As Twitter ditches its iconic branding in favor of owner Elon Musk’s favorite letter “X,” its open source competitor Mastodon is once again seeing usage numbers soar.
I can fathom no world where you’d want to trade away a multi billion dollar brand for a new brand you literally can’t SEO. What, you think your brand is gonna be more impressive that the generic variable, and a part of the alphabet?
“Follow me on Twitter” becomes “follow me on X”? “You should tweet that” becomes “you should X that”? The little blue bird on every shop window, website, and business card becomes a stylized letter that, hopefully, doesn’t look so threatening on the next iteration?
It’s a textbook case of brand destruction. I almost regret never making a Twitter in the first place, just so I could quit today, or at any of the hundred days in the past year where it got inexplicably worse without reason.
“You should tweet that” becomes “you should X that”
“You should X-create” that
And a tweet becomes an “X-cretion”
X-crement
And retweet it become
X-Forwarded-Forit
It’s just a new form of messaging called X-communication.
oh wait.
It’s inspired by all the X-Twitter employees
We’re witnessing an X-tinction event in real time.
Ain’t X-ing a term for cutting something out of your life ?
Yes, and I was thinking how confusing it could be. A: “Hey, did you see that trend on X?” B: “What? No, I don’t talk to my ex anymore.”
Destroying the brand and ruining twitter was always the goal. There’s a good reason why Saudi Arabia fronted half of the bill…
“Hey, check out this X video”
I should X that sounds like I should delete/close that. How apt.
Its a terrible rebrand that pretty much comes because of Elon’s impulses, or in other words, for shits and giggles. Regardless of this hilarious trashing of such a powerful brand, I’ll have fun calling tweets “xeets” for a good week.
It must be so horrible working “with” him. You’re trying to build something and every morning you must be frightened to see Elon hanging on a ladder because he thought it was so funny to draw dicks everywhere on the building, which would have you cancel everything you are working on.
I’ve worked in a founder led business and this is why I quit.
I’d spend forever working on a project to build a satellite site then suddenly we don’t want that anymore - bin the recipes we want a full main site redbrand.
Bye.
Feel you, I’ve been working with this kind of person but he was pushed away a few weeks after my arrival. He still had time to make an impression though, his genius move was to tell each team that the others hated them, which had no effect because we talked to each others…
“Hey bros wanna see me light $40 billion on fire?”
The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia spent good money to never have an Arab Spring again.
Which is nuts because they have a nationwide content filter and could just blacklist Twitter and be done with it in 5 minutes.
The little blue bird on every shop window, website, and business card becomes a stylized letter that, hopefully, doesn’t look so threatening on the next iteration?
Haha, I know the most appropriate iteration, a red background with the X in a white circle.
Perhaps with each corner of the X at a 90 degree angle clockwise? You know, to add style points.
It makes the X go faster, everyone knows that.
He’s just a fan of Laurie Anderson. Give him some slack!
Watch out… language is a virus!
He’s clearly laying the groundwork to sell it to Alphabet (Google’s parent company). /s
Yay, another week of higher than normal activity, until the fomo kicks back in and they leave yet again cause “everyone is on X/this is sooo complicated/I just wanna see the fallout/whatever excuse justifies their addiction”
Every time that happens the fedi retains a good chunk of users. There’s significant and stable growth throughout.
Ya that’s what happened with me, I deleted my account once Musk took over and started a Mastodon account and now I’m on Lemmy too and haven’t looked back at either platforms
Wow That is a ugly logo 🤢
Reminds me of the X-windows logo
nice
God I hate that. It’s confusing on mobile
Serious question: Are Mastadon users just like kbin and Lemmy users, but with a character limit?
You mean, are we a part of the same Fediverse? Yes. I’m actually replying to you right now from my Mastodon account! Still not over how cool that is!
But yeah, there’s a character limit. The instance I’m from is donphan.social. Our character limit is 1,008.
Username checks out. I just checked out that instance because of the name, even though I have no intent of using Mastodon because I never liked Twitter. It’s like the perfect name for a Pokémon-themed Mastodon instance.
I tried Mastodon and failed. Lemmy is different IMO in that you can freely access, write on and read all lemmy communities from any Lemmy instance (and apparently from Mastodon). On Masto you’re quite siloed-in, can’t follow “local” from a thematic instance with an account on another (and in Lemmy you can follow thematic communities from all around the threadiverse), people won’t see your content unless they either actively follow you or read the local/global feed. Curating feed is a necessary effort and not too easy one since you only get to follow individual users.
Elon has no idea how to run a social media company. At this point he’s just trying random shit hoping it will work. Get the platform operating successfully again and then worry about branding…
I honestly think that he believes himself to be some sort of super genius that only has good ideas, just cause he wrote some software and sold it for alot of money when he was younger.
More importantly: he was born rich
The guy actually wrote software? Like he coded it?
He wrote something called zip2 and sold it. Then he wrote get this… x.com, which became PayPal.
Edit, because I didn’t really answer your question: yes he did code it, as far as anyone seems to know.
Assuming “hoping it works” is really part of his plan for the platform.
gossip that Elon has no idea about running anything was circulating for a long time but since Tesla/SpaceX were not social media it was easier to manage the PR to make Musk seem like “tech and business genius, also twitter troll” regardless of what was going on behind the scenes. On Twitter every single decision hits millions of people and businesses within an hour and managing that is impossible for any PR department so we get to see the man as who he really is.
I wonder if they’ll renew the twitter.com domain name
It would be hilarious if a random got that domain and threw a mastodon instance on it. They’ll probably keep it though lol
Given how shamelessly stupid musks whole takeover has been I guarantee they wont won’t. He’ll probably assign someone to keep it renewed and then fire them.
