Here's how the rebranding from Twitter to X has affected Threads, Bluesky, and Mastodon:
In the first week (July 23-August 5) of the rebrand, Threads downloads dropped 70%, leaving the app ranked 16th Overall. But Bluesky and Mastodon saw downloads increase by 180% and 15%, respectively — an indication that those fleeing the new X largely turned to Bluesky instead.
However, in the weeks that followed (August 8-20), Threads saw an uptick in downloads with growth up by roughly 50% while also moving up one spot to 12th Overall in the category rankings. By this time, Threads had also rolled out a number of new features, including a chronological feed. Bluesky and Mastodon, on the other hand, saw downloads decline after the rebranding of X subdued, with installs dropping 25% and 40%, respectively.
The “X-odus,” in other words, has not settled on a new platform.
In other words, the rebrand to X has been everyone else's gains.
What's more notable to me, though, is that Threads, Bluesky, and Mastodon are either federated or are intending federation in the near future.
On the other hand, there doesn't seem to be much of a migration to emerging centralized social media platforms. Nobody's talking about Hive, Tribel, or Post -- all Twitter alternatives that gained notice in November 2022.
The future of social media seems to be decentralization.
Not sure how accurate measuring the official Mastodon apps as a sign of user sign ups really is. With Mastodon (and the fediverse in general), not everyone will download the official Mastodon apps.
Using the @mastodonusercount statistics may be more accurate than by app downloads...
Request: before accusing your instance admin of shadow banning you, or of trying to spy on you, or of trying to install malware in your browser, or of deleting your posts, please take a moment to try a "normal" browser that doesn't have all the security and privacy gunk.
@jerry With the death of #infosec#Twitter, the #fediverse is truly where you need to be for infosec content which is amazing! (Especially here on infosec.exchange & infosec.town 🙂!)
The scene over at #Bluesky can't compete when it comes to infosec...
@jerry ya they are there but the interactions I find is just not the same in terms of having an actual conversations. Largely it looks like people just posting to their timelines but then you don't see many replies or boosts if there are any...
Lots of "big names" seem to post on both here & Bluesky, at least the ones I know of...
Heck, on a personal level, I get way more responses here vs. there when posting the same stuff. I think @mttaggart also experienced something similar too...
@unixnick the akkoma process. I've found that the limit on ubuntu 22.04 is generally too low for most things - I ran into this problem on mastodon last year.