this post was submitted on 17 Aug 2023
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It's not just lemmy that's benefiting from Elon Musk.

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[–] flossdaily@lemmy.world 178 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I'm sure there were a huge swath of people who used Twitter and didn't care at all about Musk one way or the other.

Then he rebranded and threw his ego and control in everyone's face. And all the people who like Twitter IN SPITE of Elon were now forced to acknowledge that their Twitter is gone.

Just like over at reddit now, the latest move has alienated the people who really cared about the platform itself. If they rebranded to "Spez's World", though, a lot of the people who didn't give a shit before would suddenly be ready to bail.

[–] o0joshua0o@lemmy.world 106 points 1 year ago (5 children)

He has so thoroughly ruined Twitter that you can't help but wonder if that was his goal from the outset.

[–] Username02@kbin.social 55 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Narcissists like him would never seek failure intentionally.

[–] thefartographer@lemm.ee 35 points 1 year ago (2 children)

You've obviously never played a board game with a narcissist. Flipping over the table and calling everyone, including the game they themselves purchased, cheaters is a totally expected move.

[–] hoshikarakitaridia@sh.itjust.works 43 points 1 year ago (3 children)

They're not doing that to lose. They're doing that because they already lost.

[–] thefartographer@lemm.ee 14 points 1 year ago

I GUESS YOU'RE RIGHT, LIKE YOU ALWAYS HAVE TO BE!

- Knocks phone over -

Fucking cheaters

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[–] balder1991@lemmy.world 13 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

It’s just like Michael from The Office. You see he isn’t doing things on purpose to sabotage everyone, but he can’t control it, he needs the attention and the self worship.

[–] appel@lemmy.ml 34 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (5 children)

To what end, though? The man blew 44b on a site that apparently was only worth 5-10b, and that was before he ran it into the ground. He also destroyed his reputation and the mystique as "genius entrepreneur" which the world can now clearly see he never was.

I can't think of a single net positive. I think it's an age old tale with people with too much money: he fell victim to an over inflated ego and too many yes men aiming to please. He started to believe he really was brilliant.

Sad thing is the man has so much money he still can't fail, personally. He'll have destroyed Twitter and even more people will lose their jobs. And autocrats around the world will be pleased. Musk will just shrug, tell himself it wasn't his fault, "it was the libs" or something, and move on.

Eta: the only winners here, as per usual, are the shareholders.

[–] Vlyn@lemmy.zip 21 points 1 year ago (6 children)

44b sounds like a lot of money (it is!), but his net worth right now is 219b after this fiasco. At this point it's just a score between rich assholes who got the bigger number.

You could take 200b away from his evaluation and he could still retire on a yacht and not work a single day in the next 100 years. Same for his children and his children's children.

So yeah, "bad" financial investment, but it might be worth for him to kill one of the biggest platforms where he was called out for his bullshit.

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[–] Sludgehammer@lemmy.world 10 points 1 year ago (1 children)

IMO Mush was trying to run a simple pump and dump scheme with Twitter stock. You know, make some statements about ho he's going to buy it at a massively inflated price, sell all the stock during the uptick and then suddenly find some issue with the sale and leave. However, during the "make some statements" phase he managed to make some legally binding statements and Twitter and their lawyers held him to them.

So there's no agenda or plan really, just a larger version of the Dogecoin pump and dumps that Mush has done in the past. It's just this time rather than some crypto rubes he tried running it on a company with lots of lawyers and it blew up in his face.

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[–] ngons@feddit.nu 80 points 1 year ago (3 children)

Is this migration already called xit? Because it should..

[–] RobMyBot@lemmy.ml 25 points 1 year ago
[–] makingStuffForFun@lemmy.ml 22 points 1 year ago (1 children)
[–] Frostwolf@lemmy.world 8 points 1 year ago

tweXit does have a nice ring to it. Made me laugh 😂

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[–] Tygr@lemmy.world 69 points 1 year ago (2 children)

It’s not the rebrand that’s killing Twitter. Elon is. He’s proving to himself that he cannot, in fact, run Twitter better than the prior owners.

[–] hairinmybellybutt@lemmy.world 11 points 1 year ago (2 children)

I wonder if previous twitter execs are feeling a bit bad to have sold him twitter to see it destroyed like that.

