The Future of Twitter: What Will it Tell Us About the Future of the Social Network? An Empirical Conversation with Mike and Victoria Elliot

If hubris had a hall of fame, Musk would be a first-ballot shoo-in. He thinks his Musk itude will enable him to do what generations of other leaders have been unable to do: swat away precedent. After it became a hit at the South by Southwest conference, Twitter was taken off the ground. From then on, it experienced huge growth. A memo quotes Evan Williams as saying that if we had a billion users, it would be the pulse of the planet. It seemed plausible that a billion people would use the micro-messaging service. And Williams believed that with this base, it would be easy to concoct a business plan that made the company wildly profitable. But Twitter never got even half of those billion users, and while it seemed to come up with a good ad-based business model, it has had only two years of profit in its almost 20 years on earth. Everyone who has led a social networking website tried to boost user growth and solidify profits. Evan Williams tried. Dick Costolo tried. Jack Dorsey tried, twice. Over and over, smart people who knew the workings of the platform from the inside tried and failed to boost Twitter from an important speech platform to a giant tech power. Musk is trying to learn how to use it before Christmas so he can put up his tree.

Jay Graber, Bluesky’s CEO, declined to comment on the progress of the project and the implications of Musk’s acquisition, but has implied publicly that she is unconcerned about the project’s future. She wondered if she was going to see where Elon was going to take her account. “Very glad we’re independent—will keep working on building protocols that make social more resilient to rapid change.” Meanwhile, in a thread published in April, soon after Musk tabled his bid, Bluesky claimed it will continue to receive funding from Twitter as long as it works toward enabling “open and decentralized public conversation”—a loose brief if ever there was one.

This week on Gadget Lab, we talk with WIRED platforms and power reporter Vittoria Elliot about the changes coming to Twitter and how they may affect the future of the social network.

It is your job to encourage male-presenting friends to watch House of the Dragon. Mike recommends the new album from Natalia Lafourcade, De Todas las Flores. Lauren recommends reevaluating your relationship with Twitter, and social media in general.

Twitter @Telliotter, Lauren Goode @GadgetLab – Listening to Solar Keys on Android and iOS Devices

Vittoria Elliott can be found on Twitter @telliotter. Lauren is known as LaurenGoode. Michael Calore is a fighter. Bling the main hotline at @GadgetLab. The show is produced by a man. Solar Keys is the music for our theme.

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Mastodon: A Small-Scale Social Network for Musk to Turn Around the Apple Company he Built in 1998 to Turn the Company Around

At the time, Jobs had been developing personal computers for 20 years, his entire adult life. He was intimately familiar with the company he was suddenly running because he had founded it and led the team that created its flagship product. In his years away from Apple, he had founded another computer company with a forward-thinking approach to the internet and next-generation operating systems. Plus, he was Steve Jobs. If anyone could quickly turn around the near-bankrupt computer giant, it would be him. Yet it took him months to come up with his plan and years to bring it to fruition. While the colorful iMac he unveiled to me that day in May would help nudge Apple’s bottom line back into the black, it wasn’t until the company’s entry into non-PC devices—like the iPod in 2001 and the iPhone in 2007—that it became a profit machine. Jobs did not even include the post-PC future on his road map in 1998.

Musk need not look farther than his own successful enterprises to realize the absurdity of his haste. The company was five years old when he took over. Musk came up with a brilliant plan to turn the company around—but it didn’t post an annual profit until 2020, 17 years after incorporation. Musk deserves a lot of credit for what he’s done with the company. SpaceX, Musk’s other company, is private and doesn’t report earnings. It takes years to even launch a rocket ship, and you can wind up killing people if you cut corners.

But unlike on Twitter, where I can easily interact with a large audience, my Mastodon network is less than 100 followers. I had no clue what to post until I saw that the network makes it less consequential than before. I realized the smaller scale of Mastodon is calming compared to the endless stream of stimulation on social media.

Mastodon’s new sign-ups include some Twitter users with big followings, such as actor and comedian Kathy Griffin, who joined in early November, and journalist Molly Jong-Fast, who joined in late October.

The network is set up a different way. Because Mastodon users’ accounts are hosted on a slew of different servers, the costs of hosting users is spread among many different people and groups. But that also means users are spread out all over the place, and people you know can be hard to find — Rochko likened this setup to having different email providers, like Gmail and Hotmail.

On Mastodon, you have to join a specific server to sign in, with some of which are open only to you, and others that require an invitation. There is a server operated by the nonprofit behind Mastodon, Mastodon.social, but it’s not accepting more users; I’m currently using one called Mstdn.social, which is also where I can sign in to access Mastodon on the web.

If you sign up with a Mastodon server, you can follow any other Mastodon user, no matter which one you are on, but you can only see the list of who your Mastodon friends follow if they are on the same server.

A Newcomer to Social Media? The Mastodon Story of a Contribute Drinfeld Tevator on Twitter, Revisited

At first, it felt as if I was starting over, in a sense, as a complete newcomer to social media. As Roberts said, it is quite similar to Twitter in that it has the same look andFunctionality, and it is easy to use.

