With the change in name from Twitter to X, and with the destruction of a recognisable brand mentioned in tens of thousands of podcasts, podcasts, episodes and millions of web pages I was curious to see how Twitter was, with the new logo. It took more than 24 hours to change the favicon, and whilst x.com does redirect to Twitter, it does not do anything else than redirect to Twitter.com. You can’t see your x posts there.
Yesterday Twitter decided to re-brand as X. X.com redirects to Twitter.com. Within the next few days, weeks, months twitter will change its name and brand, and the URLs will be wrong. All twitter links, all embedded tweets, everything will become dead links. When we look for something on Twitter, we will be redirected to X.
The Podcast Legacy Every single website, every single CMS, every Static Website, everything, will have to be re-written to point to the new domain name.
The Fediverse is great because people are experimenting and trying new idea. It’s also great because we can be there through every step of the process. This is also why things could be better. I am now writing my blog in Hugo first, and then moving the content over to Wordpress at the moment. I could just replace my Wordpress blog with Hugo but I don’t for two reasons. The first reason is that I’m experimenting, and if I change my mind about something, I can, without affecting Quality of Service.
Over a period of a few days I have turned my WordPress blog into a fediverse instance. The process took some trial and error. In the end it was quit easy and there are three steps.
Step One: Have a WordPress Instance The first step is to have a WordPress blog/CMS. You can start with an existing website, that you are willing to have on the fediverse, or you can install the WordPress CMS in another director and use that as a dedicated Fediverse CMS.
When you listen to podcasts, and you read articles, and you visit websites you always see Twitter, Facebook, Reddit and Instagram, to name the giants. In every podcast episode you hear the guests say “You can find me under this name on this network, and the same name on that network.”
The Shift to CrowdFunded Media
With the recent shift from Venture Capitalist Social Media to crowdfunded social media I expect to hear about a shift in where people can be found.
I know of Reddit and I have an account that I use every so often. I have never felt the need for a site like Digg or Reddit, because I don’t feel the need to look at what people are sharing and reading, and promoting or demoting. For a long time it felt like a website that had users, but had not updated it’s UI for years. The Issue
The problem with Reddit, Digg, lemmy, kbin and other alternatives is that they’re large enough for everything to be shared within seconds, and you get trolled if you share something that someone else has already seen.
When Elon Musk bought Twitter he signed the start of the Social Media giant’s implosion. A decade earlier Murdoch had done the same thing to MySpace. In the end he sold MySpace for a fraction of what he had bought it for. We could cry, and bemoan the loss of Twitter but we could also look around, and see what has happened. For years I said that I wanted to leave Twitter, but no one else did, because despite all of its flaws, it had critical mass.
Twitter and Reddit want to charge people to use their API despite already wanting people to pay them directly. Twitter decided to drive users away and make itself more expensive. As a result of this the website is imploding, rather than thriving. Yesterday I read that Reddit, too, wanted to charge users to access its API and whilst this may make sense to some, it’s absurd. It’s absurd because Twitter and Reddit can already charge their users directly for use.
Mastodon has reached eight million accounts today. That’s close to the population of Switzerland and two million less than London. Mastodon is growing because it was ready to scale up at the right time. As Musk and Twitter shift towards the Right, and as Musk perpetuates conspiracy theories, on a daily basis, so he prepares the idea conditions for other social networks and opportunities to thrive.
As Twitter loses users, and engagement so other social networks are more likely to thrive.