"Doing the good thing is pointless as long as not everyone is doing it" said every last man to do the bad thing in history.
Don’t do what the world is, do what you want the world to be. Said the others.
(disclaimer : I’ve fully deleted Twitter and Whatsapp last year thanks to enough people on Mastodon and Signal. No, not everyone. But enough to survive).
I mean, that's assuming that Twitter doesn't change dramatically.
For me, the last straw is the planned blanket unsuspension of banned accounts. Twitter's moderation was always weak and inadequate, but life is too short for dealing with some of the complete monsters that that will allow back on. I think I'm done.
(Also, Musk has said that they plan to deprioritise tweets from accounts who don't pay for a checkmark. Literally no-one I am interested in hearing from will pay for a checkmark, so that would make the site largely pointless, even if they weren't doing the "bring back the Nazis" thing)
It's hard to say what critical mass is, and not knowing that, it's hard to say it has or hasn't been reached. Half a million people signed up earlier this week and it's still going strong at a consistent ~2,000/hour. A handful of famous people have also moved and a few others have reserved accounts. Maybe this isn't the tipping point, but maybe it is. In any case, it's not "pointless" for the people who did move. It's community, and a hell of a lot less toxicity (so far anyway.)
I think the cool thing (regarding toxicity) is that with moderation at the instance level, and instances able to choose their federation partners, there are natural limits that aren't in place with a half-assed moderation in a centralized system.
It's sort of "think global, act local", but for discussion.
my timeline feels pretty much identical to how it did when i was using twitter. maybe a bit better. the conversations are significantly better-a massive drop in low-tier/low-effort/annoying comments.
but my experience may be different from others—my circles were already pretty actively looking to get off twitter and the recent changes just put the final nail in.
if you’re interested in infosec, the infosec.exchange community has a massive chunk of former infosec twitter and it’s very very active.
that comparison isn't right because in reality it's about moving people from a single app into an open ecosystem. If Mastodon-like projects have success it's going to be a 30 year, linux-ish thing, not some attenion driven wave. Not to mention if you can spare a few megabytes of disk space you can do both, you shouldn't tell people that using Mastodon means you have to abandon Twitter in the first place.