I mean it certainly proves Elon is an idiot as he used fraud to manipulate the price and got played instead.

But was it worth it to let him destroy Twitter just because he tried to defraud it?

[–] flamingo_pinyata@sopuli.xyz 22 points 1 year ago (2 children)

They got $44 billion, double what sane people thought the company was worth. It would be irresponsible not to take Elon for a ride.

[–] pup_atlas@pawb.social 12 points 1 year ago (3 children)

Responsible financially, as agents of the corporation, sure. And I understand why they did it. Morally though (and I would argue civilly) it was wildly irresponsible. Thousands of people lost their jobs, hundreds of people are now forced to work at Elons insane business under threat of deportation if their visa is invalidated, and hundreds of millions lost a trusted, dependable direct link to governments, public figures, and other notable people. The world is a worse place for having let this deal happen. What is responsible financially is often irresponsible in pretty much every other way, and I wish this perspective was represented more.

As a shareholder in a number of other large corporations, I would actively like for buy-outs like this one to fail, even if it would make me a quick buck now, even if that quick buck is a lot. I much prefer stability to major erratic changes, even when they benefit me.

[–] wahming@monyet.cc 15 points 1 year ago (3 children)

hundreds of millions lost a trusted, dependable direct link to governments, public figures, and other notable people.

It should not have been trusted and pervasive to such an extent. If anything, better to cut the dependency now than later.

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[–] PeleSpirit@lemmy.world 55 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Here are tips for everyone to enjoy Mastodon (thoroughly explained in the sourced article at the bottom):

  1. Boost posts you like
  2. Look at user profiles on their original home server
  3. Search for content on other instances
  4. Enable the advanced web interface for Mastodon
  5. Use groups
  6. Be your own aggregator with RSS

Source: https://www.infoworld.com/article/3701292/6-ways-to-find-better-content-on-mastodon.html

[–] SineNomineAnonymous@lemmy.ml 8 points 1 year ago (1 children)
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[–] ominouslemon@lemm.ee 43 points 1 year ago

Cool, but the article is from July 24th

[–] moitoi@feddit.de 38 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

Twitter under Elon looks similar to the UK under Brexit.

[–] ultratiem@lemmy.ca 15 points 1 year ago

So smooth sailing right? Right??

[–] miz_nocturnal@lemmy.ca 35 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Just deleted my Twitter account. Of course, the app gave nothing but errors so I had to do it on desktop, but it’s done!

[–] ramblinguy@sh.itjust.works 10 points 1 year ago

So now you have an ex-Twitter account. Or an X account for short.

Maybe Elon was truly 200 IQ with his naming

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[–] Rozz@lemmy.sdf.org 34 points 1 year ago (3 children)

I wanted to use mastodon, but I haven't even used twitter in years, so then I realized I just don't social media that way anymore (or much at all for that matter).

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[–] ch1cken@kbin.social 26 points 1 year ago (3 children)

It’s not just lemmy that’s benefiting from Elon Musk.

Whether its lemmy or mastodon, or kbin that grows, we're all benefiting. That's the beauty of federation.

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[–] Tapioca@lemmy.world 25 points 1 year ago

There were stories that Tesla had a team in place to distract Elon any time he showed up to the office, and I absolutely believe that. Now that Elon has Twitter to distract him, I wonder what that team is up to.

[–] fry@fry.gs 24 points 1 year ago
[–] downpunxx@kbin.social 17 points 1 year ago (7 children)

Musk trashed Twitter with intent, by design, and on purpose. Elon Musk is worth 95 Billion more now than when he bought Twitter.

The continued forced cognitive dissonance is the grandest example of info_corpo_kabuki i've ever seen. It's all just so fucking dumb.

Elon bought it to trash it so he could have access to Saudi markets for his electric cars and rocket ships. The face he's a fascist fucking cunt who gets to stick it to liberals where they most liked to exchange news, information and organize online was just a bonus for him.

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[–] westyvw@lemm.ee 16 points 1 year ago (2 children)

I am so annoyed that Twitter got ruined.

Don't get me wrong. I don't like Twitter. I don't follow anyone on Twitter. But if I had no other recourse I could complain about a corporation that wasn't paying any attention to me and they would do something about it.

