Mastodon is not and will not ever be a replacement for Twitter.
Twitter's too large and the people who had bleu checks before the $7.99 fee are addicted to attention, validation, and/or lording their bleu check status over others.
That's why Mastodon won't replace it. Sure, a few small (relative to Twitter) alternative Mastodon instances will pop up, but no real challenger or contender for the throne.
I mean, it depends what you mean by 'replace'. Mastodon is already filling many of the functions that twitter filled for millions of people. Will it be a like-for-like replacement for Twitter? Of course not; I don't think anyone's saying that. But as Twitter crumbles, it's a place for many Twitter users to go which will work for many purposes.
> the people who had bleu checks before the $7.99 fee are addicted to attention, validation, and/or lording their bleu check status over others.
You're talking about, maybe, on the order of 50,000 people there. To a large extent... who cares? Extremely high follower count people are important to Twitter's _business model_ (or were, when it had one), but arguably not all that important to the _average user_.
I think it depends on what you mean by _celebrities_.
For me, the appeal of Twitter is being able to interact with various communities (such as the legal twitter community). There are people who are fairly popular in that sphere, that I really like being able to see their thoughts on various issues and even ask the occasional question (Popehat, Akiva Cohen, Mike Dunford, Greg Doucette), etc.
Are these people celebrities? Kinda, in their niche, yea. In the broader sense of the word not really.
But all of those people have moved to Mastodon. So, I think that kind of reinforces the point. It's more communities within Twitter that move. That move is relatively sticky. And there are people within that community that are highly connected in that community ("celebrities" within the niche), and when they move it tends to solidify the move of the community.
Yeah, that's another point that I think probably goes in Mastodon's favour. Most of the people who could be loosely classed as celebrities that I follow either are posting to both, or have flat-out moved. But they generally are niche "celebrities", not people with millions of followers.
Yea, I think this is the biggest thing. Most "real" celebrities can still post on Twitter or whatever. If Elon Musk or Lebron James or Barack Obama posts something important, I'll probably see it wherever they decide to post it. They could just yell random things at passersby on the street and I'd probably find out about it if it was interesting enough.
The value of Twitter a lot of the time is less the big name Blue Checks, but the long tail of niche blue checks. I bet a massive amount of people on Twitter have no idea who Paul Graham is, or Popehat, or Marco Arment, or even dril, but they all have some number of people who were mostly on Twitter because of them primarily, so if they and their friends all move to something else, their fans will follow.
In some ways, it's not too different from TV hosts or journalists of note. People will watch John Oliver on whatever TV network he's on. For certain niches, no one cares where they write/speak as long as it's not so insanely paywalled or otherwise cumbersome that it's a problem to follow them to it.
... Eh, I mean that is probably the appeal to _some_ users (though note that you can do that on Mastodon too, of course). But not all, or, I think, most. Twitter is many things to many people (the one I was always surprised by is that some people have Twitter accounts which they use for making consumer complaints and nothing else)...
I think maybe what you're getting at is the people who are celebrities solely _because_ they are big on Twitter/TikTok/Instagram/whatever. I would agree that the Mastodon model doesn't work particularly well for those. I don't see it as an issue for _normal_ celebrities, tho.
But that just seems like _such_ a niche. The majority of people, I'm reasonably sure, do not use Twitter primarily to follow internet celebrities.
That was the promise, but realistically huge accounts were so swamped that your actual chances of having such an interaction turn out to be slim to none. The game was dominated by people who would reply to a celeb's every post, people shilling for crypto, etc.
The entirety of twitter is too large to just lift and shift to mastodon - absolutely correct. There are also slightly different social norms and styles of discovery.
However, communities and professions have already moved and will continue to move.
This isn't about platforms but rather communities - and these things are "sticky". It's hard to get a community to move off a platform, but once it does move, it makes it hard to keep the remaining people as the pull to the new platform becomes stronger and stronger.
> the people who had bleu checks before the $7.99 fee are addicted to attention, validation, and/or lording their bleu check status over others.
This is not a thing people regularly did? Old-school blue checks were never a status symbol, just a way Twitter used to denote "real" (meaning from-the-author-stated) and "fake" (real-humans-parodying-someone-else) accounts.
The idea that they denoted status was a criticism born from misunderstanding and invented by far-right activists who mostly were never involved in Twitter socially during the first 10 years of it's run, and never really understood Twitter user's culture. 99% of people with "blue checks" were not doing some holier-than-thou dance or whatever. (It's also why none of these people are rushing to pay $8 for this newly-invented blue-as-status symbol thing -- it was never about status, these people are already often rich and famous or at least noteworthy in their field, they don't need some weirdo micro-validation from Twitter.
Only a completely tone-deaf crazy person would pay money for Twitter in an attempt to gain validation or status.
Despite it not being their stated purpose, they absolutely were a bit of a status symbol, though one that waned as more of them were given out of course. People routinely complained (both jokingly and seriously) about not being verified. It's not that rich and famous people needed the tiny bit of bonus (though some of them probably did), but that it was a marker of notability for less famous people. It's kind of like appearing in a crossword clue.
