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.
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.
“You should tweet that” becomes “you should X that”
“You should X-create” that
And a tweet becomes an “X-cretion”
X-crement
And retweet it become
X-Forwarded-Forit
Ain’t X-ing a term for cutting something out of your life ?
Yes, and I was thinking how confusing it could be. A: “Hey, did you see that trend on X?” B: “What? No, I don’t talk to my ex anymore.”
It’s just a new form of messaging called X-communication.
oh wait.
It’s inspired by all the X-Twitter employees
We’re witnessing an X-tinction event in real time.
Its a terrible rebrand that pretty much comes because of Elon’s impulses, or in other words, for shits and giggles. Regardless of this hilarious trashing of such a powerful brand, I’ll have fun calling tweets “xeets” for a good week.
“Hey bros wanna see me light $40 billion on fire?”
The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia spent good money to never have an Arab Spring again.
Which is nuts because they have a nationwide content filter and could just blacklist Twitter and be done with it in 5 minutes.
Please call them Elon’s x-crements instead.
It must be so horrible working “with” him. You’re trying to build something and every morning you must be frightened to see Elon hanging on a ladder because he thought it was so funny to draw dicks everywhere on the building, which would have you cancel everything you are working on.
I’ve worked in a founder led business and this is why I quit.
I’d spend forever working on a project to build a satellite site then suddenly we don’t want that anymore - bin the recipes we want a full main site redbrand.
Bye.
Feel you, I’ve been working with this kind of person but he was pushed away a few weeks after my arrival. He still had time to make an impression though, his genius move was to tell each team that the others hated them, which had no effect because we talked to each others…
He’s just a fan of Laurie Anderson. Give him some slack!
Here is an alternative Piped link(s): https://piped.video/watch?v=UfOK0evCqZY
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source, check me out at GitHub.
Watch out… language is a virus!
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.
Perhaps with each corner of the X at a 90 degree angle clockwise? You know, to add style points.
It makes the X go faster, everyone knows that.
Jamie Kennedy’s show is about to become relevant again. You’ve been X’d!
Destroying the brand and ruining twitter was always the goal. There’s a good reason why Saudi Arabia fronted half of the bill…
Follow me on ten.
He’s clearly laying the groundwork to sell it to Alphabet (Google’s parent company). /s
“Hey, check out this X video”
I should X that sounds like I should delete/close that. How apt.
Twitter is my ex
To me it sounds like axe.
“Yep, brilliant. Axe it.”
Xing is short for kissing IE XOXO. So instead of tweeting we are now kissing!
Is he saying we should all X communicate?
clever
are there any frontend webapps like wefwef/voyager?
I think this one is. elk.zone
If you want greater adoption, especially for Twitter users, then we should be evangelising Misskey and Calckey/Firefish over Mastodon, especially given the feature set more closely mirrors Twitter.
Calckey/Firefish
Much more beautiful than mastodon IMHO
Thanks for the info about the other projects.
I just have no idea these platforms are out there or how to get to them from lemmy
i never got into twitter, and the longer this goes on, the more glad i am about that
xvideos twitter videos? lmao
sounds sus
it’s lesser evil compare to amont of other memes after elon deside to name twitter “X” … xbox series x on x platform… sounds even more sus in my mind…
X video…
lol there has got to be a better cadence to deliver this joke. like “Twitter, now called X, has launched a new video sharing service at xvideos.com”
Risky click of the day, but turns out its benign and family-friendly. Thanks for sharing.
i think the mildly techy sounding waffle is the right way to set it up personally, it lulls you into a false sense of security thinking this is just some random tech nonsense and then bam, porn
That’s a bummer, hang in there Mastodon, keep bloomscrollin
Hopefully a massive influx of Twitter jerks doesn’t kill what makes Mastodon a nice place in the first place.
Serious question, isn’t this going to force them to release their trademark on the word “tweet”?
Quick, someone create a Mastodon Frontend Twatter that uses different logos than X yet seems oddly familiar…
I wonder how much x.com cost to purchase, or if it was just a domain twitter/Musk had lying around.
deleted by creator
Curious if he sold it to twitter, I can’t imagine parting with a single character domain for free.
He is twitter.
When is rebranding ever good for users/consumers?
When they change from a racist name and or mascot.
That rebranding seems to me as just hiding past misdeeds. I’m not charitable enough to take apologies from companies at face-value, there would need to be some effort to explain and show change too.
Most rebrands keep an element of the original or adopt how the customer refers to it. Think Dunkin dropping “Donuts” and Kentucky Friend Chicken becoming KFC.
All good.
But for Dunkin Donuts to suddenly rename itself “Place” - not so good.
Bad choice after bad choice.
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!
deleted by creator
The Mets own it too?
I mean sure why not! lmao
Wait so the cage match is still a possibility?
There is a possibility!
I hate to correct you, but it’s a billionaire baboon bills brawl.
Damn, that’s even better!
An affluent ape asset altercation.
Grossly gilded gorilla grapple?
Overhyped orangutan oligarch octagon ordeal.