Roberts, too, hasn’t yet decided if she will close her Twitter account, but she was surprised by how quickly her following grew on Mastodon. She has accumulated over 1,000 Mastodon followers a week after she joined the social networking site.

“I thought, ‘What’s it going to be like to start over again?’” She asked, and then she asked again. “It’s kind of interesting: Oh that person is here! Here is so-and-so. I’m so glad they’re here so we can be here together.”

Tuning in with Musk: How much do you need to Tweet? When you can’t use Twitter, but you have to take care of it

Musk said that small talk was coming from his own mind and that it could have bubbled up from a fish bowled dorm room. Thank you: We all live in Tiny Talk Town now, where all conversation is about Elon Musk.

In the workplace, quiet quitting is rejecting the burden of going above and beyond, no longer working overtime in a way that enriches your employer but depletes your own metaphorical coffers. Its about giving a platform that most people can expect to get back on. If you wish to stay involved on this new social networking site, you need to find a way to use it without using you.

There are a few people who power the Twitter account. According to internal company research viewed by Reuters, heavy users who tweet in English “account for less than 10 percent of monthly overall users, but generate 90 percent of all tweets and half of global revenue.”

It would be easy for an electric car enthusiast who follows a lot of people on the social networking website to mistake his own experience for that of everyone else. Same goes for reporters. It’s true that almost half of us don’t use the service five times a month and most of us just reply to other people’s posts. They check in on current events or live sports or celebrity news, and then they go about their lives. They are called lurkers.

Lurking isn’t doomscrolling, a practice (and phrase) that took hold during the early days of the Covid pandemic, when many people found themselves stuck at home and grasping at info on social media. A simplistic approach to dealing with the complexity and chaos of New Twitter is to just lurk and sit back and observe. Close your browser tab if you want to check in on Musk’s new toy. Send a tweet, then disengage. It’s important to keep an eye on it during games. Use DMs if you have to, then direct those message threads elsewhere. It’s worth saving your most original thoughts for a different place.

The Mastodon Platform: How to Join a Community of Open Software Users and How to Corral Conversations About a Paper, a Case Study

The open-source platform has added nearly half a million users in little more than a week — but should scientists make the leap? We look at the pros and cons.

Beset by bugs, shorn of around half of its staff and with an idiosyncratic new owner who is changing the rules on a whim, Twitter is turning from a must-use social-media platform into one that many people, including scientists, are becoming wary of.

Mastodon does not allow a single unified platform and instead allows anyone to use open source software to host a community with its own rules. TheFediverse is a collective of interlinked communities. It is possible to join a server that matches their interests and community standards, but also connect with other users on other servers, or completely block all content from a particular server.

Unlike Twitter, where missives are limited to 280 characters, you can post up to 11,000 characters in a single Mastodon message — known as a toot. There is more to how users encounter content. Twitter’s algorithmic recommendations are nowhere to be seen on Mastodon. Who you follow and what they share dictates what you see.

“Coming into Mastodon is a bit like going for drinks after a conference,” says Flick. “You get to chat to everybody; people who understand academia and the ground rules for academic conversations.” She says that it feels like everyone is listening in and the world is watching. Ian Brown, a cybersecurity researcher at Getúlio Vargas Foundation in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, thinks that a considerable number of Mastodon users are probably academics.

There are other issues that might give users pause. Mastodon categorizes conversations around hashtags much more frequently than Twitter, partly because of its lack of algorithmic recommendations. But there isn’t an obvious way to corral conversations about a particular academic paper, using a DOI reference as a hashtag, because of the way that the platform’s technical architecture works. The user asked for the function to be introduced after they reported the issue.

The creator of Mastodon began developing it shortly after leaving university. He was a fan of Twitter but wanted to create a platform not controlled by any single company or person, reasoning that online communication is too important to be at the whim of commercial interests or CEOs. He believed that the lack of profit motive and canny design could discourage harassment and abuse, and provide users more control.

Since Musk took over Twitter, Rochko has devoted many hours to his own server, Mastodon. He took time to videochat withWIRED from his home in Germany while also preparing a major upgrade to Mastodon. The conversation was edited for clarity and length.

Eugen Rochko: People probably want to hear that it’s been great—all this growth and success—but I would prefer to be watching from the sidelines. There are more fires to put out. It is incredibly hard to do. I’m pulling 14-hour workdays, sleeping very little, and eating very little.

The whole story coincides with the process of releasing a new version of the Mastodon software. You have to put a lot of focus into that. When you suddenly have the chance, you need to respond to press inquiries and run social media accounts.

It was gratifying and good at the same time. I would love to just relax and be a fan of Mastodon because so many new people are using it, like Stephen Fry. I don’t have time to relax and enjoy that. There has been an increase in funds due to all the new Patreon donations in the past 10 days, it’s been unprecedented.