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"birdchan"

As seen on Mastodon, to refer to Twitter.

on the mass exodus from Twitter, the view from November 2022

From the looks of it, a lot of people are moving their short form public group chats to something other than Twitter. Lots of reasons for this, cascading from the $44 billion transaction that led to a change of control at the site.

There have been online mass exodus movements before.

New management by Yahoo after a $1.1 billion acquisition of Tumblr in 2013 had Tumblr users flee en masse to WordPress, taking their blogs with them. By 2019, Automattic - the makers of WordPress - acquired the site for a reported mere $3 million.

Similarly, the Yahoo purchase of the del.icio.us in 2005 for less than $30 million caused a great number of users to move their bookmarks to the competing Pinboard site, and Pinboard ultimately acquired the remaining husk of del.icio.us in 2017.

When America Online opened up access to Usenet News in September 1993, the "Eternal September" era of Usenet started, with newsgroups being overrun by clueless newbies with no understanding of or interest in the social norms of that system.

This brings us out of the past to the present day, when Twitter users are casting about for somewhere new to go.

One destination is group chat sites like Discord. You gather up all your friends, recruit some others, and talk amongst yourselves on a multichannel system that's members only.

A second option is to join one of the many sites that makes up Mastodon, a federated network of sites that interchange traffic using the ActivityPub protocol. Mastodon sites have seen a sharp uptick in traffic from Twitter refugees.

Because Mastodon is federated, you can join the network nearly anywhere and have a mostly similar experience. There are, however, a lot of differences between Mastodon sites, and your choice of a main server actually makes a difference. The biggest and most popular Mastodon sites are currently straining under load and will be slow and laggy. The little ones are harder to fund, but many of them have active moderation and a strong topical theme. On these sites reading the "local" feed of all posts generated by users of the server will be much closer to on topic for a single topic.

Twitter is staring at a series of crisis conditions at the moment, with rumors of impending mass layoffs, a pause in spending from some advertisers, and a whole pile of uncertainty over its future. There are lots of possible outcomes from this turmoil, but past history suggests strongly that the new Twitter under new management will cause many of its most valuable readers, contributors, and advertisers to change their focus of attention away from the site onto something new.