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.