By the way fuck FedEX. Is there a place on mastadon I can bitch about FedEx? I have had a mis-delivered package sitting on my porch for over a month. I call about every three or four days and tell them, pick up your package so it can go to the right place. They say they will get it. They never do.

Never use FedEx.

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[–] MyOpinion@lemm.ee 15 points 1 year ago

That is right baby. The Fedi is a life raft always waiting to scoop people up.

[–] solidsnake2085@lemmy.world 15 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Good, isn't this what people want? Twitter to shut down? I've been hoping he just closes up shop and gets rid of it.

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[–] dx1@lemmy.world 13 points 1 year ago (2 children)

There's an ethical consideration when you sell a company. Dorsey and co. took a big payout and this is the result.

[–] chicken@lemmy.dbzer0.com 10 points 1 year ago (1 children)

It was a corporation. Corporations exist to get shareholders paid. You can't expect those to not be for sale for the right price, which in this case was more than it was worth. If you want the people running companies to make decisions based on ethics, you should ban publicly traded corporations first otherwise it's just not happening.

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[–] egeres@lemmy.world 12 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Apparently, as a competitor of any major platform you just need to get close to the features your adversary has and wait for that site/service to start the process of enshittification, let's see if reddit makes more blunders

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[–] Rearsays@lemmy.ml 11 points 1 year ago

I don’t think I cared about Twitter, the entire duration of its existence, and now there’s a whole new thing that’s apparently the same and I still don’t care about

[–] jayrodtheoldbod@midwest.social 11 points 1 year ago (3 children)

that's cool. The Masto instance I've been on for the last half year is no longer available and I'll have to start over because I didn't have a main and a back up account like I ended up with on Lemmy, but sure, that's alright. I have no idea what happened, the instance still has a blank page up, but it ain't Mastodon.

I was finally feeling moved in but now, kaput.

I don't think this thing was really ready for absolutely everyone on Twitter to bail onto it, is the problem. I don't think it was ever supposed to be. It was always supposed to be like a clubhouse for people who didn't mind being the dweebs of the internet.

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[–] ActionHank@sopuli.xyz 10 points 1 year ago (4 children)

I like the idea of referring to it only as "The social media site formerly known as Twitter" from here on out.

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[–] schwim@lemmy.world 9 points 1 year ago (1 children)

The term soaring is pretty relative in this case. It's still completely unknown to the majority of the world. It's just like Lemmy, where the very few rigid types that absolutely couldn't stand for one particular thing that happened to their social network will do anything, including cutting their nose off to spite their face rather than continue to use it. That's why we're all here and it's why nobody else but us are coming.

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[–] autotldr@lemmings.world 9 points 1 year ago

This is the best summary I could come up with:


As Twitter ditches its iconic branding in favor of owner Elon Musk’s favorite letter “X,” its open source rival Mastodon is seeing usage numbers soar.

According to a new post from Mastodon founder and CEO Eugen Rochko, the number of monthly active users for his Twitter alternative has been steadily climbing over the past couple of months to have now reached 2.1 million — or, as remarked Rochko, “not far off from our last peak.”

Meta’s recently launched Twitter rival known as Instagram Threads has committed to integrating with ActivityPub, which may have raised awareness around Mastodon and decentralized social networking in general.

Musk claimed that Twitter needed to change the rate limits to deal with a significant increase in bots and spam.

Or perhaps, it’s a combination of both of these things and more, including the momentum created by the launches of polished third-party Mastodon clients that have made using the social network less complicated and more enjoyable.

Other Mastodon apps like Ice Cubes and the no-frills client Radiant have also debuted, while Mastodon’s official mobile app received a refresh of its own earlier this month, aimed at addressing various pain points and adding more customization options.


I'm a bot and I'm open source!

[–] scottywh@lemmy.world 9 points 1 year ago

Honestly, I joined Twitter begrudgingly in 2015 after ignoring it for years only because I thought it might be easy to keep up with some interesting news before it hit Reddit.. and it worked for a while...

Now, I just wonder why I'm still there at all.

I also don't.see why I might want a mastodon account at this point though... I don't feel like I need a replacement for something that I never really liked...

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