it up on UrbDict, and I think that might have been a joke that I just didn’t understand. I guess we just use “post” and “repost”.
What’s wrong with a little skeet shooting?
I’ve just looked it up on UrbDict, and I think that might have been a joke that I just didn’t understand. I guess we just use “post” and “repost”.
What’s wrong with a little skeet shooting?
Ah, fuck.
Well, thanks for letting me know. Believe it or not, it’s not the first time this sort of thing has happened.
I mean you’re not wrong. I’ve seen multiple articles stating that a blue sky version of tweet is a skeet. It’s why I’ve written the entire platform off.
I’ll skeet skeet mother fucker
I’ll reskeet god damn!
I’ve just looked it up on UrbDict, and I think that might have been a joke that I just didn’t understand. I guess we just use “post” and “repost”.
Thank you for taking into so much detail. I feel pretty well informed now.
It’s Bluesky, Jack Dorsey’s Twitter 2.0 platform. The problem is, it makes all of the same mistakes Twitter did. So, it’s just earlier in it it’s absolute-shit-show lifecycle — not actually different.
Why am I not surprised?
Armin, i mean seymour skinner
That was a good ride
Go away, there’s no Armin Tamzarian and there never was!
Shoulda called it “Flutter”.
Since flutter is a comparatively popular* mobile framework it probably wasn’t a good way to make a name for yourself.
*(I personally hate it and think it’s going to die without Google backing it but at the time of writing it’s pretty commonly discussed as an option for cross platform mobile dev)
Aw crap. Welp… RIP flutter.
If it’s backed by Google is probably going to die.
You’re not wrong. IIRC they already planned to stop or layoff their Dart developer in favour of Golang (also a language by Google)
They laid off python, dart and flutter teams
They laid off their flutter, dart and python teams.
Flutter is cooked.
It’s open source like Dart, so it can live on but it will almost certainly wither away.
That would be cool, but Bluesky was still using a photo of literal blue sky as its icon until recently.
But there’s so many furries
Yeah, we kinda make the internet go
Best deal with it 😎🐺
They keep the internet running, they can stay.
The internet would go down in a day without gay furry hackers
Why is that a problem?
I’ve never used Xhitter
I’ve yet to try Bluesky, and Twitter wasn’t exactly the beacon of human decency or anything, but I feel like Bluesky in its current state is less of a refuge for actual human communication, and more just brands trying to find a less toxic platform to endlessly-positively-organically-brandvertise on.
Mastodon can feel a lot more slow, but also as a person it feels a lot less like whispering into the void.
As a person trying to market though, I suppose I’d probably make a Bluesky account… or…begrudgingly…a Xitter account…ughhhh…
That’s funny because I use it and I have yet to see a brand on there. It’s just mostly pleasant people talking.
twatter, i says
The best example of a terrible “rebranding”, but thank God, the platform is going down
