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
“Hey, check out this X video”
I should X that sounds like I should delete/close that. How apt.
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?”
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.
He’s clearly laying the groundwork to sell it to Alphabet (Google’s parent company). /s
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.
Yay, another week of higher than normal activity, until the fomo kicks back in and they leave yet again cause “everyone is on X/this is sooo complicated/I just wanna see the fallout/whatever excuse justifies their addiction”
Every time that happens the fedi retains a good chunk of users. There’s significant and stable growth throughout.
Ya that’s what happened with me, I deleted my account once Musk took over and started a Mastodon account and now I’m on Lemmy too and haven’t looked back at either platforms
Wow That is a ugly logo 🤢
I’m just here to spread the good word about old.lemmy.world
Can’t wait for Lemmy Enhancement Suite.
Because LES is more.
Or Kbin! Kbin can do both microblogging and link aggregation/discussion. Tbh departing Twitter users coming to Mastodon, and reddit refugees are brought together on Kbin.
The “all-in-one” method acomplished by Kbin is a huge feat, especially when it’s built by a single person from scratch (ie; not based on lemmy codebase wise) and still much more ActivityPub compatible.
Kbin is sadly very underrated imo.
I feel that’s a feature of Lemmy to not do both. I don’t care about microblogs. I want the sites that I use to do one thing and do it as well as possible, so I can mix & match what I use, and not see what I don’t want.
Removed by mod
A more appropriate rebranding would be ‘L’.
I wonder if they’ll renew the twitter.com domain name
It would be hilarious if a random got that domain and threw a mastodon instance on it. They’ll probably keep it though lol
They even stole x.org’s logo:
believe it or not its more likely they straight up ripped off U+1D54F MATHEMATICAL DOUBLE-STRUCK CAPITAL X:
𝕏
absolutely no creativity. at least threads drew the ring in @ clockwise instead of the usual anticlockwise
Saw this on Mastodon:
Important sets:
ℂ the complex numbers
ℕ the natural numbers
ℚ the rational numbers
ℝ the real numbers
𝕏 the set of fascists wannabes
ℤ the integers
My favorite comment about this from Mastodon: “X is just a sans serif swastika”.
I would argue that ℤ would also be the set of Russian fascist wannabes.
Imagine a billionaire approving that “logo” despite how uncreative it is. Like get a better graphic designer I guess?
only difference between billionaires and normal people is that billionaires have a lot of money. best not to assume they have above-average logo appreciation skills. although they could hire some good advisors i suppose
I hear ya… The advantage that Lemmy and kbin have over Mastodon is that Redditors tend to be more technically inclined than Twitter users, so ditching Reddit for Lemmy was easy, while I only know a grand total of three people on Mastodon, and two of them are tech YouTubers.
Redditors tend to be more technically inclined than Twitter users
This used to be true, but Reddit has been mainstream for years now. Today’s average Redditor is likely pretty similar to the average Twitter user.
When a quarter of the replies on Reddit have become “this” or “💯” or “^^,” which it feels like it became when I left, I’d agree with you.
I remember when you’d get ripped apart and down voted to hell for daring to use an emoji on Reddit when commenting. People hated it. Then one day it was fine to do it, no one cared anymore. I guess that’s around when Reddit became mainstream, maybe.
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!
I hate to correct you, but it’s a billionaire baboon bills brawl.
An affluent ape asset altercation.
Wait so the cage match is still a possibility?
There is a possibility!
Maybe if twitter keeps fucking shit up, mastodon will become mainstream haha. I would certainly love to see that.
This reminds me of the time that the movie XxX came out and it was difficult to find to pirate.
When you name yourself anything with a lot of X’s then your search engine results are going to point to adult entertainment over the product
Just googled X, musk isn’t on the first page of results, absolute melon of a man.
When life gives you melon…
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.
Yep, everyone I followed on Twitter went to Bluesky, some made accounts on Mastodon, but none of them stuck around
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.
I don’t want to rain on your parade but I’ll do it anyway: The numbers of active posts and members in Lemmy communities, even in the most active ones, are mindbogglingly low in comparison with Reddit, even in comparison to somethingawful what I still consider the dirty cousin of Reddit.
All the numbers are just two sizes lower than Reddit and then there is the atrocious web interface. I have stopped counting how often my posts got eaten, the reply button didn’t react and general stuff didn’t work at all.
we willget there eventually.
you can’t compare a product that is decades old wuth something that’s fairly new.
I opened Twitter page and it shows login page with small x on left and big x in the middle. But only one closes the popup.
I just checked too. And if you close popup it takes you do another login page (also with an X) but that one can’t be closed. So apparently there is no way to browse Twitter without an account now, which you could before.
People always used to claim that getting banned from twitter meant you were cut off from important information. It’s highly debatable that there was any important information on twitter. That aside it wasn’t really true you were cut off entirely, you could still browse tweets, just couldn’t post when banned. Now it seems being banned does mean you’re cut off from reading it.
Twitter was really good for news media and it kinda still is. Where I come from legacy media have been bought off by plutocrats who are in bed with the government and only reputable source of news are independent media which don’t have enough funding or financial backing to appear on satellite TV channels. There’s also no incentive for the incumbent to let such media flourish since legacy media is doing their dirty work. So for people like me this is a huge setback.
He didn’t want to buy the company. So, he’s turning it into a pet project. The end. The oxymoron here of this story: The winners of the 44 billion Musk payed for it probably don’t care that their creation is being run into the ground while the users of the platform are obviously in an uproar. In the end, the creators and founders, etc. did it for the money, not the cultural impact they would have on the world. Twitter’s former CEO has allowed himself to be interviewed from time to time to say what he thinks Musk is doing wrong, but he doesn’t seem to have any hurt feelings or express any kind of extreme regrets for the company being sold. From what I’ve seen in the news, he’s pretty dry. The drama comes from the user end. This tells me something about how, in the end, it’s just rich people doing business and doing as they please with what they please. It’s kind of sad. Like, let’s say I made something really cool with my own two hands and my creation got turned into something monstrous. I’d be upset. The people who made twitter are happy with their riches. In the end, the outrage and scandal is kind of pointless because it’s just a thing that makes more money for big business rich tech people and it always was just that.
He didn’t want to buy the company. So, he’s turning it into a pet project.
That’s a good point, and one that had not occurred to me. For all we know, he’s already mentally written off the $44 billion as a loss and is just having fun with it, with no expectation of success.
That would explain a lot.
