It's like this is the 21st century version of the San Francisco story where Yung refused to sell their house to the robber baron Cocker, leading Cocker to build an expensive three story tall fence around the house forcing Yung to move.
Elon jet is alive and well over there.
He could have banned the account on day 1, but he tweeted in defense of it. I don’t buy the theory that he had to wait to save face, he seems perfectly content to change his mind and make new rules on the spot without worrying about the backlash.
It seems more likely that he had idealistic reasons for buying the site and is becoming less idealistic as time goes on. Every worldview is flawed, you just don’t know it until you try to implement it. I think he’s moving past any initial altruistic aspirations and is now treating Twitter more like a tool that can be customized to achieve certain goals. I’m sure he thinks the goals are good for everyone, including himself, but from the outside it’s not mirroring the “public square”, “absolute free speech” mantras pre-acquisition.
This is exactly why democracy is so important. Humans are fallible. Power eventually corrupts everyone. Power should be distributed. I am not happy about de facto town squares being owned by powerful people. For this exact reason. Democrats were very happy with the status quo when their opponents were being censored. "It's a private business." I wonder if they will remain so idealistic.
It currently had 41k followers, and 2.5k likes on the post about it being banned on Twitter.
Comparatively, Elon's most recently Twitter post ("Twitter right now is <four fire emoticons>") has 186k likes.
It seems very unlikely the "great exodus" is happening or likely to happen due to this, at least to Mastodon.
This is hn, not 4Chan
For example: Despite wanting to, it took me a month and half to migrate to Mastodon, for a variety of personal, irrelevant reasons. And I'm a techie. But now I'm there, I've unfollowed large amounts of people on Twitter, and am phasing it down entirely.
In the mean time, Mastodon gained magnitudes of users. Servers previously running fine are now overloaded. Services are shutting down to new signups left and right because they're overwhelmed.
When this happens, people notice. You should know: you're in a community composed of the kind of people who make their millions noticing trends like these and quickly jumping on them. This means more resources go into these trends, and it becomes like a wave: Every few weeks, there's a new large influx of people.
Every new "round" of this exodus, servers will be more ready, there will be more services, the social graph will be larger, and more people will be convinced.
Will Mastodon ever be larger than Twitter? No idea. It's definitely possible, but knowing in advance is not.
I can say one thing: I'm glad people are taking notice of the importance of decentralized social graphs again. It's nice to see, for once, an open source protocol growing organically and winning hearts and minds.
I fully agree. However given the number of triggering events, I'm yet to see and numbers that would indicate a strong trend in that direction.
> I can say one thing: I'm glad people are taking notice of the importance of decentralized social graphs again. It's nice to see, for once, an open source protocol growing organically and winning hearts and minds.
I disagree with your conclusion of likely continued growth - peopel are comfort driven and unless things directly affect them, they won't move or will move back.
However I fully agree with this point. I've been a big supporter of fediverse things for a long time and I hope the positive outcome here is more broad support for open source and decentralisation.