Summary
Stephen King announced his departure from X (formerly Twitter), calling the platform “too toxic” and urging followers to join him on Threads.
King has frequently clashed with X owner Elon Musk over verification charges and political disputes, including Musk’s support for Donald Trump.
Other entities, including The Guardian, German football club St Pauli, and actor Jamie Lee Curtis, have also left the platform, citing concerns over toxic content, misinformation, and hate speech.
Rival platforms like Threads and Bluesky are gaining traction, with Bluesky reporting nearly 15 million users globally.
We’re here for fun. Celebs are on social media as part of their brand. It’s them doing business, and they’re going to use what the feel will reach the largest audience with the least effort on their part, and something with corporate backing likely has customer support for moderation, hacking, and whatever else. They’re not here for a digital revolution, they’re here to keep their name and income stream out there.
I imagine it’s the same reasoning why a business will pay for Red Hat when they could run Linux for free. It may or may not be the best option, but they feel it offers tangible benefits.
This is absolutely correct. And these businesses are typically paying employees to manage these social accounts so there is financial risk with choosing one that’s not going to result in revenue. Why market on a platform with no audience or backing?
I’m not saying I like it, but that is indeed how things work.
Yup, I just replied to another comment, what’s so bad about having a place that’s just regular people? I enjoy having my comments actually read here and getting to know some of you to some level. I’d lose interest in this place if it turned into new Twitter. I can’t compete with Taylor or Beyonce or whoever the flavor of the week is. We can have both platforms if we so choose, so why wreck one for the sake of another?
Although federated social media has the “chicken or egg” problem with content and attracting users, I’m content with places like Lemmy and Mastodon staying the small size they are right now for a little longer.
Sure, I definitely miss content from other platforms from time to time. But I think your comment about businesses and celebrities rings true. I’m happy to be clear of the grifters and influencers for as long as possible.
Exactly. For all the things that typically get complained about: one product trying to do everything, people coming in to monetize things, feeling like your voice gets lost in oceans of comments, it seems like people forget that when it comes to the Fediverse.
The same guys that spent all that time being mad about potential federation with Threads are mad that this place isn’t going to be Twitter 2.0? It doesn’t make sense to me. If you want ads and celebs, go see them at their place. Keeping this just place us regular people doesn’t need to be a negative. There’s room for both.
Well, if the corporatized platforms all went to federated instances, it’d be a lot easier to pack up and move to a different platform, or fix the existing platform by choosing different instances. It would make those platforms better and we would probably still have our own spaces either using different protocols, or different clusters of instances who only federate with each other.
Threads being federated is not them actually trying to be federated, but trying to EEE the open competition, and I think that is more of a threat to us than people joining mastodon.
Edit: I’m realizing that I’m kind of contradicting myself here lol
That was my initial gripe with the other commenters. Nobody ever likes the one-size-fits-all software platforms. It’s always got too much of what you dont want and not enough what you do. All these social platforms are free., why mix them when we can use the ones we want. Installing Lemmy and Bluesky apps is easy, but if you later decide you dont want Bluesky, you just uninstall. If all those people would come here, you’d have to get people to defederate or you have to pack up and leave for another instance. That seems a lot more hassle to me than just using a second app.
Lemmy is great as-is. Let’s be proud of it. It gives me a day’s worth of content as it stands now…probably more than I actually should use it already!