Lucrative lemur litigation.
Microsoft also as a trademark for X.
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.
A bunch of people discussed in another thread why that doesn’t make sense: https://iusearchlinux.fyi/comment/976118
For 44 billion, he could have started a rival platform from scratch and paid people $100 each as a sign up bonus. That would be for over 400 million customers.
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.
especially since mark doesn’t fire all the compentent people the second they bring up a problem
That makes sense until you realize he already made a company called x.com that failed, and it’s the source of his fortune
Yeah, you know what those have in common? They all started providing one service more successfully than anyone else on that market and slowly accreted functionality in the absence of a popular local dedicated service. Twitter is not that, was never going to be that, and it is not becoming that, certainly not with a skeleton crew. The same goes for Reddit, which was certainly bigger than people think but not big enough to pull that move. It may have grown into a OF alternative specifically, just from having a foot on that business already, but that’s about it.
We do have one of those “everything apps” here, though. It’s called Facebook. Terminally online people don’t realize, but there are millions of people right now buying and selling used stuff, dating, watching videos and exchanging business information over it, even without accounting for the rest of the Meta ecosystem.
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.
It isn’t a bad thought, but it should be quickly apparent that an American equivalent might not work. The West isn’t the same as those regions. There’s a complex interplay of culture, history, and the current market scene. A good business person would recognize the possibility that it might not work and just do exploratory work. Musk in his arrogance thinks he can make it happen regardless
If Elon is truly able to turn The App Formerly Known As Twitter into an ‘everything app’ that’s actually worth using…
That opening conditional (emphasis added) is carrying a whole lot of weight…
How many people would trust Elon Musk with their banking details? I doubt enough to make the $44 billion worth it.
I wouldn’t trust Musk to tell me the time of day without double-checking on at least three other clocks to make sure.
Yeah, how bad does it reflect on someone’s credit report if they don’t pay their rent and other bills for many months?
Maybe that sort of thing doesn’t count on the credit report for a billionaire (because they don’t have to follow any rules), but it counts for most people.
I wouldn’t even trust a thin dime with Elon Musk given the way he operates.
Is that why I’ve seen more people today wanting to bitch about politics in completely random threads?
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
Unfortunately this is not the fault of mastodon, its community or tech behind it as much as … nobody from twitter actually moving to mastodon. There aren’t many big influencers, companies or content creators on mastodon so your feed is just random people talking about random stuff. The lack of algorithm doesn’t help either since someone’s random showerthoughts have the same chance of showing up for you as does something trending that you’d actually be interested in.
Follow / pin active hashtags. I have 4, #news #nintendo #xbox and #playstation. I’m a simple man
And then I get even more random irrelevant crap because everyone talking about their latest rp adventures in stardew valley tags steam, gaming, indiegaming and other general hashtags.
Yep, everyone I followed on Twitter went to Bluesky, some made accounts on Mastodon, but none of them stuck around
Sportsbots.xyz host mirrors of the popular sports writers. I follow thurrott from twit apple insider and 9 to 5 max. Tech meme is good for tech news headlines. I fill krebs on security as well. It’s better than twitter because it’s chronological and not algorithm fed
@Squidquid Option #1: Search for a hashtag. If it exists, and it’s halfway active, follow it. No, I’m not kidding you, you can do that on Mastodon.
Option #2: the people section on fediverse.info.
Option #3: No matter which instance you’re on, go to mastodon.social with your Web browser and search it for interesting hashtags. This may reveal to you more people who are interested in those topics/write about those topics.
Also, if you want to learn more about the Fediverse beyond Lemmy (and beyond Mastodon, for that matter), go follow fediversenews@venera.social. It’s a public forum on Friendica. You’ll learn soon enough what Friendica is.
It depends on what you are into. If you like anime (for example) you could try something broad like # (anime) [no spaces and such] & then see what other hashtags people are using from there. The same with music or something. That’s what I do at least. There might be better ways but a lot of times people are into similar stuff and that can lead down different paths as well.
One idea is to browse the hashtag #introduction and follow people whose introductions sound promising to you. The hashtag #FediTips might also be useful. If you want to follow scholars and scientists, there is this list grouped by discipline: https://github.com/nathanlesage/academics-on-mastodon And in general, you can follow hashtags on Mastodon, e.g. “#bloomscrolling” for pictures of plants.
I’m interested to know which accounts to follow for lemmy news. Seems like a natural place to go when having trouble connecting like I did with fmhy before and shit just works recently.
It takes some effort to build up and shape your Home feed on Mastodon. One good starting point is to search for hashtags that you’re interested in, like #sports or #gamedev or whatever. It may take some trial and error to find the most popular hashtags being used in your topics of interest. Once you find the hashtags with stuff that’s interest to you, follow those hashtags so you will continue to discover new people and posts in those topics in your Home feed. Once you find interesting people posting in those hashtags, follow them. The name of the game on Mastodon is to follow, follow, follow. I’ve heard it said that your feed will get pretty good when you follow around 200 people or so.
