STAFF REPORT
LOS ANGELES: With the official takeover of Twitter by Elon Musk, chaos ensued with top officials and employees quitting the microblogging website after the new chief executive officer (CEO) announced to overhaul of the platform.
Musk laid off half of the employees, including top executives soon, after he took over Twitter. The platform briefly introduced a new “blue check” verification tool, only to be plagued by trolls and false “confirmed” accounts of celebrities like LeBron James and companies including Eli Lilly.
Like other platforms in the past, naysayers say, Elon Musk’s measures are likely to destroy Twitter itself with most of the subscribers leaving the platform. But some say that was not going to even in most extreme scenarios.
Marketers quitting
Thus, even Musk’s harshest detractors have been surprised by the previous 10 days: After he took control of Twitter on October 27, letting go of thousands of employees and the whole board so that he could join as its sole member, the platform has really started to decline.
According to Musk, the company is losing $4 million per day, a loss that is mostly attributable to marketers quitting.
More than a million users are said to have quit the site in the few days after Musk’s takeover, many in search of an alternative Twitter-like network. Mastodon is quickly becoming a favorite among users who want to write text postings that may be published on an online message board.
Mastodon not user friendly like Twitter
Mastodon is a social networking site that operates exclusively as a nonprofit and advertises itself as “Twitter, but nice.” However, it’s a pipe dream to think that you could create a new version of Twitter free of its current issues.
It won’t occur on Mastodon and probably won’t occur anywhere else either.
The most obvious difficulties with Mastodon especially are technological in nature; you cannot just sign up and instantly appear in a shared place with other users. The platform functions as a collection of isolated servers, each of which manages a unique place with a distinct topic (such as “journalism” or “Glasgow”).
Twitter has 237 million active users
Even while you may still interact with people from other services, doing so is not simple, and it is challenging for users to compile a comprehensive history of all Mastodon users. The procedure is cumbersome.
It does have a single primary server that serves all users, but once Musk took over Twitter, this server quickly filled up and was no longer accepting new sign-ups. Since Twitter has 237 million active users, this large migration of users has caused the site, which has just reached 1 million active users, to experience server overload.
Mastodon’s technological foundation doesn’t appear to be able to grow overnight to support even a small portion of Twitter’s user base.
These Twitter competitors are having trouble replicating the Twitter experience for reasons other than technological ones. It’s extremely challenging to control a vast digital “town square” when hundreds of millions of people are jammed into the same place, as Musk himself is learning.
The few websites that most closely resemble Twitter are those with far-right overtones, such Parler and Donald Trump’s Truth Social. However, this political free-for-all is not an option for a platform looking to build a more peaceful, superior version of Twitter.
Twitter becoming insecure but still a need
The purpose behind creating a new Twitter, though, is one of the most overlooked aspects of the process. How many people genuinely want Twitter to exist at all? Despite the fact that many individuals may still be willing to utilize a microblogging platform, there were several indications that Twitter’s popularity was dwindling even before Musk assumed the helm.
Recent studies have started to demonstrate that even the most active users of Twitter are now logging on far less frequently than they formerly did. Twitter has always failed to attract the user numbers of other major platforms, such as Instagram, Facebook, or even Snapchat.
Before they even tackle the issue of duplicating, what was it that people genuinely enjoyed about it in the first place, Twitter-alternative services have an uphill struggle to re-enthuse jaded Twitter users.
Twitter’s unique offerings to users
It is difficult to acknowledge that Twitter, despite all its flaws, is also offered something unique for its users. Many people used the site to find employment, new hobbies, love, or even lifelong pals (I met my partner of six years thanks to Twitter and also have to credit it for launching my career).
It was exceptional in that, it made this simple by squeezing every user onto the platform into a single, public space that had no physical boundaries and was created mainly to facilitate social interaction.
Most people just want a place to read jokes and connect; they don’t care about the aesthetics, the advertisements, or the specialty functionality. This is especially important in an area where it feels like everyone is there. No number of stated parallels will truly provide what we think of as the Twitter experience until we do manage to induce mass migration to another platform that then recreates that environment like-for-like (mass meaning most of Twitter’s 400 million users).
