LogFAQs > #974745864

papercup posted...

Bold of you to assume I know what Mastodon is

This is sort of indicative of what I mentioned in the other topic on this subject.

There are tons of Twitter alternatives out there... but while people who are terminally online may know about most of them and have opinions of which one is better and why, the average person living in the real world (which are still making up the vast majority of users for social media sites, even if their reading/posting habits are more casual) has never heard of any of them. So there's never going to be a concerted push to switch platforms no matter how terrible Twitter might become or how much people come to hate it. At least not until one of the alternatives manages to establish itself as a clear alternative that is both popular and massive.

Most people on social media in general are followers who go where the trends lead them, they're not trailblazers who are going to actively go looking for new services. So they're not going to jump ship unless a new platform presents itself as both more useful, more popular, of significant size, and "cool". Which really isn't happening right now, no matter how much people want to complain about Twitter.

This is one of the reasons why new trending social media sites tend to be significantly different from what already exists, creating a new niche to fill. And why, if anything, the "new Twitter" these days is probably something more like TikTok (for good or ill). Or even something like Instagram or Snapchat.