I’m just…starting to absorb the sheer scale of what we may be dealing with here.
Twitter has over 300 MILLION accounts. 1% of that is 3 million.
This exodus has only barely begun. Twitter’s reported losing about 1 million accounts since Musk took over.
In that time, the past two weeks, Mastodon has grown 33%. That takes it a bit past half a million users (a little over 600,000 in fact). Its design means it literally doesn’t even have the capacity to absorb the kinds of numbers we are likely to see, even in a small Twitter exodus, unless a hell of a lot of people start up their own fediverse servers (which I’m 100% in favor of tbh but wow that’s a lot of grassroots-powered scaling).
Pillowfort is around 120,000 users.
Cohost is closing in on 50,000, and they aren’t even off their training wheels early-beta platform. They just announced they’re reprioritizing their development queue to move ‘migrate our backend over to the full-sized system’ up to the top of the list. They implemented their invite queue because even a fraction of this influx could literally destroy them without it.
Tumblr maxed out around 500 million users (measured as unique visitors) in 2019, and they’re down from their peak. They have the capacity to absorb several million extra users, but the number of signups they got yesterday still destabilized them.
Discord. Now Discord does Twitter-level numbers. Two years ago they had 300 million users with 140 million of them active in any given month. There’s honestly a better than even chance Discord may actually be bigger than Twitter at this point, but they’re privately owned so they aren’t obliged to release their stats unless they feel like it. But Twitter is where people go BESIDES Discord, isn’t it? Like doesn’t 3/4 of Twitter already have Discord accounts?
(krveale mentioned that even in passing, even as a joke, he hasn’t seen anybody talk about leaving Twitter to go to Facebook. I LOLed…but neither have I.)
It’s just… Even if you factor in the number of empty/abandoned and bot accounts on Twitter, you’re dealing with something like 200 million actual human people.
Think about even 1% of Twitter hitting all those sites. All of them put together. For most of them that would vastly more than double their current user bases. Of course they aren’t the only sites out there where people are likely to go (CounterSocial! Telegram! Hell, even Dreamwidth!). But still.
We WILL see more than 1%. 3%? 5%? 10%? A lot of that depends on how far you think Musk will double down. How toxic you think that site can get when the worst elements think the guard’s run off with the maid.
If 25% of Twitter leaves, that’s over 50 million people. And if Twitter goes down, then good god. Any–all combined–of the above platforms absorbing numbers like that is going to be an onslaught.
And that doesn’t even touch on the fact that SOME of those people are going to get more wild and woolly. Some of them are going to travel to lands further out, like Berner-Lee’s IPFS protocol. This may be what gets enough people off their asses to truly get the ball rolling on Web 3.0 (edit from ‘Web3’ which is the more techbro-oriented version based on blockchain asininity).
I knew intellectually that this was going to change the shape of the internet (I mean even if the whole thing collapses, 200 million users is a spit in the wind for the number of people online now, but it’s still a hell of a lot of people) but I’m kind of internalizing it now.