That’s a bummer, hang in there Mastodon, keep bloomscrollin
Hopefully a massive influx of Twitter jerks doesn’t kill what makes Mastodon a nice place in the first place.
What makes this even better is that apparently Mark Zuckerberg / Mets owns trademark for the X logo.
You know what that means! Millionaire monkey money fight!
I hate to correct you, but it’s a billionaire baboon bills brawl.
An affluent ape asset altercation.
Grossly gilded gorilla grapple?
Overhyped orangutan oligarch octagon ordeal.
Lucrative lemur litigation.
Wait so the cage match is still a possibility?
There is a possibility!
Microsoft also as a trademark for X.
Serious question, isn’t this going to force them to release their trademark on the word “tweet”?
Quick, someone create a Mastodon Frontend Twatter that uses different logos than X yet seems oddly familiar…
Addiction it is. They think they are advocating for health and social justice. But they’re not. They’re just addicted to Twitter/X. I mean… it’s owned by someone who pays fascists to post on there, but they are still there? WTAF?
They even stole x.org’s logo:
believe it or not its more likely they straight up ripped off U+1D54F MATHEMATICAL DOUBLE-STRUCK CAPITAL X:
𝕏
absolutely no creativity. at least threads drew the ring in @ clockwise instead of the usual anticlockwise
Saw this on Mastodon:
Important sets:
ℂ the complex numbers
ℕ the natural numbers
ℚ the rational numbers
ℝ the real numbers
𝕏 the set of fascists wannabes
ℤ the integers
My favorite comment about this from Mastodon: “X is just a sans serif swastika”.
I would argue that ℤ would also be the set of Russian fascist wannabes.
Imagine a billionaire approving that “logo” despite how uncreative it is. Like get a better graphic designer I guess?
only difference between billionaires and normal people is that billionaires have a lot of money. best not to assume they have above-average logo appreciation skills. although they could hire some good advisors i suppose
yeah but then they’d be spending money to be told they might not be 100% right and perfect 100% of the time, and that’s just a waste of money
Billionaires wouldn’t care if they’re wasting money
if that was true then maybe the stingy fuckers would tip wait staff
I hear ya… The advantage that Lemmy and kbin have over Mastodon is that Redditors tend to be more technically inclined than Twitter users, so ditching Reddit for Lemmy was easy, while I only know a grand total of three people on Mastodon, and two of them are tech YouTubers.
Redditors tend to be more technically inclined than Twitter users
This used to be true, but Reddit has been mainstream for years now. Today’s average Redditor is likely pretty similar to the average Twitter user.
When a quarter of the replies on Reddit have become “this” or “💯” or “^^,” which it feels like it became when I left, I’d agree with you.
I remember when you’d get ripped apart and down voted to hell for daring to use an emoji on Reddit when commenting. People hated it. Then one day it was fine to do it, no one cared anymore. I guess that’s around when Reddit became mainstream, maybe.
Probably cause more and more users gravitated to mobile where it became commonplace to include emojis in posts. I remember too when using emojis was a mortal sin. At most you could use an emoticon but that was it.
Back when I started using Reddit it was frowned upon to post OC. I remember some subs had rules that you would be banned if you more than like 10% of your posts were OC.
bump
This
^^
And my axe!
I feel like when the Reddit API controversy happened I was more inclined to switch due to the blackout vs Twitter which didn’t have nearly as instant of an event that would happen to get me off. Now all of a sudden because of Reddit I’m on various Fediverse projects such as Funkwhale, Mastodon, Kbin, and Lemmy.
Plus there’s some staying power to posts on here
I’m replying to what you wrote 10 hours ago. My local feed would be a lot of shit before I ever saw this
And it’s 100% relevant to the area of content I wanted to read. Same if I went to a gaming or news related group
But in the other hand lemmy seems much more mature than lemmy.
Don’t get me wrong, the experience has been rapidly growing in recent weeks thanks to the proliferation of third party apps 👍 But Mastodon’s first party experience feels solid and their new official app just blends in any mainstream app.
I assume you mean Mastodon seems much more mature than Lemmy?
Yeah, I’d agree with you there. I’ve had zero issues trying to find people and content on Mastodon, while I have had federation issues with Lemmy. And I do use the official Mastodon app.
My only gripe with Mastodon is that it isn’t obvious that you should follow hashtags. I didn’t know this at first and struggled to get into it with post after post complaining about Elon, but once I figured out to follow hashtags, I like it now. I’m just annoyed that all the artists I follow on Twitter are flocking to Threads and Bluesky instead of Mastodon though.
I’m just here to spread the good word about old.lemmy.world
Can’t wait for Lemmy Enhancement Suite.
Because LES is more.
Honestly my favorite thing about Lemmy so far is that the web UI already has most of the things I wanted RES to have. And it’s all open source so we can just improve the UI directly. No need for browser changes!
Same!
Though I do miss the content/comment filters that RES could do!
Or Kbin! Kbin can do both microblogging and link aggregation/discussion. Tbh departing Twitter users coming to Mastodon, and reddit refugees are brought together on Kbin.
The “all-in-one” method acomplished by Kbin is a huge feat, especially when it’s built by a single person from scratch (ie; not based on lemmy codebase wise) and still much more ActivityPub compatible.
Kbin is sadly very underrated imo.
I feel that’s a feature of Lemmy to not do both. I don’t care about microblogs. I want the sites that I use to do one thing and do it as well as possible, so I can mix & match what I use, and not see what I don’t want.
Removed by mod
Mastadon is where the smart people hang out… X is the fascist site and Facebook/Threads is the frivolous and stupid site.
Nah, Facebook and x are both fascistic sides because of the amount of qanons and magats I’ve seen on facebook
Hence why I haven’t had a Facebook or Instagram account in years.
A more appropriate rebranding would be ‘L’.