The thing about putting the badge into Twitter Blue is that it makes it not a status symbol: both because it's just generally accessible (so even what little cachet you might agree it previously implied is now gone) and because for many you might see "enthusiastic about Elon Twitter" as an negative signal.
There's a whole separate axis to this where it was clearly easier to get verified as a mainstream journalist than for many other kinds of professions or claims to fame (understandable both just under the basic "verification" goals and for presumably being pretty easy to actually verify as such things go). Much "anti-blue-check" sentiment is just the same familiar fights over the media, simply filtered through Twitter's systems.
Yea, for the folks I know who got blue checks in the sort of post "because you know someone at Twitter" zone, the whole exercise was more people joking or complaining about how random the whole thing was. I remember one time where half of the hosts of a show I follow got verified, but not the others, which was insane since the only possible verification that would be relevant would be that they were, in fact, the hosts of that show.
They're a status symbol, but I don't think almost anyone really cared about outside it of people who didn't have them and felt like they should. I'm not sure I ever saw a sort of "why would I trust you if you don't have a blue check" sentiment.
I hope Mastodon doesn't "replace" twitter (as in becomes like twitter). So far Mastodon is much nicer than twitter so I hope Mastodon stays like it is and is something better than twitter had become.
I think this is where it's going. Particular Mastodon servers will provide certain guarantees to their users and about their users. It's easy to envision a white-glove server + service that provides user screening, phone support, etc. at a price. Over time when certain celebrities join it becomes the popular server and sought after as a username destination.
By this logic, there should've been no new social networks after Twitter. I point to Tiktok as a contradiction. There are many more factors that your simplification ignores.
It replaced Twitter for me. Pretty much everyone I was following on Twitter is on Mastadon now, but also a whole bunch more because discoverability is easier for me on Mastadon.
Maybe it will never replace Twitter as the place to follow celebrities, politicians and corporations; so you can see what their social media teams have thought up in the last hour. But for keeping up with personal interests and chatting with other like-minded folks? Absolutely. And I'm not gonna miss the use-case that falls away. Also not going to miss the ads!
This view of "the blue checks" as a uniform elite class is really fascinating to me — and I think is partly why Elon bought the thing in the first place.
It cuts both ways — both the overvaluing of the check and the denigrating of those who have it.
How can Twitter make money without high engagement scores? Do you know of a profitable social media platform with users that do not partake in content creation and commenting?
Not that I necessarily want this feature implemented or that this is a good idea, but I can foresee some large Mastodon instances asking for X dollars a month to put a blue check mark in front of your name.
You can add these shortcodes (eg. :verified:) to your Mastodon display name or your profile. If you don't see them immediately convert, try F5-ing the page and they should render.
People have been putting check mark emojis in their Fedi display names forever, as a joke. While I could see an instance considering something like that to help pay for server costs I don't think it's likely to be very popular.
To put it another way, Twitter is/was a notary/PR firm as well as a "microblogging" service. Popular people and brands could verify their identity with Twitter, and users could trust it.
I think, though the idea is unoriginal, that there is money in hosting Mastodon servers as well as hosting a particular mastodon service that does brand/personal identification. Perhaps even semi-automatically, such as via DNS.
These badges are emoji - currently e.g. https://infosec.exchange/@lcamtuf has three of them. That's 200% more than you can get on Twitter, and $8 cheaper, too.
The "verified badge" on mastodon is just a satirical emoji.
Mastodon does have a mechanism for instances vouching for their users actually having control of a webpage (using rel=me links). Those are the links in green boxes here: https://hachyderm.io/@nova (It doesn't cost anything, and isn't exclusive to famous people).
I assume the person I'm replying to is aware of all of this... but for everyone else...
all that I want is a place where I can see other tech people's comments on stuff I care about in tech; coding, architecture, cool technologies, whatever. People say that the network effect makes it impossible to switch over fully but look what happened with Freenode -- virtually _everyone_ moved to libera.chat in literally like two weeks. Is there an equivalent for Twitter? Which Mastodon "node" is the thing I'm looking for?
Mastodon is a bit less centralised around nodes, but there are a number of tech communities gathered around a couple of instances already (although they all interact with each other and other instances, so it's not that big of a deal): https://hachyderm.io, https://fosstodon.org and https://front-end.social are big ones in my circles.
…but will it replace it for a significant number of people who matter (for whatever arbitrary definition of "people who matter")?
Think of the quotation of "The Velvet Underground and Nico only sold 10,000 copies, but each person who purchased the record went on to form their own band"
in the past few weeks I've personally found it very amusing to see pre-$8 bluechecks on twitter telling their followers that they're moving to other (non-mastodon) social media services, then you click the link to their new profile there and almost without exception find out that they've been "Verified" on that platform too. it's like they can't imagine using a social media website unless they have some kind of visible Status Signifier that the unwashed masses don't get to have. all other leadership decisions aside, the $8 bluecheck is the best thing anyone could've done to twitter.
Twitter's too large and the people who had bleu checks before the $7.99 fee are addicted to attention, validation, and/or lording their bleu check status over others.
That's why Mastodon won't replace it. Sure, a few small (relative to Twitter) alternative Mastodon instances will pop up, but no real challenger or contender for the throne.