I honestly think it sure will. People will probably go in 3 directions:
- Mastodon
- Wait for Bluesky
- Wait for Instagram “Threads”
Honestly, if people go fediverse way, they definitely should choose something like Misskey/Calckey. They’re much better options than mastodon IMO
I believe this will increase the fediverse population, but ultimately I see a new centralized service emerging soon. Though, I do hope the fediverse becomes the prominent place for social content!
I think we shouldn’t expect to see the same sort of migration from Twitter to Mastodon like we did for Reddit to Lemmy. Because of network effects, Mastodon will have a much harder time attracting refugees. What you can hope for is more of a slow drip as Twitter users get fed up with the platform. Every migrant to Mastodon makes it that much easier for the remaining Twitter users to move as well.
I’m hopeful but I wouldn’t count on it.
This is the thing, it is much harder to replicate your network on mastodon.
Lemmy is easy, you just look for communities of interest and join them. It’s largely a one sided affair (you the user), sure, people do have relationships in smaller communities but it’s the exception rather than the norm.
Twitter I follow about 500-600 people, and have a shade over 4000 followers. This is a lot harder to rebuild on a new platform. And many of those connections are (online) relationships built up on the platform over many years.
Moving from Twitter is a bit like leaving school. You might maintain relationships with a few of your closest friends, but on the whole, you will not see most of those people again, however much you enjoyed your time with them
The problem with Mastodon is that they don’t have very many major entities actively making posts. The main thing I track on twitter is OSINT and US politics, and that community basically doesn’t exist on Mastodon right now
What you call a problem I call a relief. I’m tired of the cult of celebrity that corporate social media foists.
It’ll definitely happen, but it remains to be seen whether people will actually stay. For all we know, this latest Twitter thing could be resolved this week and people will come crawling back because they’ve built up a network/following there. Something like that is really hard to destroy, and even then I think it’s far more likely that a commercial product with a large budget and fancy apps takes in most of the users.
I also feel like the Twitter brand is still too well known to die forever. Even if it goes away for a while, someone else will buy it and bring it back.
Like Friendster and Myspace, those two grandly important pieces of the modern social media landscape?
