The wild thing about Twitter’s demise is that it’s not too late to turn the platform around. Now that it has been burned to the ground, it could be rebuilt with a focus on standards, community features, and useful paid subscriptions. Would need new leadership, like a reverse-takeover from Bluesky.
@manton MySpace tried very hard to turn itself many times around and pretty much failed every time. I wish the same for Twitter. I think thats the risk most social media companies have to take - once a collective group of users are done emotionally with a platform, they just move on. As much as I hate Meta thats the one thing they did well, they successfully turned into a utility instead of just being one thing.
@manton Would it be feasible for Twitter to federate via ActivityPub at this point? I would think that'd be requisite these days for good social media to flourish, leaving behind the silo approach. If Twitter did federate, it could interconnect with Threads, Mastodon, you name it. Twitter and Threads could be big "instances" in federated social media, like outlook and gmail are to email.
@manton Twitter had/has about 350 million users. I wouldn't call that a demise. Just because the community you're apart of left, or is in the process of leaving, or thinking about leaving, doesn't mean the base/core user group is leaving.
Is Twitter making bad content moderation and product decisions?
Yes
Is Twitter making less money due to those decisions?
Yes
Does that mean the platform is dying?
No
I agree that they can turn the platform around, but it will take focus and communication and willingness to engage with their users; all things that the current leadership of Twitter doesn't do well.
@joelhamill That's fair. Platforms with hundreds of millions of users don't just disappear. It will just continue to bleed users slowly over years without a course correction.
@jasonmcfadden ActivityPub can be difficult to scale, but Threads plans to do it, so no reason Twitter couldn't. It could be opt-in to start with and then ramp up.
@manton @joelhamill It depends on what "not dead" is. I mean, Digg.com still exists, and am sure some use it but it's not part of the zeitgeist anymore.
@joelhamill @pratik Maybe I should've said "impeding demise" or a different word. Hopefully clear enough what I meant, though.
@pratik probably, but is it really "limping" if their user base is still the population of the United States? My point of reference is: is calling the service demised really truthful or factual if it still has 300+ million users?
Just because your community (not specific to you, the royal your) isn't using the service anymore doesn't mean that other communities have also stopped using the service.
@joelhamill In that case, I beg to differ. First, we don't even know if that 300+ million number is accurate. Musk himself doubted it as mostly bots when he was buying it.
Have you heard of Orkut? Before FB, it was huge among Indians and Brazilians and had more than Twitter's users. That didn't make the service influential. Or for that matter, why is Twitter with say, 300m users mentioned in the same breath as Facebook with 2.3bn users? Because who those users are matters.
@pratik I remember Orkut, never used it though. If I remember correctly it kind of morphed into Google+.
My point of view, is independent of influential users. I'm just saying; just because you think something is dying doesn't mean that it is actually dying.
@manton @jasonmcfadden Except I believe there is a reason why Twitter can’t federate, and that’s because Elon wants all users accessing — and locked into — the platform and its apps directly. He killed off the API to ensure of that. I just don’t see this happening, even in the face of his competition adding ActivityPub support (assuming it doesn’t fall through the cracks).
@pimoore I don't think Elon would federate. But Twitter, technically speaking, could federate if new leadership decided to. Maybe Elon will eventually decide to sell Twitter or otherwise back out somehow. I could see him stating he must refocus on SpaceX and Tesla instead. Just a thought.
@jasonmcfadden I suppose that’s possible, but he’s also enough of a control freak that I could still see him forcing new management to maintain Twitter’s lock-in. This is the same man who tried to name his daughter some random alphanumeric sequence.
